Synchronicity: Where Kali Dances

There is a quote from Cixous that has stood out for me in my reading of her book, Rootprints. 

"What ties me to my elective relatives,
what holds me in the lure of my
spiritual guides, is not the question of
style, or of metaphors, it is what they
think about incessantly, the idea of
fire, over which we maintain a stealthy
silence, so as not to stop thinking about 
it. No complacency. Only the admit-
ting of the fear of fire. And the
compulsion to confront the fire. We
need fire." (p. 26)

I think of Cixous as an elective relative.  She is poetic, metaphorical, elusive, academic, but not an academic, and a woman who writes with her whole being.  Everything I strive to be.  

No complacency.

There is something in her language that aligns with the work I have been doing over the past year.  Interestingly, I have not picked up anything from Cixous since I taught "Laugh of the Medusa" about a year ago. I have not read Rootprints in quite a few years. She and I grew distant, but I see how her words settled into my unconscious, like a footprint, a rhizomatic set of memories of her words and metaphors.  Root. Print.

What blew me away in the quote were the lines: No complacency. Only the admitting of the fear of fire. And the compulsion to confront the fire. We need fire. This sums up the complex work I have been doing over the past year with ayurveda.  Facing fire. Facing fear.  

In meditation this morning, I was working with Kali.  My mind immediately took me to the place I often go to in my meditation.  I would call it my internal fire source near/around my third chakra. It's a dark primal space. There was Kali--dancing around and grabbing me and pulling me into her circular vortex. She was dancing around the fire source, but I didn't realize it at first. It was as though the fire source was camouflaged.  It was covered with dark gauzy cloth.  Lately, I've been feeling stagnant... Not stagnant.  I have been feeling myself wanting to revert to a place that no longer exists within me.  And Kali refused to let that happen. She, rather violently, pulled me into the vortex, which made me look more closely at the black gauzy formation.  I pulled it off and realized that it was my power source.  And there were red hot coals pulsing and emanating heat.  She made me stay with it.  Kali made me dance around with her and stoke the coals until flames started to rise from the pit.  Then I sat there shedding layers of myself and throwing them into the fire. All the gauze, clothes, masks, skin, that was inhibiting me.  It's wondrous to think about how all this can happen in 10 minutes of meditation.  But my mind took me there immediately. 

No complacency. Only the admitting of the fear of fire. And the compulsion to confront the fire. We need fire. 

Could Kali and Cixous be any more direct with me?  I don't think so. 

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I've been struggling to understand the difference between synchronicity and serendipity.   I looked up each of the words in the dictionary.

Synchronicity: The simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

Serendipity: Supposedly, the first use of the word in the English language was by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann. He said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of."

On the surface, these words seem very similar to me. But for some reason, I'm more comfortable using serendipity.  Happy accidents. Reading the definition and history of the word, I have become more fascinated with it.  "Accidents and sagacity." I love that these two words aligned.  Training yourself, focusing yourself, putting yourself into the right mind frame to find the thing we were not looking for, but what we, ultimately, needed to find.  Following the rootprints down into something more.

At the same time, I know I often bring divergent ideas together. Things that seem to have no apparent connection align to bring new knowledge, new ideas.  It seems to me, that it is the cornerstone of creativity.  Opening myself up to things that seem unrelated.  One could say our lives are constantly moving and tangling up in all kinds of synchronistic potential.  

These are two words to think about more. They deserve contemplation, because I know they have guided me through some difficult moments. When I trust in the things that my gut--that space where Kali dances--tells me, I know I'm doing the right work.  I just have to keep focused enough to remember when I feel most distant and remote from my elective relatives (and myself). 

And just when I feel most distant from everything, something tangible arrives that grounds me back to this earth.  A solar wheel to remind me of the energy and power of light. And the energy and power of each serendipitous, synchronistic moment.