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What is going on with these incredible coincidences I keep having?

5/28/2016

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Recently I attended an evening event downtown. Linda wasn't interested, so I went alone. I took the bus down as it was such a hot day, but planned to walk home in the cool of the evening, and was looking forward to that pleasant hour.


At the event, I met some of my young poetry friends. Which was nice, but before it was over, they wandered off together, leaving me behind, which reminded me of my own youth back in those hippie years and my similar reactions then to people of my parents' generation. Anyway, afterwards I wandered around downtown alone, a bit lonely in that beautiful evening air, and more so by the minute. Me there and Linda at home. I guess I did a loop of about eight blocks, finally arriving back where I had started, more or less, where the buses stop. So then I had to decide whether I to walk or not. I thought what a waste of a heavenly walk if I were emotionally down the whole way. Yet, what a waste too to take the bus. In the end, I decided to get home with Linda as soon as possible. My mood would change quickly.

My bus came in about ten minutes and I got on. It was surprisingly full. The long front benches were filled. I glanced back and could see the occasional single empty aisle seat. The first one had the guy's bag in it. What a selfish guy, I thought. The next one was beside a very wide person, so I climbed the steps up into the back. There were two isle seats, the first one wouldn't work and then I came to the last space, in one of the last rows. The woman had her purse on her lap. As I was beginning to sit down, I looked up at her face. It was Charmaine E. Elijah! She's the indigenous poet who acted as the organiser of our last open mic, which featured indigenous poetry and history. As we talked, the unlikelihood of us sitting there together began to sink in. The chances against it are astronomical! There had to be some person there. A random person. But somebody I know? And, most especially, Charmaine?

Charmaine is one of my favourite people. She is truly one of the wisest people I've ever met, someone who has lived a life of wisdom; she hasn't just thought it. Her wisdom is all the more interesting because some of it originated from her indigenous background, some from contemporary society, and some simply from her own struggle with life. An even more odd thing about running into her like this was that that very day I had thought I should contact her again soon. We're planning a lengthy interview with her, a live one, taped. At the open mic, I had asked her if she would be interested and she had said she could do it. But because of some other stressful things that happened at the open mic, I had been wondering if she might have changed her mind. So, on the bus, amongst a lot of other things we talked about, which cheered me up enormously, I asked her about the interview, and she said she was still interested in doing it. (We're doing an extended interview with the indigenous historian David D. Plain first, and in the process learning, hopefully, something about indigenous history and culture, which should be helpful in the interview with Charmaine.)

Anyway, I told Linda about this chance meeting when I got home, also my sister by phone, and they were both as astonished as I was. It was as if the whole evening had been set up just so I would end up taking that bus and have to sit in that seat! But of course, that's nuts. I'm not the centre of the universe. Life doesn't revolve around me. And anyway things just don't happen that way. Everything has its immediate cause and effect. Period.

But still, this kind of thing happens so often in my life that I've practically come to expect it. For instance, back in my youth when I was trying to backpack across Canada I got so used to being rescued from situations that would otherwise have killed me or at least have totally derailed my trip, rescued by very last-minute occurrences, out-of-the-blue situations, that I actually began to lose my fear. I began to assume that something would come up in the final seconds. And yes it always did. And these things have happened all my life ever since. (My cynical but realistic self says that the only people who exult in all the rescuing coincidences in their lives are the few survivors, those who happened to have the dice falling their way so far. So far. The other risk takers were all eliminated along the way. They're not talking.)

Anyway, for me, sitting with Charmaine on the bus was my latest example. If we hadn't met there, I don't think I would have died, or even have been derailed. But it was Charmaine! Who knows what that could mean for the future?

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Paula Dawn Lietz believe it - it was indeed to happen 
everything about it - set you there 
wonderful

Unlike · Reply · 2 · 15 mins

Donna Allard we forget one IMP rule of the universe... let life happen, we must stop controling it or beautiful moments will occur less or maybe not at all.. wink emoticon
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 10 mins

Stan Burfield
 That's what I've found for sure. Well, more a combination. Make things happen, but at the same time be open to what IS happening.

Meredith Moeckel
 Really a lovely story Stan? Wasn't it you who recently wrote on the topic of synchronicity? I have had similar things happen to me quite often, and have taken to simply smiling to myself..... Anyways, I'm sharing a couple of quotes regarding synchronicity smile emoticon (well it won't allow me to share two at once, so I'll attach one after this!)
Like · Reply · 41 mins

Meredith Moeckel
Like · Reply · 1 · 41 mins

Scott Alderson Calvin's theory of Predestination. Whatever, it's all good as they say.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 35 mins

Stan Burfield It's very difficult for me to believe this, and yet, how to explain it. Yes, the previous one of these that I wrote about here was about April 20th, a month ago.
Like · Reply · 35 mins

Donald Brackett A nice story. A basic example of Jung's theory of Synchronicity. Not hard to believe at all really, upon investigation.
Like · Reply · 28 mins

Stan Burfield Well, I have pretty much of a scientific view of reality. Jung's ideas were more religious than scientific. Science just doesn't allow for this kind of thing. So I have to try to explain it all in terms of simple cause and effect in a complex world. The problem is that when it happens too often it definitely starts to become a bit weird.
Like · Reply · 18 mins

Stan Burfield And anyway I know there are things happening that science doesn't explain. Like telepathy. However, seeing something like the world organised (by who or what?) so that Charmaine and I would be sitting together is a whole different level of impossibility to what telepathy requires.
Like · Reply · Just now

Stan Burfield
 Here's what I believe: We have to look beyond our beliefs and favoured ideas and opinions to find out how the world works. If we don't, we don't see anything except our feelings. And there's only one method humanity has ever devised for seeing beyond our feelings into objective reality. That's science. Science doesn't know everything yet. But what it does know, and has thoroughly tested, is true. Anything we believe that contradicts those findings simply isn't true.
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Here comes summer!

5/24/2016

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Linda has a new balcony design for us, I have a new bicycle seat design for her, and she has me as a flower.
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The most shocking coincidences happen to me all the time!

5/24/2016

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Picture


Yesterday I emailed Frank Davey asking how he's doing these fine days, only to be told he was in Budapest, and would be in Vienna today, then on to other fabulous places. I said I envied him. Well, today at some point I looked at my emails and there was this photo he had just taken from his hotel room. That's the Danube River down below. So I said, "Nice view!! I guess you must have heard the Blue Danube Waltz a few times by now." Then I got up and turned the TV on. And there was a movie playing called The Great Waltz, a 1972 biopic of Strauss! It was about 20 minutes into the movie. And within 2 or 3 minutes of turning on the TV, we were in the great ballroom, and, for the first time in the movie, The Blue Danube was being played, with Strauss on violin!
​
Can you beat that? Pretty hard. But I have no trouble matching it.

​
Barb Langhorst, Silvia Palacios and Cambridge N Calvin Keenan
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Cambridge N Calvin Keenan That's magical 💜
Like · Reply · 1 hr

Aldous Richards I love synchronicities like that. They seem to stop time for a second, just so you can appreciate the magic. smile emoticon
Like · Reply · 1 hr

Silvia Palacios Eso es maravilloso
That's wonderful

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"Feisal was passionately fond of Arabic poetry."

5/24/2016

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PicturePeter O'Toole as Lawrence with Alec Guiness as Prince Feisal.
At the moment I'm reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence, or, as most know him, Lawrence of Arabia. The book is his account of his exploits in Arabia during WW1, leading the Arab revolt abainst the Turks. The movie based on the book was one of my favourites of all time, but the book even surpasses the movie in quality, with incredibly rich and beautiful writing. If it were not so heavy in content, Lawrence would have become known as a major English literary figure, but his story of the time, the place, its history, its characters, the epic adventure, and the incredible stretching of his own life into something shockingly different, simply overwhelm the literature. 

I've often thought that today's literature, including its poetry, has just the opposite problem. It and it's writers sometimes seem so lacking in deep content as to contain little more than words.  Which may be good for the authors. Their excellent word play, unfettered to content, could crown them as literary figures. 


However, times have changed since Lawrence's era of mass nationalist movements . It could be said that these days every individual is part of the radical adventure of modern society, as it thrashes through its enormous upheavels. It could be said that no life under these conditions is empty. Day to day living is a constant war between one's anxious self and the world. 

But back to WW1, and an Arabia which was then, in some ways, the equivalent of far earlier times in Europe. 

If you've seen the movie, you may  remember that early in his adventure Lawrence arrives at Sharif Feisal's large encampment. Feisel is the charismatic leader of the entire Arab revolt at this point. Lawrence in his army khakis sits on the carpet in Feisal's tent with the arab leaders, talks with them for some days, and they become impressed with him. In the following passage he describes Feisal's interest in poetry.

"In the evening he relaxed as far as possible and avoided avoidable work. He would send out for some local sheikh to tell stories of the district, and histories of the tribe and its genealogy; or the tribal poets would sing us their war narratives: long, traditional forms with stock epithets, stock sentiments, stock incidents grafted afresh on the efforts of each generation. Feisal was passionately fond of Arabic poetry, and would often provoke recitations, judging and rewarding the best verses of the night."

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I TRY TO STAY AWAY FROM MAKING POLITICAL COMMENTS HERE....

5/21/2016

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... but I'm just too shocked and enraged by the Trudeau scandal on the floor of the Commons.

I've voted NDP all my life, partly because I always felt it was the party of compassion, but also the party of truth. And certainly truth and politics are not easy bed fellows. So I was shocked to see the NDP lying for political gain, trying to make people believe Justin Trudeau has no concern about women, going so far as to call him a molester, just because he happened to elbow a woman he didn't see behind him. If anything is a lie, that is. It's exactly the kind that Donald Trump would indulge in. The only reason the NDP would say these things, that I can imagine, is that it is hoping it might convince people not to vote Liberal, people who only hear the rumours of their accusations but don't actually see the video of the event itself.

It's even worse than this. What Trudeau was trying to do that got him in so much trouble was help the party whip of the opposition Conservative Party move to his bench to talk to Conservative members. He couldn't because he was physically being blocked by the bodies of a number of NDP members, including the leader, Mulcair, and the woman whom Trudeau bumped into when he barged through the wall of their bodies and pulled the Conservative whip out by the arm. Why was the NDP doing this? It was trying to force things to go the way it wanted them to go. Force. That's not the NDP party I used to vote for. And then to call Trudeau a molester of women, which was obviously a way of punishing him for rescuing the Conservative. Canadian politics isn't a hockey game. NDP members shouldn't be acting like goons.

I'm not voting for this kind of behaviour.

Elizabeth May, representing her little party of one, the Green Party, stood up in the Commons afterwards and supported Trudeau, saying it was obvious he hadn't done it on purpose, and that he nevertheless fully apologised.
The NDP should be ashamed of itself.



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Strangely, an arthritic old codger who runs up stairs like a kid!

5/21/2016

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Sometime around the year 2000, all my joints started seizing up, starting with my fingers. Not seizing exactly, but at first stiffening and then grinding. My doctor said I had osteoarthritis, and that it would just get worse and there was no cure. She said the only thing I could take for it was a pain killer. I was in shock. And I was desperate. I thought my life was over. Already I could only go up stairs slowly pulling both feet up onto each step. A wheelchair wasn't far in the future. So I pleaded with her like a little kid. I said, "There MUST be something I can take for it. Surely!" There was a long pause, as if the doctor was doing something very unethical just by telling me what she was going to say, like she was only doing it to calm me down. She said, "Well..... you could try glucosamine....Some people say it helps. You can get it in health food stores."

Within just a few days of starting on it, I could tell the stiffness in my fingers was receding, and within three weeks all my joints were working like a kid's. The next time I was at the flower auction to buy flowers for our shop, which has long stairs up the buyers' gallery, I ran up them, flying like a teenage. It was exhilarating. I felt young again! And to this day I have no symptoms. Unless I stop taking the glucosamine, and then in a few days my joints all start scratching again.

It bothers me a lot that I had to show desperate emotion to my doctor just to be told about it. If I hadn't, she wouldn't have.

Apparently the reason is that it doesn't work for everyone who has osteoarthritis. Those it doesn't work for, it doesn't help at all. Maybe half the people who have it aren't helped. Which means that in some people their bodies have stopped producing the glucosamine, an essential ingredient of the slippery lining of the joints, and in the others, by implication, a different chemical is missing.

If I were a medical researcher, I would definitely look for that chemical. It shouldn't be that hard to find. And there's a fortune to be made there.

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I was a good-looking kid at 19, but...

5/21/2016

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Picture
Looking back at my young self in this photo, which was taken by my sister at UBC where she was studying English, I'm very happy to be the old, receding person I am now as a senior. In that handsome young visage, I see only the beginnings of an understanding of the world and very little understanding of myself. Yet I badly wanted to know then what I know now. Some people of my advanced age would, I'm sure, give anything to be their young selves again, but not me. I'm happy that after 45 years I've finally arrived at the place I desperately wanted to be back then, and so have no interest in returning to that dark hole of ignorance, especially that total lack of knowledge of myself, and the rough life that resulted from it.
​

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"You get to the age like mine..."

5/15/2016

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​"... and you realise it's impossible to be anybody other than the person you've always been." ... A character in tonight's episode of Wallander, my favourite TV show. I couldn't have said it better myself. I would add that when you're younger it's difficult to know who you are because you're always trying to be someone else.​
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After four seasons, I'm flying!

5/9/2016

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Four years ago I decided, like Nemo in The Matrix, to leap off the roof of the skyscraper in hopes I would learn to fly before hitting the ground. 

Well, I have. And it's an amazing feeling.

That leap was a last-ditch effort to rid myself of shyness, which had been seriously trashing my life since I was a kid. Finally, at 62 and semi retired, I could see that if I didn't take this last opportunity to cure myself, I never would. 

I started out by attending Ron Stewart's poetry workshop, which would have been a simple thing for most people, but not for me. It took months of steeling myself up. Then, when I finally got used to that, I threw myself into the most extreme fear-causing role I could imagine, that of organizer of a new poetry series, London Open Mic Poetry Night. I thought it would probably be far too big of a leap for me, and yes, for the next four years my anxiety  was very high, nearly unbearable at times. 

But that social organizing did miraculously rid me of most of my shyness. However I was very disappointed to find that I was left with a generalized anxiety, and assumed I would be stuck with it for the rest of my life. 

I had pushed myself through those four seasons with sheer determination, but anxiety-driven willpower doesn't help a person get to sleep at night. At some point, I began taking a sleeping pill. And, as sleeping pills do, it slowly lost it's effectiveness, forcing me to increase the dosage continually. Finally, a couple months ago, I decided to get off of it. To do that, my doctor said, I would have to decrease the dosage by a quarter pill a week, while taking melatonin, which would make up for the difference. Well, I finally did get down to hardly anything, just a quarter pill a night, only to find that to go from that to none is very nearly impossible. My body had come to rely on it to get me to sleep. 

That was ten days ago. For these last ten nights I've gone without a single good night's sleep as I tried to force myself to fall asleep naturally. Until last night. I was reading an easy spy novel in bed and suddenly woke up four hours later! I was so excited I didn't think I would be able to fall back to sleep at all, but in an hour I was zonked out for another three! 

And another good sign: at our special indigenous poetry open mic two days ago, when I began to read my poem during the open mic section, the sheet of paper I was holding didn't shake at all! For the first time it was totally still. Always before at least my left hand would shake. And usually my right would as well, with the least bit of anxiety. (This is called familial tremors, inherited from my mother.) Suffice it to say I was astonished. I very nearly lost my place in the poem just from watching that paper not move. 

Another thing that has done wonders for my anxiety lately is suddenly having more people working with me on this endless poetry project. This last couple of weeks, I've been feeling quite strongly that making it go isn't all up to me anymore. They're taking a lot of weight off my shoulders. They're even coming up with ideas on their own. And carrying them out. There's nothing more wonderful than discovering that others have met and discussed a project without me even knowing about it!
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    Stan Burfield's Blog

    Organizer of London Open Mic Poetry. former support worker for people with autism and developmental disabilities.  former farm boy, former adventurer, former florist.
    The 2014 Ted Plantos Memorial Award

    Interview in Your Old South Magazine
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    *Linda in first day of snow. ​
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    *From "The Cat's Table" by Ondaatje
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    *I THINK IT’S LIKE THIS.
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    *Orange-oatmeal cookies!
    *To put London Open Mic behind me
    ​
    *She sings!
    *Worried
    *While walking home from the store with cherries...
    *Science
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    *Hey, get a job!
    ​
    *Linda and I are learning to trust.
    *Linda is away visiting relatives. 
    *"We halted and so knew that the quiet night was full of sounds..."
    ​
    *"We halted and so knew that the quiet night was full of sounds..."
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    *Diet and health/longevity
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    *What is going on with these incredible coincidences I keep having?
    *My world of coincidences
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    *Revelations are everywhere.
    *Knowing you
    *Despite...
    ​
    *The sound of love
    ​
    *Our smile for the day
    *Hurricanes Carla and Esther
    ​*Time Warp!

    *The Pow Wow
    *The Polar Sea
    *Other people
    *Moccasin Bells
    * Stories from my life
    *Je  suis Charlie Hebdo, mais....
    *Life at a fire lookout tower
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    *Blue

    Personal Essays
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    ​*Will I and the Open Mic both survive?
    *Medical Update, for those interested
    *Fred, my father
    *THIS  IS  GETTING  TOO  WEIRD:  the nearly-impossible coincidences are rolling in en masse now.
    *After four seasons, I'm flying!
    ​
    *True North
    ​
    *Back to work on poetry, finally!!
    ​
    *Maybe it's time to see a psychiatrist.
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    *Jean Vanier and L'Arche
    *But then again...
    *A Most Useful Invention
    *Building my next beater.
    *My dreams are full of people now.
    *Dear Diary: Relax. Take your boots off. 
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    *Familiar
    *I  had a glass of Landon Cabernet last night
    *The Less-educated Imagination
    *Listen, I'll tell you something that's really got me worried
    *Can't get enough


    Poems
    *The universe as a poem
    *If you don't know
    *A meander through Euston Park 
    *The Picard Card
    *To Open the Morning
    * We'll see...
    *1st published poem: On a Crate 
    *We decide
    *Standing Still
    *DRINK
    *Oblivious
    *Some Other Place
    *Tinnitus
    *It seems you just have to be still
    *In the Night
    *When I was young
    *Not for inspiration
    *Oh
    *Concerning our Glorious Future: (2nd prize winner at 2014 Poetry London Contest)
    *Yes I heard Ginsberg read once he said prepare for death
    *Amazement
    *Getting used to it
    *And now the news
    *Heart Shaped


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