Signs and Synchronicities
Talking To The Universe
At the first Quaker meeting I ever went to, an elderly woman was moved to stand. She beamed across the room, full of a message from God, and said this:
“Friends. There is good news. The transformation is coming, and we need only follow the signs. Faith is the bird that sings before dawn.”
At that moment, I could tell that her God speaks the same language as mine, or atleast makes themself known in the material world in the same ways. I have been following the signs my whole life. It is the way that I let the universe talk to me. An atheist might call it “trusting your gut instinct”, but this does not allow for communion with everything greater than yourself. A Christian might call it “following the light”, but, for my faith, following the lights would be more apt. I follow signs and synchronicities that beckon me. They lead me into the future as a sequence of floating white lights would guide me through a dark forest.
Two years ago, I went to my tattoo artist’s studio in West Hampstead. I asked him to put a snake eating its own tail on my forearm; a reminder that endings are as natural as they are painful. Unlike most people who get an ouroboros tattoo, I decided that the image would not encircle my whole arm, just the inward-facing side. Deep down, I still wanted to get away from the harsh truth I was putting in my skin. The tattoo was done by 4 pm, and I walked around North London to kill time. I was going on a third date that evening. Having wandered for a while, I settled on a bench on a residential street and thought about the meaning of the tattoo. In the first few days of having a new tattoo, you keep it protected under a sticky layer of plastic called second skin. Apt for a snake. The third date, and all the dates after it, went well. Eight months later – a matter of weeks before he moved to the other side of the world – that man drove me to his family home. It turned out to be on a residential street in Hampstead with a bench where I’d once sat, grappling with the harshness of endings. As he parked, he asked me what was up. I was looking at my tattoo, trying to internalise its lesson. The self-devouring jaws. The edges of the scales, smudged where I’d let the ‘second skin’ shed before it was ready.
Last Spring, I watched a show called Loudermilk on Netflix and paused it to find a song playing in the background. It had a familiar tug, though I’d never heard it before and couldn’t be Shazamed as the dialogue in the scene blurred the lyrics. I spent five minutes transcribing what I could hear and traced it back to the song: ‘Lost on You’ by LP. I have heard that song at pivotal moments ever since. Once, it was coming from a busker in a Portuguese alleyway. Once it reached me through the tinted window of a Mercedes in Earl’s Court. Each time, I feel the forgotten familiarity and spend five minutes groping back to it, googling the lyrics, realising that I’ve been here before. ‘Lost on You’ comes by when I feel like I’ve lost myself in something or someone else. It’s a small thing, but the searching time always recentres me enough to set things straight.
A snake and a song are the signs. A bench and a busker are the vehicles of synchronicity. You can think that my methods are made up. In many ways, they are, to the extent that history and the stock market are made up, and perception is just a string of moments that the mind can only bear if it makes them into a story. Signs are anything we bestow with significance, and are therefore personal and arbitrary. For example, ‘Angel Numbers’ are recurring digits. 11:11, 123, 888. When Doreen Virtue popularised the concept of angel numbers in 2004, she was a New Age spiritualist and medium. She has since become a nun and insisted that they are satanic values sent by false spirits. Despite this, thousands of people still catch a glimpse of digits on their microwave and choose to gild them with meaning.
When I am attuned to signs and synchronicities, I feel like I move through life with minimal resistance. Everything I read, write, and think connects. Many people I admire preach this kind of non-resistance, or call it Flow State. I have only realised recently that some people don’t experience life as a silver chain of synchronicities. The most cynical among them might attribute my world map to the Baader-Meinhof effect, or even call it a psychosis. Carlo Rovelli’s book ‘The Order of Time’ is very important to me for many reasons, not least because it has helped me ground these beliefs. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist. He explains that all dimensions of time - past, present, and future - coexist in Now. They shift and intersperse like grains of sand in a dune. The grains of the past have been warmed through by the friction of life already lived there. They are marked by the friction’s heat. This timestamps the past and lets us process it as memory. All the grains of future time remain invisible, unbranded by work and friction. I like to think that signs are just hillocks in the dunes where my future self is telling me to dance up heat.
In the same way that you would look up at the sound of your name (and my name is relatively rare, whenever I see a gift shop item personalised for me, or open a book at a random page only to see ‘Eliza’ in print, I feel that it’s not something to ignore), you will have signs that resonate with you. Signs can be universal - we all understand that a colon followed by a closed bracket signifies the thing we do with our faces when we feel happy – but they can also be designed. Reverse engineered. I have a long list of personal signs that nudge me forward as clearly as the orange departure boards at Victoria station. This is a small selection of them, alphabetised.
Armchair at the back of a room – “your thoughts are not you, they’re just things passing through your head.”
Bikes and Bike locks – Independence.
Blue winter light just after dusk and before dawn – Lean into others’ portals, perspectives.
Brocken spectre – Spirit.
Coast Path signs with mileages that don’t make sense - Reminder to enjoy the process.
December’s last week/ any mention of the days between Christmas and New Year – Infinite potential to alchemise romance and beauty.
Dictionaries – Expansion.
Double scull – Reflect on where you’ve been.
Garish or crude versions of religious iconography - ??? significant, but the meaning is still unclear.
Handwritten letters – ^.
Lost On You song – Call to return to self.
Mossy forests – Secrets: You can never truly understand someone’s mind.
Mundaneum – Multiplicity.
Ouroboros – Endings are beginnings.
Parallel stars – Acceptance that some beautiful eventualities are not meant to happen.
Reading in bed – Home (regardless of place).
Red candles – Hypnotism, fervour.
Rings in a tree stump – Stop telling linear stories.
Sweetener-tablet coffee – Creative Flow.
Sweet wine – Decadence.
Tattooed skin – Agency.
Untangling a necklace using needles - (the same instinct as William Empson’s Poetry).
Uphill hiking – A task can always be broken into smaller increments.
Verbal exactitude – Beauty is truth. Truth is revealed, not created.
Water surface – Everything is a mirror of how you choose to perceive/ when you smile, the world smiles back.
Yellow arrows (whether they are Camino markers or graffiti used by the London plumbing network) must always be followed.
By creating a lexicon like this, I believe you let your subconscious and your future self guide you. I have found that my biggest mistakes have often begun in a blind spot. The universe has an ironic sense of humour and sends me back to repeat the lesson again and again until I spot a pattern. At the very least, superstition can be helpful. Whenever I walk past a bin in a conspicuously remote part of the countryside, I wonder what it is I’m meant to leave behind. Sometimes synchronicities don’t feel forthcoming, and I worry that I’ll run out of lights to follow. In those moments, I listen to ‘Mirror Man’ by The Human League and pretend that it’s the universe singing to me rather than Philip Oakey.
You know I’ll change If change is what you require Your every wish Your every dream, hope, desire Here comes the mirror man Says he’s a people fan Here comes the mirror man
I went to see a scientist talk at Cadogan Hall when I was 16. As a boy, the scientist had loved birdsong. He had spent hours sitting in his home’s hilltop garden with his father, listening. Together they recorded, identified, and mimicked the birds, and in those hours, the boy learnt to love scientific methods too. While the boy was abroad doing a PhD – becoming the scientist – his father died, so he left university and went home. During the days, he listened to all the old birdsong tapes they had made together and started uploading them onto his laptop for posterity. At night, he went into the garden. There is little birdsong at night, so instead the scientist sat and watched the light on the opposite hill’s telephone tower as it flashed red signals into the darkness. He noticed that he could hear the light singing; a strange, birdlike call every time it flashed red. Every night, he sat there, trying to imagine what the telephone tower would look like if it were a bird, what it might be singing about, and he spoke with the memory of his father about this. When all the files from his childhood were safely digitised, the scientist returned to his lab and started a new PhD proposal. This led him to Cadogan Hall, over two decades later, where he presented his discovery of a new type of synaesthesia: in some brains, such as his own, there are connectivity overlaps among aural and visual pathways that let the owner of the brain see a sequence of lights as a melody.
I remembered this story in the moment when the Quaker woman sat down. “Faith is the bird that sings before dawn.”
So beautiful. I love this :)
Eliza this was exceptionally beautiful and I am going to be paying more attention to signs !