Negative synchronicity

What else can you call it?

Shana and I prepared for a Mapping Mythaca workshop last Friday over a period of months, making materials, painted paper and cut out images for collages, paper soaked in tea for maps, I practiced the stories I planned to tell, chose the parts of Journey to Mythaca that I wanted to read, I called the person organizing it, emailed back and forth, drove five hours to get there...and the charter school sponsoring the workshop had a board meeting the night before that lasted till the middle of the night (no doubt till the exact moment that I woke up with a cramp in my foot and had to walk around the living room until it went away), the director left with half the families, and not one kid from the school showed up for the workshop the next day. Actually one kid did show up, but he wasn't from the school. What are the odds of that?

We did the workshop with the boy and his mother, which was fun, and then we went to see a friend who lives in the area. It was an adventure - an unexpected little vacation.

As if to drive home the lesson (be ready for abrupt changes in plans?) as thoroughly as possible, this was the third big negative synchronicity in my life over the past few weeks: three events that could be considered losses because of exceptionally unlikely circumstances that were so out of my control that I can only shake my head and laugh about it.

I wondered whether it would go on, and if perhaps I should stop trying to do workshops, but I had a classroom visit scheduled for Tuesday this week, and you know what? It went really well. I had lots of materials left from the non-workshop on Friday, and the kids loved the book and and the artwork.

And when I came home, I found two good emails. One said that a local magazine would be running a review of the book in July. Local publicity! Hurray! I'd been working on a new set of questions for book groups, so I put those together in a brochure and took them down to the local independent bookstore. Jim was there and was pleased to get the brochures, setting them right up at the cash register. And now we have a signing set up for the first week in July, right when the review comes out.


The second was from the fellow I began working with months ago to make a recording of Journey to Mythaca. We'd been ready to go when his studio flooded in the heavy rain we had in March. Now he is ready to begin again.

I think of synchronicity as an opening to Kairos, the world of once-upon-a-time. Kairos, by its nature isn't reliable. I guess that's the point.