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in issue twelve:
Synchronicity
Scintillations
The Phone Call
Finding Feathers
Did God Land Me
   This Waitress Gig?
Letting Good Happen
Continuous
   Synchronicity
Unexpected Inspiration
Rubber Band Fairy
Bird on My Shoulder
Listen To Your Body
Letters to
   My Younger Self
Books That Changed
   My Life
Moody Girl

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Ally Moll: Rock My World
Forrest Norvell:
Traces
Egghead Party Time
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space
Locke Berkebile:
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NY Subway
Produce District

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future issues
Issue 13: Danger
Issue 14: Home
Issue 15: Transitions

previous issues

Two years ago I moved from a sleepless house of musicians in Pacifica to what I was told would be a quieter place overlooking the ocean in Montara, California. After I finished loading the moving truck, I took a long breath, put the truck in park, and went back in for one last look around the house before I left.

I was oddly drawn to something peeking out from under the 1890s-era workbench in the garage. I reached down and picked up an old petrified bar of hotel soap and could just make out the “Circus Circus Hotel” logo on it. This triggered fond memories of my grandpa taking us to the Circus Circus family casino in Las Vegas in the ‘60s. After a moment, I carefully placed the soap back under the bench and heaved one more deep sigh before hopping back in the overloaded truck. I was excited to finally be driving south to my new life with high hopes for the new landlord’s promise of quietude, rest, and rejuvenation in Montara.

Rounding the infamous “Devil’s Slide” peninsula of Highway 1, I arrived twenty minutes later at the new house where the landlord handed me the keys. I literally lost my breath when I noticed that, unbelievably, the keys were on a Circus Circus key chain! It felt alive with significance, as if there was something there for me to see if I was just willing to look closer amid so much life change. At first I thought I was just losing it from lack of sleep, then I recalled the bar of soap in Pacifica. Before these two Circus Circus events occurred I hadn’t so much as even thought about that trip to Las Vegas in decades.

My overall feeling that day was one of a surging joy and comforting sense of a layered connectivity to all things. I was elated that I even noticed the meaningful coincidence. There was also something unsettling to me about the two Circus Circus objects showing up that day, but I let the feeling go without mentioning it and went on with moving. Spellbound and amazed as I was about the synchronicity and what it might mean, I must have looked like a wide-eyed deer staring in the headlights as I moved boxes off the truck.

Later that night I decided to write down some thoughts about this “Circus Circus” coincidence and theorize about what it might have meant, below the surface. Did the two seemingly related events represent a symbolic blessing for my new home? Were riches awaiting me at a Vegas poker table? Was my late grandfather trying to tell me something? Or was it simply a case of boring Newtonian causality and was I therefore wasting time pondering the cause-and-effect events of the day with so many boxes to unpack?

In hindsight, the coincidence of the two objects was both about life being so very interconnected between Pacifica and Montara and a loud warning to me. I ended up dragging all my dramatic life baggage with me right around Devil’s Slide. To this day I think the bar of soap and the key chain showed up sequentially for a reason, like Jungian bookends to the move, to make me see something I hadn’t yet realized.

Key chains and bars of hotel soap aren’t typical symbols of alarm and warning but, finding those two objects bearing the same logo along my life’s path that day obviously meant there was much more to be revealed. When I was rudely awakened at 3 a.m. the next morning by an upstairs party, I instantly understood the Circus Circus warning loud and clear, though of course far, far too late. The landlord had lied and horribly misled me about my new upstairs neighbors in order to make his mortgage payment that month. The “quiet, older couple” he mentioned living upstairs turned out to be a vibrant New York couple in their 50s who kept graveyard hours and argued a lot and cackled five nights a week on a creaky hardwood floor. I had actually re-created a worse situation for myself than what I had moved from in Pacifica.

Perhaps partially because my knowledge of synchronicity was admittedly a bit naïve, I didn’t yet know about the positive “helping hand” and negative “danger, danger!” aspects of synchronicity. I had literally moved from one madcap circus to another where the only improvement turned out to be the expensive sweeping Pacific Ocean view.

Although this synchronicity, or “sync” as I now call them, turned out to be warning me of imminent danger, I have noticed since then that for every “warning sync” there are 15 blissful ones, as well. There are syncs I experience every day that reassure me about my life’s position on this planet.

I have paid close heed to the thousands of synchronicities in my life the past two years since that Montara landlord handed me the Circus Circus key chain. The joys, warnings, insights, and sheer hilarity of synchronicity ever since that remarkable day have made, and continue to make, a gigantic impression on and positive difference in my life.

Randy Alberts is a writer, musician, and photographer now living near Bellingham, Washington in the San Juan Islands just south of Vancouver, British Columbia. With gratitude to the synchronicities that led him there, he is currently researching and writing a book about his experiences that will include interviews with experts and everyday people from all cultures about their views on synchronicity. What’s yours? E-mail him at au-dio@pacbell.net