days of the halcyon

 

Blissful midsummer awash with tides of mystery.

Somewhere in the middle of it all I was asking the creator of the universe does he speak to us through coincidences.

I  brought to mind a memory from a few years ago where I'd demanded of a young woman sitting with me in a cafe: "Do you believe in God?"

And she'd thought for a bit and then replied: "Yes. Yes I do believe in God."

The  moment she said it, a blue butterfly floated down from the rafters of the cafe and settled on the lip of her coffee cup.

We stared.

Then the butterfly fluttered to the window beside us for another few moments before flying away.

Last month amid the hilarious rain and sun of an Irish Summer when I brought that butterfly memory to mind, on the very day I'd asked God, did coincidences mean anything, right that day, I came across footage of a most erudite commentator called Jordan Peterson on the internet.

He was talking about the mystical significance of coincidences.

Jordan Peterson was saying: "The psychologist Jung was visited by a woman patient in his office. She had had a dream with a scarab beetle in it and wanted to know what it meant. Even as the woman spoke to him, Jung could hear a fluttering against the window pane and was almost afraid to turn around. When he turned there was a scarab beetle pressing against his office window. Jung was a student of Freud but he rejected Freud's atheism. He concluded that incidents like that with the scarab beetle were not just conincidences but what he called synchronicities. He suggested they represented God tapping us gently on the shoulder."

Later the same night I had watched Jordan Peterson's commentary on Jung, I received an email from a lady in America with whom I am in touch.

It was a short greeting.

Part of it read: "There is a scarab beetle in my apartment. I must let him out as he's probably hungry."

And a few days later when I when I ran into the girl who had been part of the butterfly story five years ago and told her about the events of the week, she immediately googled scarab beetles.

She looked up from her computer phone wide eyed.

"It says they represent resurrection," she told me.