“Sometimes you find the universe has a different plan.” These words give me pause, as I transfer pieces of cut melon to my plate at the breakfast buffet at the Omega Institute, where I am leading a workshop this weekend. The hood over the long buffet table makes it hard to see the speaker’s face. I drop down a little, trying not to be obvious, and see a young woman wearing a rainbow-striped watch cap. I wonder if she’ll say more to her companion. I am not disappointed.
She goes on, ?”The things that change my life come in at me from the side, when I think I’m doing something else.”
These are the first words of human speech I have heard today, and they seem to me to contain an amazing lesson, one I’ll want to remember and carry with me. I recall that at the close of my opening workshop session, the previous night, I gave my group the assignment of tagging the first unusual or striking thing that caught their attention – between then and the session I’ll open this morning – as a possible message from the universe.
The ancient history professor who still lives in me remembers that the Greeks thought that one of the most reliable oracles was a chance phrase, coming out of silence or a field of undifferentiated babble, or overheard in a stranger’s conversation. They called this a kledon, which means a “report” or a “rumor.”
Hermes, the messenger of the gods, was always suspected of being involved in incidents of this kind. When silence falls amidst a company, the first words to be spoken were examined as a possible hermeion – an act of Hermes, the god who operates through synchronicity. At the marketplace oracle at Pharai, after a seeker whispered a question to a statue of the god, he was instructed to walk back to the gate of the walled market with his hands over his ears, and then – when he freed his hearing – to accept the firsts sounds that came to him as a direct message from the god.
Glad to get a pretty rich message about life at the breakfast buffet, along with some really good organic peanut butter.
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