It’s been a little while since I’ve posted a new piece outside of my weekly serialized adventure novel. It’s been a rough go for Paul so far, I’ll be the first to admit, and the namesake of this site hasn’t yet been given its full due.
So I thought I’d share a story of extraordinary coincidence from my own life in the meantime.
The everyday experience of time is usually linear, based on a Newtonian model that works very well for getting us from A to B in our busy lives. But zoom out far enough, or go in close enough, and seemingly disparate events start to form recognizable patterns that spiral together, echoing forwards and backwards in time. Sometimes the recognition of these patterns can give us clarity, relief, guidance, and a revitalized sense of purpose — they point us towards healing. Towards integration.
I hope you enjoy. And yes — coincidentally enough, today happens to be Valentine’s Day. 😆
Coincidence always speaks through one moment that pulses through time.
A calico cat tucks in her front paws, pretending to nap on the kitchen table where I write. She pretends long enough for it to become real.
How do I start? I ask of my life. At the beginning, Life responds.
Where’s that?
No answer.
The calico cat is a frozen statue now, almost deathlike, her triple hues of orange and black and white held captive like dried blobs of color on a two dimensional painting. I breathe all the way out and become part of her stillness. And then I wait. I wait for inspiration. I wait for movement.
Her little lung softly inflates, gently rippling through her still frame. The unequivocal knowing emerges along with her slow, rhythmic breathing: Life is a Pulse.
The way each inbreath merges into each outbreath reminds me of an old song lyric, and I write it here, testing the creative waters: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
Zztzzt my phone pulses on the table, exploding the last bits of silence with its sudden intrusiveness, all the more so with the impossibly timed email notification it brings: “New Beginnings…Again.”
So I’ll start there. At the beginning.
In the woods.
The screaming wail of a banshee flew out of the deep woods, first puncturing my ears then boring down into the pit of my stomach. It was as if nature Herself had been pierced through her Heart.
I’d never heard my wife sound like that.
Sprinting across fields of trampled wildflowers and into the tree line towards the sound, I already knew what I would find. But I ran straight there anyway.
Into the woods.
Crashing through a thicket and hurdling a small creek, the trees opened to a small clearing. There was my wife, collapsed on a blanket of brittle fallen leaves, sobbing on the ground next to the remains of her beloved calico cat.
She had named her Heidi, after her favorite book from early childhood, about a little girl who lived freely in the mountains and tended to all the plants and animals. Heidi was my wife’s inner child, brought to life by a book. And, by the sweet gentle soul of this calico cat who absolutely adored her.
Like Heidi of the mountains, my wife lives in a world of land and animal stewardship - gardens, orchards, goats, chickens, ducks, cats, dogs… even a human here and there. We’d lost so many of our well-loved animals before, in so many different ways, but somehow they were almost always in her arms at the end.
Heidi had been missing for the better part of that week, which wasn’t totally out of the ordinary. She had been on multi-day gallivants before, and had always come home. But she’d felt something, my wife said much later, sitting on her sister’s porch in the city earlier that week. A sudden heart-splitting wave of fear, a sharp stabbing panic that something awful had happened.
Finding her in the woods was more than her tender heart could take. This was far more than a simple loss of innocence. This was Nature herself betraying my wife. Nature had become Predator.
Our quaint family hobby farm adventure was over. The dream ended in that moment.
A part of her went into the ground with Heidi that day. A jagged shard of her soul had crystallized and broken off, embedding itself deeply in the land. And the trauma left a dark stain on what had been a magical sanctuary of discovery for our young family.
She staggered back to the house, still in shock, asking if I could bury her alone. Heidi had my heart too and I gave her all of it. I gave her all the sacred ceremony and gratitude and love and prayer I could summon up as I prepared her final resting place. Death stared at me out of dry empty sockets. I stared back.
As salt tears spilled down onto the last shovelfuls of freshly displaced earth underneath the triple-trunked tree where she had been laid to rest, an unbeckoned image burst into my mind’s eye. Those tears were dropping through the soil, spiraling down, down… straight down until they reached Heidi’s empty shell. Suddenly her bones ignited in a flash of white gold brilliance, and a scintillating light entered into the roots of the triple tree, flashed up its trunk, and shot out of its branches into the blue sky above.
Whether the image was all in my head, or whether it was fodder for something larger happening, I felt comforted. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I sensed her suffering was temporary and Heidi’s true essence had left its old shell behind.
But the damage to my wife been done.
I trekked back to the house, caked boots tracking trails of red grave dirt, wondering what we would say to our kids. They were too little for the full truth. I sat down in the living room and buried my head in my hands.
My daughter burst into the room with her trademark flurry of dramatic movement. As if she knew: “Did you and Mommy find Heidi yet?” They always know.
I told her she had wandered off and didn’t know when she was coming home. Her eyes watered as I held out my arms for a trademark Daddy Hug.
Just beyond the embrace of my sobbing daughter was a bookshelf. And atop that shelf sat a hardcover book. HEIDI, in big bold letters. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the blue sky on the cover.
The blue sky…
The change in her was immediate. The joy and wonder she’d once had for our home in the country wasn’t just gone, it had been desecrated. I watched, powerless, as she ghosted through each day, hollowed out by frozen trauma.
I didn’t even need to fight my usual impulse to try to fix things. This was unfixable. Senseless. There was nothing I could say or do, except give her space to grieve. And to grieve myself.
It wasn’t until the darkest day of the year, on the winter solstice, when she mentioned Heidi’s name again. Her voice was flat, edging out through a throat thickened with despair
I can’t go anywhere without being reminded of her
My chest hurts and I can’t breathe
I wake up every night… and I can’t go back to sleep… my heart. My heart is crushed
“I’m so sorry… I know how much you loved her…” I trailed off.
I wanted to tell her something like “That moment - the one that haunts you - it is only one tiny moment outweighed by the light of a thousand others…” Maybe it would help to put the trauma into a different context.
But trauma doesn’t need context. It needs to be given space, to be seen and heard and felt, felt with compassion, for the heart to breathe once more. Context only comes afterward.
“I just need to know that she’s OK. I have to know…”
The image of a brilliant blue sky flashed into my mind again. The same blue sky surrounded the car I was driving. She’s here, somewhere all around, I’m sure of it.
“Maybe you could ask her? Ask her if she’s OK?”
She humored me, almost certainly because she had nothing left to lose. Linking her hand in mine across the console, she took a breath and said softly, “Heidi… are you OK?”
At that exact moment, as if in response, an oncoming car flashed past in the opposite lane. The license plate, of all things, said “MEEOWW.”
My eyes widened. “Holy crap did you see that?”
“See what?” She was looking out the passenger window.
“That car that just passed us - it just said ‘Meow’ on its fricking license plate.”
She smiled a little at the improbability of it, but the ancient flame behind her eyes was buried in coal and ash.
A few minutes later we pulled into our driveway. There was a letter in the mailbox, addressed to her, featuring a cat from the same animal shelter she had rescued Heidi from.
She smiled again, but sadness still shaped her lips. These small coincidences held little comfort. Not while shock, and fear, and grief, and anger were still locked within a well of deep trauma. So often the cleansing waters of frozen grief can only be thawed by rage.
Ten days later, on New Years day, a vivid dream shocked me awake. The type of dream that is more real than this world, until it is forgotten…
Early morning. The sun has not yet broken the horizon.
I am outside my house playfighting with our overly aggressive rooster Henry AKA “Hammerin’ Hank.” I throw a rock up into the air near him, not to hit him, but to ruffle his feathers a little bit. But instead of landing next to him, it goes right through the ground and sinks into the earth without a trace.
Upon closer investigation, the rock seems to have created a small rip in the earth itself. The opening grows larger the closer I get to it, large enough to squeeze through, and there is a strange shimmering around it that can only be seen out of the edges of my eyes.
As I peer into the narrow entrance it leads deeper and deeper into the earth, opening up into some kind of underground enclosure. The feeling is that this cave chamber I’ve stumbled upon is some kind of interdimensional safe haven for woodland creatures - a place predators cannot reach.
A tiny tuft of movement catches my eye… white black and golden orange - calico colors… maybe 50 feet down…
“HEIDI??” I called for her. The little tuft of color disappeared.
There is a strong visceral sense that if I go into the ground after her it would be at great personal cost. I hesitate, but only for a moment. I have to go. Minutes later I am deep in the earth cradling a calico cat in my arms. Her face looks a little different and she is smaller than Heidi - but it feels and sounds like her. I begin scrambling back up to the narrow opening. I cannot WAIT to bring her back home and into the arms of my wife.
But when I return above ground the world has gone dark. The sun is long down and the air is chilled. My house is empty and decaying, the windows shuttered. Vines creep up the sides all the way to the roof.
Only then did I realize the price I’d paid to rescue Heidi. The rip in the earth was some kind of time vortex. I’d only been down there for a few minutes.
Fifty years had passed.
I woke up half-panicked, still in that space between waking and dreaming.
I’d been underground for half a lifetime. My children were long grown. My wife was gone.
Coming to my senses and putting the unsettling dream out of mind, I moved on with the new year.
Three months later almost to the day, she woke me up first thing in the morning, breathless to tell me something.
“I just had the most incredible dream. I don’t remember the details, but you found her, you found Heidi - you went somewhere and brought her back to me. It felt so real.”
My own dream came pouring back, and I shared everything I could remember about it.
“But it was - I screwed up somehow. It wasn’t totally her. I got the time wrong. It was like a piece of her, but not HER.”
The next day, the state shut down because of a mysterious disease called coronavirus.
The whole world was in shock now. It had been almost a full year since Heidi’s passing.
The coronavirus had been renamed Covid-19 amidst writhing traumatic change. A ripping of the carpet out from under the feet of collective humanity, goalposts shifting almost every day.
The world felt inverted, as if it had fallen into a parallel dimension and landed upside down. Loved ones were now disease vectors. Nature was off limits. A Daddy Hug had become Death.
On the lighter side, we were headed out to dinner for the first time since restrictions had eased. For some reason, my wife insisted on going to a particular chain restaurant thirty minutes away. Later she would say it was simply because she was craving one of their trademark martinis.
“Inside or outside?” the hostess asked.
“Outside,” in unison. She sat us in the open air at the last table at the end of a fenced in area. We had the entire patio to ourselves.
Midway into the martini she’d been craving for the better part of a year, the conversation turned to Heidi.
“I’ve been praying constantly, asking for some kind of sign, asking for closure. I NEED to get over this. I still wake up almost every night thinking about her. I can’t walk in our woods without remembering that moment. It’s been a YEAR. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m ready to move on.”
That was the moment a tiny tuft of colorful movement just beyond the patio fence caught our attention.
A kitten shyly poked its head around the edge of the fence. Right in the middle of a massive urban development, right next to newly reopened retail shops and a busy eight lane intersection.
A calico kitten.
Staring intently at my wife.
The tiny kitten was living in survival mode, completely feral - we fed her every last scrap of our shrimp appetizer and as much of our entrées as she could handle. She would only come just close enough to devour a few scraps at a time before scurrying back to the periphery. The staff said she had been living there for several weeks but wouldn’t let anyone near her.
She spent dinner with us, then disappeared.
We walked around toward the back of the restaurant, hoping one last time to somehow coax her to come home with us. She was nowhere to be found, but not far from the patio was a small clearing in the midst of several trees with the telltale scraps of nesting.
She had been making her home there in that small grove of trees, in the epicenter of that mixed-use urban development, almost like a strange echo of the clearing where Heidi was buried. And directly over that grove of trees was a storefront sign. A nearly impossible sign.
The next day, September 11th, another heartrending day of collective American trauma, my wife and her friend went back to the restaurant to bring her home.
Three words hit my phone. “We got her.”
Later on in the evening she sent another text:
The kitten has grown into the calico sleeping on the table in front of me now, her tiny lungs pulsing softly.
Back here at the beginning of the end, only now does the curious timing of my wife’s text come into view - the day her heart began to breathe again: 9:11 on 9/11.
Zztzzt! my phone startles the calico awake. “New Beginnings…Again.”
Even after three years, she’s still halfway feral. She ducks deftly under my vain attempt to pet her, and looks at me with self-satisfied supremacy. She can’t be touched, but she dances all around me.
She is not Heidi, but her spark is there.
The spark is always there, awaiting the first breath, just before the beginning of time.
How does it end? I ask of my life. With Music, Life responds.
I pick up the phone and ask it to play me a random song on shuffle, letting Her choose the track.
A song fires up, a nearly impossible song
and I run back into the woods.
What a beautiful piece of writing. Thank you.
Wow! Wonderful writing! "These small coincidences did not hold much comfort. Not while shock, and fear, and grief, and anger were still locked within a well of deep trauma." I think not only do they not hold much comfort but also maybe we can't see them with the trauma? I typically use the word synchronicity over coincidence... and define it as being in synch with the Universe or our higher self. I needed to read this today. After reading your writing and looking back a little, I realized that coincidences have been slowly starting to appear again. Oh, and that song at the end... tears flowed so there was a nice little release, and coincidence. Thank you!