I recently offered a simple and fun way to grow awareness of what rhymes in a day. It goes like this: choose a finite interval of time (a lunch break, for example, or the evening commute, or half an hour in the woods) and notice and record three things that enter your field of perception during this period.
If you have a question or theme on your mind, you may find that the three things you observe provide guidance, even a very direct message. But this game is less about putting your question to the world than about letting the world speak to you. It’s about developing pattern recognition and field perception.
As you go on playing the game, you’ll grow your self-awareness in interesting ways. For example, you’ll become more aware of which are your primary senses. If you find that (like me) you are highly visual, you may want to push yourself to do more with less active or dormant senses, making it your game to smell what is around you.
Most important, you’ll enhance your ability to play witness to your everyday self. The ability to observe yourself from a witness perspective and notice, where you place your attention, and how you choose what you’ll focus on in a day is crucial to the art of conscious living.
My good friend Wanda Burch has just shared a marvelous example of playing the Game of Three – or rather, of the world playing it with her – from her drive home from meetings earlier this week. On this occasion, the three things were followed by a reward:
1.
At the start of her drive, Wanda noticed that the license plate on the car in front of her contained the last four digits of the telephone number of the place where she worked for many years and from which she recently retired.
2.
After pausing in her journey to do some Christmas shopping, she found herself behind a car whose license plate contained the full seven digits of her home telephone number. This felt very personal.
3.
Traffic brought her to a stop at Red Fox Drive. Now she began to sense that foxy, reality-shifting energy at play. The next street was Birch Drive, echoing her surname.
Reward
When she parked her car, she found a stack of pennies right beside her door. The pennies were balanced on a dime that in turn was balanced on a quarter. Wanda comments, “I’m not sure of all the messages from the universe, but it all felt very good.”
Let’s notice that living by synchronicity isn’t merely about getting messages. It is about growing the poetic consciousness that allows us to taste and touch what rhymes and resonates in the world we inhabit, and to notice how the world-behind-the-world reveals itself by fluttering the veils of our consensual reality.
Postcript: NOTHING SPECIAL (Three Things from a Morning Walk)
After posting the little article above, I walk my two dogs in a neighborhood park and note three things perceived with different senses:
1
Kinesthetically, I have to balance the very different pull of the two dogs on their leashes. One is a young puppy of limitless energy who wants to bound off in all directions; the other is very elderly, slow-moving, and somewhat gaga, needing encouragement to keep up. I can hardly miss the life metaphor in this situation.
2
Through other urban noise – of traffic, of street sweepers – I hear, from all directions, the sounds of construction and renovation. Not unpleasant, at all. This echoes my own work of editing and shaping texts today.
3
As a cold hard rain starts to fall, I see the city people form tribes. The largest is the Umbrella People, followed by the People of the Hood, then the Hat People (my bunch) and – smallest in number – the Barehead Mob.
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