DON’T HUNT FOR RHYME: Where our magic goes wrong

Synchronicity, that sly wink from the Universe, cannot be manufactured. Yes, go ahead and pull your attention and focus to your desires and goals. Sync up your actions and thoughts and intentions upon that object of focus. Gather your gemstones and affirmations, sure. And by all means, do your Astro-Archetypal Planetary Magic! ;) Start stirring your cauldron of meanings that you would like to weave through your life experience. 

 

But the second you try to jump into the driver’s seat and try to determine or anticipate where, how, and when all of those elements are going to line up, the moment you insist that you know when life is going to rhyme with you – your vision distorts. You will likely start to insist on seeing patterns that are not actually there. And you miss the information that is actually being communicated to you when certain events do rhyme with you. Your whole worldview starts to get rigid with expectation, grasping; seeking a validation of a foregone conclusion. When we hunt for the rhyme, as Matthew McConaughey says in his interview with Rick Rubin on the podcast Tetragrammaton, it actually pulls us out of life’s natural magic. 

 

This wisdom runs counter to what most New Age folks will try to sell you. But I, as a persnickety, skeptical, science-loving type of New Age folk, think it’s important we wed our common sense with our spirituality.

 

In my personal experience, whenever I go from being in the mystery to adopting a stance of certainty about how things work, stuff stops working. And when I stay in a lighter dance with it, life responds in kind. My desires show me where I want to go but I couldn’t possibly know what I will feel or who I am going to be once I get there, because the nature of experience is that it…changes us. The key ingredient isn’t knowing how to force the rhyme; it’s willingness. The Hero's Journey, of course, is all about us transforming - not knowing exactly what will happen and how things will go and how we'll feel about it when it happens. 

 

Though of course we all want smooth pathways and soft, well-orchestrated landings, what life delivers to us is often more in the spirit of Puck; the trickster; the fool; the Kachina. This is partly because there is a divine, tricky, delicious humor to life, and humor’s sharpest weapon is surprise: you don’t laugh at things you knew were going to happen, but at what you didn’t expect. Whatever shocks or hits you upside the head of your adhered-to norms and frailties; that’s when we laugh. And I suspect life relentlessly teases us in just the same way because it doesn’t matter so much whether we figure it out or not; all that matters is showing up. And often enough, we need to be rattled out of our self-seriousness and our deeply etched patterns of control in order to do that. 

 

A longtime practitioner of embarking down weird detours and straying far afield from what I thought I was heading for, back in undergrad I took a printmaking class as an elective. My grandfather was a printmaker, so I felt this was a way to get acquainted with one of the family’s art forms. Our semester project was to make two copies of a book, two identical handmade printings of the same content.

 

My project was an accordion book with an image of a karmic wheel that I had carved out of a rubber print block; I stamped the image of the wheel across each of the pages so that it spun as they unfolded, and a line of text ran alongside them, weaving along the seam of each crease: 

 

“a glimpse of the larger pattern at work.” 

 

At the end of class we went around the room presenting our work. I said that my accordion book was a way of capturing an idea that can often feel complex, in the simplest way possible. 

 

“The irony is that this is definitely not simple whatsoever,” my teacher frankly observed.

 

It was an early attempt to conceptualize the larger movements of life on earth and the cosmos, of the cycles of life and personal growth in relation to them. (And that karmic wheel, by the way, is also tattooed on the inside of my wrist. My flesh is literally permanently inscribed with my demand that life be discernible, that I should, through my understanding of and ability to recognize the pattern, know my life’s events in advance or be able to make supreme sense of them once they’ve occurred; that I should be co-pilot, essentially, with God.) And that earlier attempt symbolized in the accordion print has perhaps been answered, decades later, with the development of Soul Figures, a system that, although its basic practice is pretty simple - meditating on an archetypal image, following some instructions, and remembering your work from one meditation to the next - I've expanded it into something quite complex. As is my want. 

 

But while I still fall into torturing myself with complexity, I have learned to relax on my demands upon the wheel of karma. Although I cannot help but use the archetypal and intuitive systems at my fingertips to tug, at least a little, at the larger pattern of my life, I accept that I'm not actually supposed to know all of it.

 

The most tempting thing is always to try to figure things out from afar, at a safe distance from the actual mess of life. To get the overall scope of what’s happening and why. We do this seeking control over life, imagining we will find ourselves at a more advantageous position, better prepared, suited with an armor of intellectual foreknowledge. Or, we think that after events have occurred, we will enjoy an additional comfort in making supreme meaning of what has just passed.

 

But the reality is you just have to continually push yourself past the edge of the fear that sits on the precipice between wherever you are and what comes next. And it’s in being able to meet the moment and push through the fear and hesitation that you come to know your own edges and get a sense of the ongoing task of how to keep moving forward. All self-empowerment and liberation techniques are essentially guided to conditioning us to be able to do just that: to enhance our willingness to participate more fully in life, freed of or in spite of whatever inhibitions or anxieties tend to hold us back.

 

The present moment, the unknown moment, causes us to stretch. And rather than shrinking back and shrieking in fear and rejection of the moment, we have to just push past that edge. If we comply, if we show up, we get is a feeling of triumph and empowerment that can only come from having done a thing we didn’t know we could do: 

 

“Hey man, I fucking did that. I conquered that shit.” 

 

That’s all you really need to know, and all life needs to know about you, in order to keep rhyming with you: that you met the moment and moved through it. That you’re willing. Not so much that you understand the why behind it, or that you can anticipate how future moments are going to go. Just that you met that one. And from that, you gained the confidence to meet the next one. 

 

If you already knew how life’s verse in response was going to go, that would be so boring, wouldn’t it? And life wouldn’t let you get away with it anyway. The rhyming verse will always come with a twist, a variation we didn’t expect. It will often point us down a different path that turns us from the thing we thought we wanted towards the thing we actually need in order to get to where we might not have imagined we need to go, in order to grow in a way that’s different from our preconceived notions.

 

Sure, tuning into the larger cycles of life and the cosmos, into the archetypal and unconscious realms, helps welcome nature and the universe to resonate with our actions. Getting in step with the rhythm of things enhances the poetry of our experience. The ancient mystery traditions help impart a sense of continuity with our larger human past on this planet. They are a link to other humans making meaning and noticing patterns long ago, and creating beautiful systems to describe what they saw and what they learned. But the rub is this: the more you probe the patterns, the bigger the mystery gets. It just keeps expanding.

 

And besides, poetry doesn’t explain; it savors. Putting your half of the verse out into life through thought and action is a statement of faith and trust that the Universe/Source/God will respond with the other half of that verse. And if you lighten up on the need to control what all of that looks like, it can be really fun. 

 

I will probably always be wondering and marveling at those glimpses, when they do peek through, of the larger pattern at work. But when synchronicity knits an uncanny stitch that connects me from one moment to the next, all I need to do for my part is listen well, wink back at the Universe, put my head down, and continue doing my work—be willing to participate. And, trust that whomever or whatever orchestrated that synchronicity doesn’t need me as co-pilot. They need me as the actor, the experiencer, the conduit for things I don’t necessarily need to understand—the voice who supplies the first half of the verse, and listens for when the second half comes back. The one is simply willing to continue with the next step in the dance.