Chapter 19 - Nature Speaks
Coincidence Speaks
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Happy Friday friends! Welcome to Chapter 19 of Coincidence Speaks. No worries if you’re new here, or aren’t all the way caught up—chapters are crafted to be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning!↩️
Many thanks to
for recommending my book for summer reading. She’s built a thriving community in such a relatively short time here on Substack, and her work happens to be highly synchronistic with this particular chapter—check her out at Sacred Environment!And if you enjoy the themes I explore in my writing, I’m thinking you’ll really like
’s piece Everything Is Changing, Nothing Is Changing. Sheer brilliance, to the point of😎.Onward to Chapter 19...
Chapter 19
Nature Speaks
“Does it get any better than this?”
It was a rhetorical question, of course, and one soon forgotten—but nevertheless, something must have been listening. As the leaves reddened and bronzed on the way to Paul’s 37th birthday that autumn, that question was answered. Slowly at first, then all at once, the connection between his inner awareness and the physical world around him powerfully reignited.
And it started—and ended—with Nature.
Paul padded upstairs the next morning before the sun and his family arose for the day, tip-toeing into the guest room for an impromptu awareness expansion session. The feeling of overflowing gratitude from the night before was a welcome companion, effortlessly catalyzing a wide open, spacious state of awareness. He dropped further and further into that feeling of spaciousness with a few deep, relaxing breaths.
Suddenly, a spiraling geometric pattern arose, spontaneous and vivid, front and center in his mind’s eye. Paul marveled at its fractal complexity. It looked a lot like a more sophisticated version of the Fibonacci spiral he’d learned about in a high school math class years ago.
Later that morning he walked through acres of enchanted woods, the same woods that had awakened the inner child of his wife Clara, a lifetime away from the noise and concrete of their mutual suburban upbringing. Suddenly, he rooted into the ground as if struck by lightning, embraced by a deep stillness. The exact same complex pattern from earlier that morning was front and center on the spiraling wrinkles of the tree trunk facing him.
“How the heck…”
His mind flashed back to the “❤️NWCSTLE” career-changing moment—how that strange car’s license plate had appeared in front of his own house the exact moment he’d asked for guidance around joining the Bank of Newcastle. How the sense of openness, of adventure, how the feeling of infinite potential seemed to be the catalyst for it—along with the subsiding of analytical thought. And he remembered how the magic of that day had all begun with a sincere request for truth. An invocation.
He reoriented himself in the present, took a long slow breath, and made another sincere invocation:
“Is it actually possible? Can… Nature hear me?”
At that moment a strong wind picked up from nothing, from nowhere, rustling his hair so strongly he was taken aback by it.
“Coincidence?”
Of course it was. It had to be. The wind was a completely random large scale weather phenomenon. To even think otherwise was ridiculous.
But he asked again.
“Does Nature really communicate directly? Show me. I’m open to the truth.”
The wind gusted even harder, as if in immediate visceral response. Then the air returned to its original stillness as if nothing had happened. Yet for a fleeting half moment Paul could almost swear he heard a subtle inner voice riding the wind, “We/I/You don’t speak in words, but in metaphor.”
«Thump» A pinecone broke the silence and landed at his feet, displaced from its perch high above by the gust of wind. Paul picked it up.
The way its seed petals spread from inner to outer was an exact match for the same geometric pattern that had started the day.
Paul walked back toward the house in a daze, mind stuck on a repeating phrase, thinking “The earth itself is alive!” over and over. A curious urge got the best of him, and he fished a phone out of its pocket for a quick internet search to thumb in “the earth itself is alive.” The top result was something called the Gaia hypothesis:
Simply put, the Gaia hypothesis says that Earth is a living system and uses similar mechanisms that living creatures use to stay alive, by constantly regulating temperature, chemical and physical inputs and outputs and adaptation through evolution.
Paul’s jaw dropped. Although at this point, it was no hypothesis, as far as he was concerned. There was no need for theory, no pressing need for analytical thought. That the world was a living, breathing entity was self evident through direct experience, at least if he gave any credence to the highly subjective—yet highly anomalous—sequence of events that had just occurred.
Later that night he did his best to commit the experience to memory in his journal:
“Nature is alive. Nature speaks. It’s like I’m opening up to a subtle, universal language of interconnectedness. Of correlation. Everything is expressing and receiving information in its own unique way. Everything.”
The earth itself—Herself—had become a living organism. Or, always had been —
And he was just noticing for the first time.
The next morning, instead of his usual indoor perch in the upstairs guest room, Paul was drawn to sit outside in nature Herself, seeking out the tree with the spiraling geometric pattern and leaning against it. Powerful gratitude along with that unmistakable feeling of spaciousness landed immediately, and a sudden thought rang through him like a bell:
“If I am part of Nature, and Nature is a living, breathing fractal of Life itself, then everything I could ever possibly need to know is within me too.”
Time slowed down and became porous, the breath slower and slower, naturally subsiding, the space between each one growing larger and larger until he couldn’t tell the difference between himself and the space holding every breath pulse, every heart pulse.
Instead of a head directing four limbs somewhere far below, his body felt like a spiraling pillar, connected deep within the earth and out into the sky. Like the tree he leaned against.
Answers emerged from the depths as direct inner knowings:
I am Fire from the core, from the inside out
Rock mineral crystals are my bones my skeletal system
Water is the lifeblood of my circulatory system
Plants my lungs for respiration
Armies of bacteria and insects eliminating decomposing composting
Electricity nervous system lightning synapses
Mitochondria a thousand brilliant suns
Atmospheric skin barrier porous and protective
Viral codes for blueprint transformation
Thoughts electric emotions magnetic like the moon pulling tides
pollinated seeded fertilized stimulated focalized intensified by SOMETHING, something like the Sun…
Faster and faster, packets of information downloading and uploading into his conscious awareness all at once, too much, too fast, and he opened his eyes and stood up on shaky legs. While he couldn’t put everything into exact words, he could not deny the sense of rightness that came with the intuitive information that had arisen from the depths of his awareness.
That day was the first time witnessed Mother Nature breathing, as the earth sucked moisture down into the soil as the sun went down in the evening, and expressed it again in the morning dew just before sunrise on the outbreath. It was respiration all right, just on a different timescale.
One breath was one day.
To be sure, Paul knew that most of the people at his office and his entire client base would probably assume he was a few cards short of a full deck. Possibly more than just a few, in all likelihood.
Nevertheless ordinary life, while outwardly appearing just the same, had turned into a firehose stream of constant multi-channeled communication. And whether at work or in nature, Paul moved through each day immersed in a full on flow state of communicative feedback loops. It was like living out his very own personalized paradise on earth, like each and every moment was spontaneously engineering itself for the sole purpose of bringing the beauty dancing within everything to his personal attention.
Paul gulped it all in for all he was worth—this was like nothing he’d ever dared to imagine was possible. It felt positively divine, yet somehow fundamentally ordinary and natural. Like this was what life was supposed to be.
While—thankfully—far out reality-bending phenomena like prophetic dreaming and shimmering auras and crazy repeating numbers weren’t going on like they had years before, this new interconnective state was much more powerful and grounded by how it was intimately interwoven throughout the interplay of practical, ordinary life.
Each day, each breath kept compounding into an ever-quickening series of vivid, live streaming connective experiences. It was like his nervous system had been plugged into a brand new power circuit, and all the lights in every room came on all at once.
And he remembered! He remembered how emotions, and thoughts, and dreams, and the physical world all intertwined together in an instantaneous, unplanned realtime. A full blast, streaming symphony of universal supportive vitality that he could feel, resonating through the very cells of his body, continually reflected within the outer circumstances of day to day life.
Seemingly anomalous phenomena like that “❤️NWCSTLE” moment were happening not just once in a blue moon, not just a few times a month—but for hours at a time on a daily basis, no matter where he was. Any sincere question or inner contemplation he held within would soon be answered through the symbolic reflection of events and situations that sprung up around him.
The sole raison d’etre seemed to be nothing less than an ever-deepening revelation of his own intrinsic connection within the deeper archetypal patterning of Life itself, constantly revealed through the feedback loops of free-flowing everyday experience. And that revelation could happen and was happening everywhere—in the knowing twinkle in the eye of a stranger, in the intricate timing of business transactions, in the reflective energy shared within relationships, in constant “coincidental” synchronistic occurrence, and especially now in the natural beauty of their new rural home.
Paul had taken to driving a different route to the office every morning, and this one was no exception. He’d found that following natural spontaneity was a surefire way to amplify the sense of expansiveness even more. And the less he tried to control how his day would go, the more it would surprise him with completely unplanned experiences of revelation.
As he flew down another unfamiliar road, he hoped it would never end. This was living. This was what he’d been seeking all his life. The phenomenal message of Life itself was “Everything is interconnected, and there are no coincidences!” His heart was full.
“Ain’t life grand?!” he shouted aloud through an open sunroof to no one in particular.
Something was listening then too, because at that very moment his car stereo cut off, right in the middle of a song, and kicked off a new song in response—
“Ain’t Life Grand” by Widespread Panic.
Paul laughed and laughed. He couldn’t make this stuff up even if he wanted to, and no one would believe him anyway.
Life had his back every single moment. Until it didn’t.
Until widespread panic set in.
End Chapter 19
Chapter 20 - A Murder of Crows will post next week. Thanks for being here in interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
Whoa, this chapter was so well done (they all are but this one was Nature). This is beautiful and something I haven't read/thought before "That day was the first day he witnessed Mother Nature breathing, as the earth sucked moisture down into the soil as the sun went down in the evening, and expressed it again in the morning dew just before sunrise on the outbreath. "
Thank you so much for the generous mention at the beginning 💜🌿
Now you are allowing the reader to peel the onion, so to speak. Great fun by the way. Each concentric layer carefully lifted and removed, exposing , getting ever closer to the core. I cannot even begin to guess where Paul’s new revelation will take him. Will this ultimate enlightenment be so intense he becomes more thought than being? I’m wildly all over the place in solving the mystery. Though it is obvious that you have allowed the reader to reach some sort of critical threshold, any semblance of sudden insight I have been forming, has all but vanished. So much so , that I now give myself over to the turning of each page. Cannot wait to see where it takes me next.