Are all coincidences just random events? Are they sometimes happenings with connections that go well beyond those isolated occurrences? My stance as forcefully stated in my young adult novel, Sliding Beneath the Surface, is that the events of our lives are tightly linked to each other in ways we will never understand.
Every once in a while though, those linkages are so strong that they stand out like a road map. Here is an example.
I live in Florida with my wife Barbara and we have more than our share of spiders. The picture of one you see here came from my daughter Nicole Dillon’s photo gallery. Beautiful specimen, if you like such creatures.
Of course, these spiders sometimes decide to join us inside our home and they can be fairly large. They are definitely unwanted guests. Even so, our response is to try and capture them, if possible, and give them another chance, outside.
Over the years we’ve gotten pretty adept at placing a drinking glass over each intruder, slipping a piece of cardboard under the glass, and then carrying glass, cardboard and spider out of the house.
One day we had a particularly large, hairy specimen crawl from behind a picture on the family room wall. Barb declined to capture it and in no uncertain terms delegated the job to me. Dutiful husband that I am, the task was quickly accomplished. Once outside the front door of our house, I decided to release our unwanted guest on top of a large plant Barb keeps there.
I felt pretty good as I dumped the little critter on all that greenery, saving his life and all. Wishing him a long and happy existence, I turned to go back into the house when the plant started shaking. No spider could cause all that commotion.
The shaking stopped and when I bent down to inspect the plant more closely, I saw a very large lizard looking up at me with the spider in his mouth. In just a few gulps, the lizard downed the spider. So much for my intervention in trying to save the life of our hairy house guest, right?
Coincidence? Fate? Destiny? It truly seemed that no matter what I did, my poor little old spider was not long for this world. The exact timing and the location of the critter’s release almost seemed choreographed to end the spider’s life and provide a meal for the lizard.
Beyond clearly pointing out to me the connectivity of all things, that sliver of life also dramatically showed me how little our human plans matter when other patterns of existence lurk just around the corner.
What do you think?
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If you are truly interested in paranormal phenomena, you might be interested in read my book, Carl Jung, Hauntings, and Paranormal Coincidences. You can find it in most online bookstores. Listed below, however, are direct book links to some of the larger retail outlets in the English-speaking world:
Amazon.com, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK, Amazon India, Amazon Australia, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Millon.
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