Floating Orbs, Synchronicity

I just bought a small piece of grown-up art. It's the one in the lower right hand corner with the red dot on it that means Sold. I was astonished when I saw these pieces because the image of floating orbs of light, central to all of these, is also central to the biography I'm working on, and the novel which will follow.

These prints were made by my friend and office partner Carrie Knowles. I watched her putting up this series for an open-to-the-public show on Sunday, November 19, 1-5 p.m.
A couple of years ago, sitting at lunch chatting with a reiki teacher, I saw a small ball of light rise from the top of her head, zigzag upward, and vanish a few inches from the ceiling. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. And at the same time it felt perfectly ordinary.

But this "ordinary" event was a big deal. (I think I've written about it before on this blog.) It became the seed for a novel I began.

Weeks into the novel, I felt seized by the need to find out more about a painter I'd heard of in my hometown in my youth.

I tend to FOLLOW THESE URGES WHEN THEY COME. So I did a bit of research.

I struck pay dirt on my second or third dig into archives. In an art library at UNC, I found a bit of her journal, in which she'd written a note that people sometimes see a light over her head.

That was my eureka moment. It was clear to me that I had to write both books, and the biography was what I wanted to do first.

When I saw these floating lights go up in the room next door, it was just as obvious that I needed one of them for my room, for a book cover, for a talisman. It felt like a good celebration of the ongoing projects, and of the good results from following mysterious urges.

If you're in Raleigh and loose on November 19, stop by and see this collection. My personal floating orb will be there, with its red dot, through the end of that afternoon.

Yes, You Can!

Around the corner from my office, a church sits up on wood blocks. A bold-thinking downtown developer, Greg Hatem, had it scooped up from its old site and moved to what was a parking lot.

A lot of people might think that a church building stays where it's planted for as long as it exists. And the same with parking lots.

This guy wasn't stopped by that kind of silly assumption. Now he's spiffing the place up to rent, and it's a lovely addition to my leafy old-fashioned neighborhood.

I so admire this move: TO SIMPLY DISCARD THE IDEA THAT SOMETHING CAN'T HAPPEN. The world gets much richer if we step right through the conventional wisdom. In fact, a lot of improbable and amazing things can happen with perseverance, imagination, and looking past the frozen ideas of what's possible.

In it most radical definition, a church embodies a sky's-the-limit view.