Yesterday, September 23, I happened to see a bright blue scooter with the license plate MDY-0098. I thought that MDY-00 was the best way of encoding the word moody in the ABC-1234 format (keeping in mind that there are no Os on license plates, only zeroes), and this combined with the color of the scooter made me think of the Moody Blues -- the very first band I got into as a teenager. The remainder of the plate number was 98, and I was pretty sure that in '98 the Moody Blues were in Italy, recording their album Strange Times. This was released in 1999, during a time when I had no access to secular music, but buying it was almost the first thing I did after returning to secular life in 2000. It served as my main soundtrack during that in-between time, after my mission and before entering the linguistics program at Ohio State. I used to play it in the car on my many drives from Kirtland out to Lake Erie to wander around the saltless, surfless beaches, meditate, and compose not-very-good verses on the metaphysical significance of erosion.
The cover of Strange Times shows the Earth inside what looks like a transparent snail or ammonite shell, on a beach.
Anagrams were very much my stock in trade at that time in my life (almost as much as synchronicities are now), and of course I had subjected the Moody Blues to the treatment. Their band name yielded such pleasing anagrams as The Bloody Muse and Embody the Soul. As for this album, Strange Times is an anagram of Granite Stems -- i.e., crinoid fossils, complementing the possible ammonite fossil on the cover.
Running into a license plate that evoked Strange Times was a bit of a sync because just two days previous (September 21), in my Book of Mormon post "Lehi, Nephi, and the pillar of fire that 'dwelt upon a rock,'" I had revisited my 2022 post "Snail on shingles," about a remote-viewing image of an enormous snail shell on a shingled roof. At the end of the post, I note a sync with the Mock Turtle's Song from Alice in Wonderland, which mentions a "snail . . . on the shingle" -- meaning of course not roofing shingles but pebbles on the seashore.
On September 22, one day after revisiting "Snail on shingles" and one day before the Strange Times sync, I received an email from a correspondent who always emails me about synchronicities related to the number 555. This time it was about a rock shop where most of the items had been labeled "555." He sent me several photos of these items, but the one that got my attention -- and the only one I mentioned in my reply -- was a rock with fossils of Orthoceras, a primitive genus of ammonites.
Though the shell on the Strange Times cover has the familiar shape of a snail shell, the rough edge at its mouth makes it look more like a fossil, suggesting that in fact it is an ammonite. I suppose the word Plates is also a sync with the Book of Mormon context in which I revisited my remote-viewed snail shell. Come to think of it, Orthoceras is "straight horn," a standard iconographic attribute of the Angel Moroni.
That was all yesterday, and I didn't think it quite synchy enough to be worth posting.
Today (September 24), I unexpectedly had an hour to kill while away from home, so I camped at a coffee shop and read Joshua Cutchin's Ecology of Souls -- to which I have recently returned after taking a break to read all eight volumes of Daymon Smith's Cultural History of the Book of Mormon.
Almost all of the background music they were playing in the coffee shop was unfamiliar to me. As soon as I sat down, a song started which repeated "Time to wake up, time to wake up" an inordinate number of times. Given the recent syncs related to "Wake Up Time" by Tom Petty, this got my attention. I looked it up on my phone and found that it was a song by the band Cacti, called -- no points for guessing! -- "Time to Wake Up."
"Wake Up Time," as you will know if you've read the linked post above, was connected by William Wright with a dream he had about a man who called himself El-Anor ("sun-star"), and who Mr. Wright thought represented simultaneously a man and a stone. Just as the song "Time to Wake Up" was ending, I read this in Ecology of Souls:
One informant living in Belize told Ardy Sixkiller Clarke that he met the "stone woman" of Mayan legend . . . describing her as "magnificent," "beautiful," "glow[ing] like a star," . . . .
A stone woman like a star is an obvious sync with the stone man who called himself Sun-Star. Note also that yesterday I posted "Who were the 13 luminous beings Lehi saw in his Jerusalem vision?" -- about a vision of one whose "luster was above that of the sun at noon-day" and "twelve others" whose "brightness did exceed that of the stars in the firmament." The popular Mormon imagination associates the Book of Mormon peoples with the Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations.
(Incidentally, in writing my post on the 13 luminous beings, I considered, but did not end up committing to writing, the possibility that the brightest being was the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is traditionally depicted with a crown of twelve stars.)
Some minutes later, I read in Ecology of Souls a long quotation from Suzy Hansen, about "the incarnation process":
The familiar soul, the blue ball of light, would accompany me in this life, as would two others from the group of souls present . . . . We would all become part of something together, but the blue soul is the one I have had a long connection with . . . .
The incarnating soul is depicted as a "blue ball of light." Just yesterday I had been remembering my old anagram habit: The Moody Blues = Embody the Soul. Furthermore, the cover of Strange Times depicts a literal blue ball, encased in rough shell as if it were a soul incarnate in crude matter.
Just then, another unfamiliar song came on in the coffee shop. The only lyrics I could make out were the repeated line "Would you turn to stone?" This syncs with the ammonite fossils, the "stone woman," and the man who was also a stone, so I tried to look it up. I had no luck finding the song itself. The only thing that came up was a song called "Losing My Shit" by a band called Breakfast In Silence. Here are the lyrics in full:
Feel a little crazy like I wanna shave my headbut their music makes me wanna grow out my hair againDo I have much to lose?I just want my head to cut it out.Will you turn to stone if I put another hole in my head?Got a Medusa last week --Will you care if I still can't get out of bed?I'm so moody, and I forget a lot of shit,I'm so moody, and I forget a lot of shit.
I'm so moody -- you've got to be kidding me! Scrolling down their bandcamp page just now, I see that Breakfast In Silence is based in Salt Lake City, which syncs with the general "Mormon" theme (Ammonite is another Book of Mormon word, by the way) and with my specific mention earlier in this post of the saltlessness of Lake Erie.
I suppose it's also worth mentioning that I shaved my head today (as I do about once a week), and that I used to be called Tom Petty in college because my long blond hair made me look like him.
15 comments:
Just after posting this, I began reading Mike Clelland’s novel The Unseen. In the first chapter, the artist protagonist describes a painting of his which has just sold for a million dollars: “The image was of a thin, scruffy tree with a blue ball of light centered in the branches.”
Kindle informs me that three other readers have highlighted the passage quoted, about the blue ball of light.
The painting is called “The Dream,” and he painted it while high on peyote — cf. “Time To Wake Up” by the Cacti.
After reading this, scrolling back up, the cover image for the Moodg Blues made me remember that the talmudic rabbis claim that the blue for the blue fringes was made from the blood of an extinct sea snail, and this claim makes the Karaites a little moody.
There is — I suppose it was inevitable — a band called the Moody Jews.
Yesterday I was briefly at an urgent care and in the waiting room the Disney movie "Brave" was playing. We saw the part where the Scottish princess named Merida ends up at a henge of old black stones and then follows a trail of blue balls of light to eventually meet a witch. As far as I can tell, the name Merida has no basis in Scottish lore but fans seem to connect it with the name of the Spanish town Mérida. It was settled by veterans of Augustus' army and originally named in Latin Emerita Augusta. It jumped out at me that the Mexican city of the same name is not too far from Belize.
Also, you would have rejected this potential anagram in 2000, but perhaps not today because of the Australian cartoon: The Bluey Moods.
Merida -- Spanish -- anagrams -- cue Beavis & Butt-Head laugh!
Merida is also the name of a Taiwanese bicycle manufacturer whose head office is less than 10 miles from my home.
By the way, I hope all is well with you and yours, and that you were at an urgent care for some other reason.
William,
I found this information interesting given that in etymology the word 'wake' meaning :
"track left by a moving ship," 1540s, perhaps from Middle Low German or Middle Dutch wake "hole in the ice," from Old Norse vök, vaka "hole in the ice," from Proto-Germanic *wakwo. The sense perhaps evolved via "track made by a vessel through ice." Perhaps the English word is directly from Scandinavian. Figurative use (such as in the wake of "following close behind") is recorded from 1806.
My perspective:
Maybe our 'tracks', made by our physical body ( i.e. vessel) are the lessons learned and taught, ( the good the bad and the ugly) which our Soul has accumulated throughout all of our incarnations.
I find the reference to wake: "track make by a vessel through ice" interesting because
obviously nothing grows in ice.
The more tracks we make the more knowledge we accumulated as it is gathering knowledge that
is always the Soul's quest each incarnation because (and IMHO ) knowledge raises our frequency/vibration which is how the Soul evolves.
I believe that the synchronicities serve as wake-up calls, to show us that we are on the right track to our destination.
IMO, the goal of all journeys is to get to a destination i.e. come to a conclusion i.e. solve a puzzle.
Puzzle pieces (synchronicities, weird experiences, dreams etc. ) scattered everywhere in a box creates chaos.
IMO, when we solve our puzzle and form our truth (i.e. perspective, theory, aka KNOWING )
we find balance.
Solve your puzzle....
@Wm Huh huh huh that reference did get me chuckling out loud.
Thank you! The same young household member got two stitches that day after a glasses-breaking fall, and then got a finger pretty well smashed in the hinge end of a door last night! We are well enough but looking for a respite from injuries, including accidental ones.
Today, just a few days after joking about “Merida” as a possible anagram, I passed someone wearing a T-shirt that said “MAREDI” in big letters. Under that was a picture of a dachshund, and under the picture, in smaller letters, “Mercredi,” the French for Wednesday, which I guess makes for a second sync with my Spanish anagram comment, since “Miercoles” (Wednesday) is a common minced oath for “mierda” (shit), analogous to saying “Oh, shoot!” in English.
Another anagram would be “I dream.”
One of the tracks on Strange Times is “Words You Say,” with the repeated refrain “I don’t want to wake up now.”
This looks a lot like the shirt I saw:
https://rrrose.shoplineapp.com/products/mardi-mercredi-t-shirt-ddjanji-ivory
I could swear it said “MAREDI,” but apparently not. Or, this being Taiwan, it’s possible that what I saw was a mutant knockoff of the Korean original.
In slow on the uptake, but just connected it to Zelda Tears of the Kingdom which I’ve been playing briefly almost daily lately.
There is an underground area called the Depths and you can collect glowing blue balls which are literally souls. Quite often better ones are positioned at the top of these underground trees (called Grand Poes) so it sort of evokes the Gondor image. You bring them to creepy looking Bargainer statues for various rewards.
…
They claim that Poes are "spirits that ought to return to the afterlife. They are pitiful beings who have lost their way home and wander this land." and that [by bringing them to the statues] they merely return "all Poes to the afterlife without prejudice."
Sources say 1,500 poes are required to receive all the rewards, which is of course 3x 500, or 10 reciting of the 150 psalms, or all 150 rosary beads in the 3 x 5 for format for the mysteries, heh.
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