Evolver Synchronicity Stories

I've heard a lot about synchronicity in people's journeys onto Evolver. I was thinking about mine, and there are a few pretty obvious synchronicities in it!

First, I saw Daniel Pinchbeck when he was a guest on the Colbert Report in 2006 to promote 2012: The Return of Zuetzalcoatl. I was just starting to get more seriously open to alternative forms of spirituality after I had made a break with my seven-year involvement with Mormonism and then went through a fallout period of materialist agnosticism. When I saw Daniel on the show something was striking to me--I felt a strong electric click with what he was saying. My long-lost interest in the Mayans (I wanted to grow up to be an Indiana Jones-style archaeologist) was rekindled. I felt like I had a weird moment of certainty that Quetzalcoatl, the ancient Mayan deity, was or pertained to something real, and that so did the Mayan calendar and prophecy. A strange certainty for someone only recently back to spirituality. And I was impressed by the calmness-yet-excitedness Daniel seemed to have about it.

Not long after, I started at Tulane University, and through an odd combination of factors I was never able to get any of Daniel's books--too swamped with curricular reading, the library didn't have the book, the book was checked out, the book was only available in Spanish. But I did read some significant classics like the The Tao Te Ching, The Gospel of Thomas, The Hero With a Thousand Faces and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. They all helped to move me in the spiritual direction I was more and more drawn to.

I happened to find a copy of On the Road at a time when I was feeling really unfulfilled by university life, which spurred me on a year of vagabond travel around the country. One of the most important things about my travels, I've realized, were the chance people, events and circumstances that set me subtly toward the paths of plant medicine and shamanism: an organic gardener girlfriend I met through couchsurfing, an herbalist gathering and a gathering with a bunch of shamanic transwomen, a WWOOF stay on a medicinal herb farm through which I met an herbalist sweetheart.

Because I also experienced what I felt at the time were poverty, deprivation, and indentured servitude to exacting farmers, I returned to school at Tulane. This is where it gets a little more weird. I switched majors to English with a focus on Creative Writing, and my faculty adviser, writing teacher, and generally the professor I had the closest relationship with was Tom Beller, who happened to be co-founder-and-editor of Open City, a small NYC-based independent publisher, with none other than Daniel Pinchbeck.

That year, aside from working on my writing, was marked by my getting even more jaded with higher education and generally being an angry radical. During spring break I took a much-needed trip with my herbalist girl to Tucson. Sitting with the Sonoran desert, something spoke to me from the peacefulness and quietness. It told me I needed to calm down and find peace, and that I wasn't going to do that in school, and probably not living in a city. Though I was persuaded by a professor to finish out the school year (which, let it be a lesson in answering your calls in the Now, led to a badly broken knee and months on crutches), when it ended I graduated myself to dropout and moved to Cape Cod with my herbalist girl.

For more than a year and a half, while I couldn't get anywhere financially (and I complained about it a lot), I was almost constantly nurtured in the direction of plant medicine and shamanism: through my surroundings--the outer cape with all its woods, dunes, marshes and tidal flats, animals and plants, through the influence of my herbalist girl, and through the people who showed up in my life, many of them farther along in those paths than me. And through books: from the cape's excellent library system I finally got Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head, which introduced me to psychedelic shamanism, and I found or was given books by Carlos Castaneda, Manuel Cordova-Rios and Dale Pendell. Looking up more about Daniel online I found Reality Sandwich and Evolver, and now here I am! And it's great; being on Evolver feels kinda like coming home. I'm excited for the things we're doing and the things we will do!

What about all of you? Does anyone else have good Evolver synchronicity stories?