Synchronicities

London House, Mecklenburgh Square WCN

For the last few months, people from my past have been popping up out of the woodwork.  This, I suppose, is one benefit of the growing importance of social media.  People you haven’t thought about for a while but mattered a lot to you once suddenly appear in the form of an email query—are you the Béa who lived in…???—the email asks, and suddenly you are catapulted to the distant past and you find yourself remembering faces and names that had just yesterday seemed an almost forgotten memory.

In my case, almost all of the emails are linked to my years spent as a graduate student in London, England.  I made so many wonderful friends there and became acquainted with some of the most interesting people I have ever met. It is astounding to see what has become of them now—one a counter-terrorism expert in India, another a high-ranking expert on the Middle East in Washington, another has tea daily in the once office of one of my heroes, Joseph Campbell.   Then there is the very dynamic German businessman who I remembered because he had the most beautiful name I’ve ever heard and the vibrant philosopher from Tasmania who once fell in love with a character in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and locked himself in his room for a weekend to mourn her death—and who today continues being the unabashed, life- affirming romantic he always was.

The appearance of so many of these people at the same time has led me to find others from those days following the threads of my past in order to understand something about where I now stand.  As I do not believe in coincidences but synchronicities, I began to ask myself—why now?  Why are the memories tumbling back and why are so many showing up to ask me for their yearbook (I was the editor of the London House Annual back then)?

Reflecting on these synchronicities I realized that the one thing that united my later years in London and where I find myself now is that in both cases I was fighting the strong inner urge that has accompanied me all of my life which is to write—not a blog nor the non-fiction book I am working on now, but the novels and stories that have been entertaining me since I began conceiving of them at the age of ten.   

During my London days, I fought this inner longing by telling myself I was destined for academia and devoting myself sternly to my books.  All too often, though, I would escape from my residence room and end up at the University of London library reading the short stories that appeared in the New Yorker or Granta.  Still, this seemed preferable to facing up to the hard work of not only writing but publishing a novel.  Eventually I had a complete melt down.  This was towards the end of my stay in London when I found myself without the energy to pick up any book or do much of anything.   It was as if all my inner lights had been turned off and I could not muster the desire nor the will to even get out of bed. I tumbled into a mild depression then that made me realize my days in London were over.

I returned to Canada, started writing and eventually published my first and second novels.  The story did not end there however.  Like all stories, this one meandered across some unforeseen valleys and paths until I arrived at a place where the inner stories changed.  Radically.  Where once everything seemed soaked in the patina of my Spanish past, those stories and characters eventually stopped speaking to me.   Instead, new characters and a new style emerged—one that seemed completely foreign but also very exciting to me.

A new path demands new beginnings.   I eventually wrote the new novel but–despairing that any editor or agent would ever accept it—decided to pack it away, to once again abandon the storytelling and devote myself to the non-fiction world.  The inner figures, though, would have none of that and kept me awake at nights and pestered me as I drove about tending to the more mundane aspects of life.  I quieted them firmly, telling myself that the novel-writing was over and that I was now on a new path with the Sophia Cycles and the other kinds of books that lay somewhere inside.

And then the emails arrived—not one but two, three and then four.   The memories arrived with them and I began to wonder about this person and that.   Along with the memories, the same conflicts that had visited me in London came back to haunt me now.  This way or that?  This path or the other?

Finally, the synchronicities became so surreal, they made me laugh.  It was not this way or that; not this path or the other. It was the both/and answer that you find with maturity—the one Carl Jung was always going on about.

I took out my new novel the other day out of its box underneath my writing table.   Unsurprisingly, the story is set in London.

Now the hard work begins to chart a new professional course and a new life.  In the meantime, I continue to enjoy receiving news from all over the world and learning about the fates of those who touched me so deeply back during those glorious days in England.

And the characters keep talking and the settings keep fashioning themselves out of tidbits and the stories keep weaving themselves into true narratives.

I think of Rumi then….I want burning he said and the burning is that connection to the inner fire, the one that merges and dissolves everything at the same time and which sets the world alight.  In writing the stories, the burning begins and life seems fully experienced and fully lived.

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