Sometimes it is quite impossible to avoid sensing an intelligence – or multiple intelligences – at work in the riffs of synchronicity. Here’s another personal example, from a weekend workshop at a wilderness center in the Northeast. 

In the morning discussions, two themes came up that stayed with me as I took a walk across a meadow in bright sunshine during the break. One was the Egyptian god-name Ra. The other was the fact that “honeybee” – Melissa in Greek, Deborah in Hebrew – was an ancient name for a priestess.

Now I am strolling in the sunshine in a rural location where there is no signage – no words of any kind – in sight in any direction. And across the field I see two letters more than a foot high, daubed in white paint on some weathered gray wood. The two letters are “RA”. I quicken my stride until I am running across the field, eager to see what the words are painted on. And I find that they have been painted on an old beekeeper’s box, with the remains of honeycombs still inside.

It was hard to believe that this synchronistic discovery had not been staged – but not by anyone with conscious intent that day – because the paint on the box was old. I could all but hear the laughter of a merry spirit ringing out from the other side of the obvious.

The incident led me to do some research and I found that, in an Egyptian myth, honeybees are the tears of Ra.

The sighting of Ra’s bee-box set something buzzing. The next weekend, at another site, a woman previously unknown to me told me that she found my dream books “quite Egyptian”, explained that she had been born inEgypt, and urged me to lead a group on a dream odyssey to that country. I said I would think about it. As I walked away, a man who could not possibly have heard our conversation rose from the far side of the room. A careful, intellectual Princeton psychologist, he apologized profusely for “needing” to tell me something that had just come to him.

“I don’t know what it means and I don’t want to sound like one of those people who come up and say, ‘I’ve got a message for you.’”

“It’s really okay,” I encouraged him. “Just give me the message.”

“I was told to tell you that you have the blessing of Ra.”

I heard it again, that laughter off-stage, beyond the curtain of the obvious.