The White Saint Valentine, pi, 11, and the bees of Thérèse

After the "Wreck of the Titan" sync in Whitley Strieber's interview with Rob and Trish MacGregor, I downloaded and started reading one of several book the MacGregors have written on synchronicity, 2010's The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, part of the sync awakening of 2009-2010.

Yesterday afternoon, I was reading the MacGregors' book in a café and got to the part where they talk about syncs involving seeing the same number again and again. They mentioned that 11, 11:11, 111, and other numbers of that type are a particularly prevalent theme for this sort of "cluster sync." The moment I read that, I noticed that the time was 3:14, and I had a very strong impression that that number, 314, was about to become a focus of synchronicity for me that day.

My first thought regarding 314 was the date March 14, which is the day before my birthday ("Is not tomorrow, boy, the Ides of March?") and is observed in Taiwan as "White Valentine's Day." I recast this in my mind as "the Feast of the White Saint Valentine" and began imagining what a saint of that description would have looked like. The common or garden St. Valentine was himself a White man, so someone distinguished from him as the White Saint Valentine must have been an even whiter shade of pale.

A football game was playing on the TV in the café, and the score was Steelers 3, Browns 7. Would the Browns score another 7 points, bringing the score to 3-14? I watched the game for a while, until the Steelers scored again and made the anticipated number impossible, though 3-14 did appear on the field a couple of times when the Steelers players with those respective jersey numbers happened to be next to each other. It began to snow heavily on the football field, reinforcing the "white" theme.

I left the café and walked a few blocks to a used bookstore. On my way, I passed this scooter parked on the sidewalk:

The above photo was taken at 3:30, just 16 minutes after my strong hunch that I'd start seeing 314 syncs. The numerals are written in white, too. Four minutes later, I passed a drugstore with this banner hung out in front of it:

Lots of repetitions of the numeral 1, just as I had been reading about when I had the 314 hunch. It's a promotion for November 11, which retailers have been trying to establish as Singles' Day, when you're supposed to buy gifts for yourself. It's illustrated with a whiter-than-White person, just like our imaginary saint.

As I continued walking, a poem randomly popped into my head: Saint Thérèse's bee poem, which I had translated into English back in May. I recited it in my mind as I walked:

See the little insect which is

Gathering its daily riches

In the morning hour.

Joyful, it the petals waketh,

Enters and the honey taketh,

Flies to the next flow'r.

Be thou, too, a bold collector,

Taking love in place of nectar,

All that thou canst hold.

Gather thou of all that pleases,

Off'ring up the whole to Jesus,

Little bee of gold!

At the bookstore, two books caught my eye. One was a book about Lenormand cartomancy, which I flipped through a bit. I noticed that in the Lenormand system, the Six of Hearts represents Stars. This made me think of the Rider-Waite Six of Cups (Cups being the Italian equivalent of the Anglo-French suit of Hearts), which features white star-shaped flowers. About a week ago, I had done a read for the next two months, which had indicated that the Six of Cups was a sign I should be on the lookout for.

This mental image of the Six of Cups, with the children gathering love and joy from flowers, like Thérèse's little golden bee, seemed to harmonize with the poem I had just been reciting to myself.

The other book that caught my eye was a novel by Lidia Yuknavitch called The Book of Joan, which looked to be a sci-fi reworking of the story of Joan of Arc. Joan always gets my attention, of course, and this was another link to the poem by Thérèse, who had a special devotion to Joan and wrote and starred in a play about her. (According to the Internet, the photos of Thérèse playing Joan are “the only known photographs of a canonized saint cosplaying as another saint.”)

I picked up The Book of Joan and, by chance, opened up to page 11. The first words on the page were, "See? This is pi." Pi, of course, is 3.14 -- the number that had attracted my attention as I was reading about syncs involving the number 11.

Recall that my first association with 314 had not been pi but rather the idea of a White Saint Valentine, who must have been whiter even than an ordinary White person. Now look what else is on that page, the page that begins with pi and ends with 11:

What is beyond whiteness? Will we become translucent, next? No one on Earth was ever literally white. But that construct kept race and class wars and myths alive. Up here we are truly, dully white. Like the albumen of an egg.

I'm not sure if the narrator is the "Joan" character or not, but if so we even have a whiter-than-White saint.

When I got home, I had a random craving for ice water with honey in it, which is not at all the sort of thing I normally drink. When I found the honey in a kitchen cabinet, the illustration on the bottle really caught my eye:

The flowers are white and shaped like five-pointed stars, exactly like those on the Six of Cups. There are three open flowers and three buds, for a total of six -- again the same number as on the Six of Cups. The position of the two bees mirrors that of the two children on the card. The honey label has a black triangle with a red circle at its base, while on the card the boy's red hood is right under the triangle-shaped roof of a building. I had already connected the Six of Cups with Thérèse's poem about a bee, and now here was a picture of actual bees closely paralleling the Six of Cups.

To top it all off, as I was writing this post I decided to look up Saint Valentine himself. He is, among other things, the patron of beekeepers.