Kronos & Kairos

Orismological Onomatopoeic Overture

The Vocal Tautogram challenge has been such an incredible inspiration, I felt compelled to share more about the process of creating my poem and how, to my surprise, the journey - as much as the result - transcended the words that were quickly filling the blank pages, flooding into my personal life, with alliterations flowering in the middle of conversations and serendipitous events flowing all around me.

"Sifting sand, scavenging serendipitous secrets"

Let us start with a swift note on etymology. I often find that's a good way to start off on the right foot when dealing with words, not unlike sifting through sand, looking for shells, coins, a lost jewel or other precious objects, only to discover how beautiful sand is and that what you were really looking for was actually the perfect grain.

Only when you’ve finally found the supreme speck, the quintessential quantity of quartz, the most sublime and superb sum and size of silica, can you achieve the unimaginable: put it in your favourite hourglass to measure all the time in the universe, or create the best stained glass rose window to witness, worship and welcome the divine, or offer it to lightning to fashion it into a fragment of fulgurite, or mould it into the most memorable microchip!

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour." from Auguries of Innocence, William Blake.

The word synchronicity means "together in time" or "at the same time" and it was introduced by none other than Carl Gustav Jung, to describe separate events that appear to have some kind of shared importance, while lacking a visible connection or cause. In the modern common language, this is expressed by the word coincidence, meaning "two accidents together", which makes sense in its more colloquial and casual connotation. But when this common causality isn't simply due to chance or some social, psychological or cultural shared system, the whole deal becomes an intriguing affair, a conundrum you could say, often pointing at a deeper hint, which many find it irresistible to investigate further.

Synchronicity contains the word chronos, Greek for “time”, which also makes up terms like chronology, chronic, chronicle, and many others. The Greeks imagined Time as a titan, Kronos, father of the Olympic Gods, who was later called Saturn by the Romans. In fact, that is the primary reason why I chose that particular gas giant for the first line, not just because the first two words "Since Saturn" can also be read as "syn-chronos", recalling the title of the poem, "Synchronicity".

It just so happens that Saturn is the only planet in the Solar System whose name starts with the letter S. What a coincidence! It also so happens that I'm presently writing a sci-fi short story, titled "Kairos B4", that involves a spacefaring sentient ship, a time travelling dronoid and a large amount of synchronicity and coincidences. The two artificial protagonists of the story are in a race against time to get from Earth to the gas giant in time for… you guessed it, Saturn’s summer solstice! Coincidence? Perhaps… or perhaps sometimes the threads and fibres of things in our life are entangled in ways that defy the distinction between mind and mundus, wisdom and world, consciousness and cosmos.

Surely, part of it must be coincidental, due to, or at least influenced by, the cultural (back)ground in which all these memetic seeds germinate and grow, bloom and, in turn, make even more seeds. Many of the characters of my story are named after philosophical or scientific concepts that have something to do with time, but other elements of the story (or how the story is being written/writing itself) are less easy to explain, at least to me. For example, the fact that Saturn’s summer solstice is one of the central settings of my story AND only contains words that begin with the letter S was purely serendipitous. As it turns out, this is actually something pretty common for many writers: you can read more about this topic here, here and here. I wish we had more time so I could tell you about what I heard by speaking directly with other writers around me, but for now my personal journey will have to do.

The clever Greeks, as usual, had a word to describe this curious phenomenon of serendipity, and more specifically to refer to anything that felt related to one’s own fate. Interestingly, this word is actually another word for Time. The more popular idiom, which we’ve already seen earlier, is “kronos”, the regular and often cyclical passing of seconds, hours, days, years, and so on and so forth. The rusty repetitive routine, the certain callus of constancy, the source of memory and nostalgia that frequently makes us restless and regretful or even rageful. The other less known expression, on the other hand, refers to a whole different aspect of time, often neglected, which in my opinion is also a symptom of the kind of society we Westerns have built and blindly live in. Though, in spite of this cultural deficiency and historical impoverishment (diminishing in the words of legendary writer and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien), you can still see this phenomenon every day, every time you have a feeling of déjà-vu, when you find yourself in the right place at the right time, when a fortuitous event, a good omen, happens to you. The Greeks called this seemingly divine inner working of the universe "kairos", which means "at the opportune or propitious moment". Kairos is the serendipitous quality that life seems to have when you get what you want when you least expect it but need it most, in a way that fits perfectly with everything else inside and around you. It's the invitation and talent to carpe diem, to seize the day, the most appropriate time to shoot an arrow to hit the target, the perfect window of opportunity to say something that will be the most impactful to your listener. It's Ṛtú, the Vedic Sanskrit word to describe the proper time for a sacrifice or a ceremony, from which the word "ritual" comes from. Kairos also happens to be - not by chance, I assure you - the name of the mothership in my story. Someday soon, I promise you'll hear more about her and her cybernetic child, the temporal traveller B4 (before, get it?).

I think the distinction between kronos and kairos is an important step in understanding Time, and developing instrumental definitions of its different features. Creating definitions is most definitely an art; in fact, there's a whole discipline busy dealing with defining things, called Orismology (Greek for "study of definitions"). When there isn't a proper word to talk about something important, we cannot afford to allow our day-to-day tongue to lack that expression. Labels and languages are already an incarceration act for concepts that are really much deeper and vaster, and in order to escape this "prison of the mind" and evolve better ways to encapsulate, embrace and express such entities and essences, we must craft new words, or use someone else's words, or borrow them from other cultures.

Serendipity in Synchronicity

Coincidences and déjà-vu make us feel important, they give us a taste of magic, as if there was some kind of vortex that makes things spin around our centre of gravity, providing us with the right momentum at the right moment to make us spin even faster! And even though I do confess the egocentric connotation of this self-centred approach, I’m confident that if you look more closely at your life, you’ll find at least one example of what I’m talking about, then you'll know instantaneously that those instants actually connect us with the world at large in wise and wonderful ways. Serendipity, not mere coincidence, is a reality of our daily life. Of course many people take advantage of or even profit from this - usually people from New Age movements like the best-selling author Deepak Chopra and other quantum mystics, gurus and other who-woo figures.

Regardless, no one, not even the smartest, most educated theoretical physicist or philosopher could deny that Time is pretty weird. Really weird actually. In fact, those same physicists and philosophers would be the best people to tell you how weird it is! Some say time is an illusion, nothing but a sensorial mirage emerging from the way our three dimensional brains experience the world. Scientists working on Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity got to a point where they have to come up with (or re-esumate) strange fringe hypothetical concepts, such as Retrocausality or multiple dimensions of time, in order for their theories (or interpretation of theories) to work.

Galileo Galilei was instrumental in removing more abstract or invisible entities such as soul, spirit or the subjective mind from the objective of the scientific investigation and its method, limiting science to what its tools are able to measure and reason about. The sensitivity and speculation on other more unseen realms of experience was left to other sacred or secular fields such as religion or psychology - even though historically, of course, spiritual things were also a concern for scientists and philosophers alike, just like nature and mind were. For example, astrologists (like Galilei himself) originally were concerned with studying and predicting both the mechanics of heavenly bodies and their influences on more human and earthly matters. Alchemists (like Isaac Newton) dealt with psychological and spiritual development as well as complex advanced chemistry, which allowed them to manufacture precursors of nanomaterials in the Middle-ages, reproduce complex natural processes such as petrification, like my ancestor Girolamo Segato did, as well study the possiblity of obtaining gold and silver through chrysopoeia and argyropoeia, all this while perfecting the human body and soul through the magnum opus of the hermetic mystery schools.

Galileo Galilei, of all of them, was the first person to observe Saturn's rings with a telescope! He never managed to convince the so-called spiritual guides of his time to look through the lenses of his instruments, but we will look, and we will do it with spirit!

So, after this absurdly long introduction, let's get back to where we started: the poem! Now you know, "Synchronicity", my first tautogramic experiment, is thus an attempt of injecting some good old spirit back into science, in a way that feels faithful and fact-based rather than fake, forced or farce.

My ode to synchronicity starts in space, as I wanted to begin with a bird’s eye view, far away from more mundane matters. The universe is full of synchronicity: the Moon for example, our biggest natural satellite, is gravitationally locked with the Earth, something called orbital resonance. Because this connection is so mathematically pure (1:1) the Moon always faces our planet with the same side (while its dark side always faces away from the Earth), which is also why its orbit (rotation around us) is practically equal to its rotation (around its axis). Many other celestial objects experience such astrophysical synchronicity, but when it comes to our cosmic neighbourhood that’s not even the full story: even though the Moon is slowly but constantly drifting away from us, it just so happens that at the present moment it is located at the exact distance from us for its apparent size to be nearly identical to the apparent size of the Sun! To put it simply, their silhouettes coincide with one another. Of course, this dimensional equivalence is illusory, but it is what makes the mesmerizing otherworldly spectacle of total solar eclipses possible. Isn't it mind-blowing that this is happening right when our civilization is in the mental and technological conditions to observe and record this curious phenomenon, and transmit it across nations and generations?

In the ancient times, people assigned great significance and spiritual weight to events like lunar and solar eclipses. The latter in particular, were always seen as a bad or good omen, and were usually accompanied by some kind of prophecy. Another astronomical event interpreted as a powerful portent was the supernova. Supernovae have been observed by humans as early as 185 AD by Chinese Astronomers, although some think that a rock carving scene found in Kashmir actually depicts the supernova event HB9, thought to have taken place between 6-7000 years ago.

A supernova, happens when a star “dies”, sheds its outer layers and shoots off all its materials in a cosmic cataclysm, which results in a gigantic shock wave that spans many light-years around it, and turns into a new celestial object, either a neutron star or a black hole. Apart from the amazing science behind these cosmic miracles, a supernova is capable of destroying entire worlds throughout its host galaxy ("spanning sinusoidal starry spirals, seamlessly slaughtering solar systems"), but can also trigger the birth of new stars; they may as well be one of the possible causes of past mass extinctions and as a result of that, the spawning of new species in gigantic biological evolutionary events.

A note on the word superluminal. Super-luminal means “faster than light”. Many scientists think that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in this universe, while many others think that it is indeed possible for some particles - and maybe, one day, even for humans - to reach those speeds. The fact that this word also starts with "S" made me very happy, since many events or phenomena that are synchronous (taking place at the same time) would need some kind of superluminal means of communication in order to synchronize their occurrence. For example, in quantum mechanics particles possess the ability to remain profoundly and intimately correlated even when separated by cosmic distances. That's called "entanglement". And when there are “cosmic distances” between two objects, then you start having complicated “time dilation” and other Relativity-related effects that de-synchronize things that were previously contemporaneous, aka the Andromeda Paradox.

After yet another pindaric parabole up in space, let us find anchor back into the poem. Quiet appropriately, the last verse of the first stanza ("steaming stratospheric satellites") was my bridge to return and find grounding again, by coming back down to Earth and ultimately landing home. The following two paragraphs explore synchronicity in the biological world. Amongst the many natural phenomena explored, one is worth a mention:

“Swarming starlings share synergic speed”

Nothing embodies synchronicity more than a flock of birds in the midst of a “murmuration”.

A murmuration of starlings. National Geographic.

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The quantity (and quality) of coordination required for such a high number of individuals to display such a perfect collective choreography is mind-boggling, to say the least. A group of scientists from Rome, Italy, studied starlings for a long time and discovered that the math needed to describe the way information is transmitted between flocking birds during murmuration, is practically indistinguishable from the equations adopted in the science of superfluids. A superfluid is a state of matter that behaves as a liquid with zero viscosity, in other words a substance that flows with no friction, thought to exist only in really cold gases and in high energy astrophysics such as neutron stars and black holes. But, somehow, birds manage to mimic the almost supernatural speed and efficiency of these materials.

Interestingly, Rome have a long-standing tradition of reading the flight of birds. Dedicated priests called auguries, used to practice Ornithomancy, literally "divination of birds", to predict the future. In particular, allow me to mention a curious technique of interpreting the way chickens ate food: before going to war, Romans would look at the feeding pattern of sacred hens and roosters to decide whether it was a favourable time for them to engage in battle. 

Coincidentally, apart from being a fascinating anthropological detail about my Roman and Etruscan ancestors (I was born in the south of Tuscany, Italy), this anecdot is also meaningful for my above-mentioned sci-fi story: while traveling towards Saturn, the dronoid B4, who often accidentally predicts the future due to his ability to time-travel, also takes care of a pet, the only living being on board. Their "domestic" animal, called Erwin, happens to be a chicken. The reason why I chose a chicken is entirely unrelated to ornithomancy: it's actually a nod to the famous paradox of the chicken and the egg. In the story, B4 keeps Erwin locked away in a secret room of the mothership Kairos, holding her unobserved, in state of quantum superposition, similar to the popular cat in the box dead and alive at the same time, a thought experiment conceived by Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, from which the chicken gets her name. This is only one of MANY serendipitous connections that happened (and keep happening) while writing Kairos B4, bit that's, literally, a story for another time.

"Salmons strenuously swim streams

Seeking source

Spiriting seminal substances."

This is another beautiful natural serendipity, salmon swimming upstreams ("seeking source") to find the same river bed were their eggs hatched: they want to reproduce ("spiriting seminal substances”) in the same place where they were born, which they manage to locate via magnetoreception, a special ability they share with several other animals, including reptiles and birds.

"Snakes shed skin, shapeshifting"

This is a very common symbolism in art and culture in general. The reason why I decided to include them (very much last minute, by the way) isn’t just because of the onomatopoeic abundance of "S"s and similar alliterations in their name, actions and body parts associated with them (slithering, shedding skin, shapeshifting, hissing, scales, etc) but also because of their association with time (death and rebirth, renovation, and cycling cosmogonical models, represented by the snake biting its own tail, the Ouroboros).

Another beautiful synchronicity in nature is the coordination between the moon cycles and the periods of fertility of many animals and plants, studied by the scientific discipline of chronobiology. Of course, this is no coincidence: the moon’s gravitational pull influences tides and living beings alike, and as a consequence of that, the latter developed a biological clock, technically referred to as circalunar (circa, “almost” and lunar, “related to the moon”), that's in perfect synch with our natural satellite. That's why many marine, land or aerial animals lay eggs, hatch from their eggs, reproduce or migrate in accordance with specific phases of the moon.

The not-so-hidden reference to the moon in the poem is to be found in the line “selenic seasonal subjects”. Selene is the name of the ancient Greek goddess and personification of the Moon.

“Strange symbiotic superorganisms

Self-sufficient

Sustaining salutary structures

Serving sophisticated sequestration

Solving Sapiens’ solipsistic simulation.”

This of course refers to the emergent intricacy of different nesting ecosystems that work in perfect synergy to maintain balance in the natural world. Some researchers think that humans themselves, just like many other creatures in nature, are actually superorganisms, or more accurately Holobionts, a sort of walking living ecosystem made by many co-existing and interdependent creatures. Unfortunately, humans are far from being “self-sufficient” and from “sustaining salutary structures”, like most other living beings do, hence the line “solving Sapiens’ solipsistic simulation”, where solipsistic points at our egocentric, egotistic, capitalistic society; a mad scientist-type social experiment, or in other words, a simulation.

A scene from the animated series Rick & Morty. Adult Swim.

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“Shrimps, shellfish, seafloor sponges

Sifting sand

Scavenging serendipitous secrets

Scrambling seafloor sediments

Selecting symmetrical shells

Salty swirling spacetime semblance

Scouting shelter

Safe sojourn.”

If you look close enough for long enough, you'll find the shape of the spiral pretty much everywhere in the world. That's just how space and time flow and fold, from supermassive black holes to subtropical storms, from sunflowers to DNA. This is indeed a recall to the beginning of the poem ("spanning sinusoidal starry spirals" aka, galaxies) but also an invitation to appreciate the omnipresence of this vortex-like morphology at all scales of the universe. And this to me feels very much like a serendipity, with a very potent and meaningful causal force linking all these elements together, very distant from one another, yet intimately connected. Shells, of course, are one of them. They, of course, are not symmetrical (initially the line was “selecting spontaneous symmetry-breaking shells”, which I changed for fear that hyphenated words were not forbidden in the Tautogram challenge). Just like shellfish across the world relentlessly search for (or create their own) shells to use as their home, so we follow the crumbs of this cosmic puzzle on the path towards finally knowing where we come from, where we're going and why we're here.

I also wanted to include the act of sifting through sand because sand carries a strong symbolism connected to dreams (often cradle of serendipitous or even precognitive visions) and to time. When the hourglass is turned and the grains of sand start falling down, that is the time available to us, our opportune moment, our kairos, to do what we must do.

Finally, I wanted the poem to end with a return to the stars and the cosmos, just like the Ouroboros bites its own tail in a neverending cycle. When the sun sets, the stars come out and an invitation is voiced, offering you to sit and lay down, eat supper and enjoy stargazing. The "sidereal symbols" of the last stanza refer to the constellations of the zodiac and other astrological signs, where sidereal indicates something that refers to the fixed stars beyond our planets and Sun.

"Slowly, sunrise starts"

The most serendipitous thing about Life is that, so far, it has never missed a beat, it always comes back, it always begins anew. A mass extinction makes space for new species to grow, every night is followed by a new day, when the mythical scarab of the Egyptians rolls the solar disc out of the Underworld, off the horizon and into the blue sky and all the critters below and above the surface wake up at once, ready to start the cycle all over again.

For a long time people thought that evolution was mostly, if not solely, driven by coincidence (randomness) and competition. Now science recognizes that Life is actually equally defined by coordination and cooperation. That is the essence of synchronicity. Why? In aerospace engineering there is a maneuver called gravitational slingshot, when a spaceship performs a swing-by a larger celestial body to gain thrust without extra expense of fuel, often employed to change direction, thanks to the gravitational energy of the bigger mass. In simple mechanics two pendulum clocks can synchronise by exchanging vibrational power and information if they stand on the same surface. In biology, the right action at the right time, can kickstart new life, thanks to the right convergence of environmental elements and individual intervention. That's perfectly embodied by the precise and complex art of farming, so elaborate that only a few animal species, including us, have mastered it. That's why, before becoming the god of time, Kronos (or Cronus) was actually the mythical patron of harvest, and agriculture as a whole, so deeply intertwined with the natural cycles of the Sun, the Moon and the four seasons.

Originally, the beginning of the tautogram was longer, and included a whole new section made of two extra stanzas:

"Since Saturn’s summer solstice

Silicone-based sentient species

Send superluminal S.O.S. signals

Scouting saviours, seeking shelter.

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Sceptically, S.E.T.I., sneers, scorns, scoffs

Such stranger sirians

Spacefaring Silurian successors.

Sentence: supreme sorrow!

Silly speculation? Stagnant scepticism."

What do you think? Should I have left this section in the final poem or do you agree with me that it's slightly too out there (no cosmic pun intended)? Let me know in the comments below!

The same day I submitted the poem to Vocal, more serendipitous things occured: one an intriguing synchronicity, the other a less interesting coincidence - but they both made it into my Journal of Serendipity… oh yes, I do keep a diary of all the coincidences and strange correlations that happen in my daily life. Guilty.

Here's the entry in the journal:

• April 4 - Atlanta, GE. Last night I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the first time so this morning I read an article about it, in which I learned that the band Genesis invested in the original budget for the film, together with Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I checked Wikipedia, which says that it was actually Jethro Tull, not Genesis. But then, later that night, I talked about the Beatles with some friends - the main argument was that no one ever managed to cover a Beatles song that stuck as much as other covers did. So I mentioned Peter Gabriel's interpretation of Imagine by John Lennon, from the 2006 Olympics in Italy. I played the video for them, which leads us down a rabbit hole of music videos from the '80s, starting with Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel (co-founder and original singer of Genesis) moving on to Speed Demon and Leave Me Alone by Michael Jackson, then Land Of Confusion by Genesis. The connection between all videos was that they all had a hybrid style between live action, claymation and stop motion. The most surprising thing wasn't that we went from Genesis to Michael Jackson to Genesis again by just following the aesthetics of the videos, but rather that in Land of Confusion one of the puppets was a mockery of Michael Jackson. Also, both titles, Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel and Speed Demon by Michael Jackson, start with the letter S, which was interesting since, like I said, this happened on the day I submitted my poem in S to the Vocal tautogram challenge.

• At night, while compiling my recount of writing the tautogram and all the serendipitous coincidences related to it, I found out I had a tick on my right shoulder! My last tick was probably ten years ago, if not more. I woke up my wife (it was late evening) and asked her to help me get the tick out. After getting it out and reading about it, she told me it looked like it was a Lone Star tick, which left me extremely tantalized and puzzled. You see, I wrote about this particular species of tick just last year, in my sci-fi story "Instar - a Declaration of Life", a novella about a lawyer and an astrophysicist attempting to prevent illicit corporate activities to exploit energy and mine resources from planets, stars and black holes, by declaring them living ecosystems and creating new laws to recognize their legal rights. In the story, the astrophysicist's dad, an entomologist, was killed by a disease carried by the Lone Star tick! I had chosen this particular species because of the connection between stars and bugs. This big synchronicity was made even more surreal by another entry in my journal: just a few days ago, Friday March 31, my wife and I drove to the Big Ear music festival in Knoxville, TE, with two friends of ours who are a couple. On the way, I told the woman (a lawyer) about that same story, after a long time that I hadn't mention it to anybody. Surpassing all my expectations, she gave me a really precious legal clue for my story, namely, the Precautionary principle, which is exactly what I needed to make it more realistic.

I was speechless. By the way, keeping a diary of synchronicity really helped me telling the difference between simple accidental coincidences and real serendipitous events. For example, that same day I actually had another entry in the journal:

• The trailer for "Spiderman - into the Spider-Verse" dropped on Youtube and I watch it on my phone. That same day, at night, I opened one of my friend's Youtube account to show them some music videos (see previous entry in the journal), and one of the Youtube suggestions in the search tab was Spiderman - into the Spider-Verse. By the way, Spiderman and Spider-Verse also both begin with the letter S, plus I had a lovely dream a few nights ago, inspired by the bold plot of "Spiderman - No Way Home".

Explanation: the trailer dropped that same day, so naturally it will be pushed to other YouTube users. Conclusion: this is just a coincidence. But the others?!

I decided to ask my wife Racquel if I could film her while she read my tautogram. I got this idea because of another coincidence, which I'll quote here below, directly from my journal of serendipity:

• I shared the draft of my tautogram "Synchronicity" with my friend Alice, who replied with a message of appreciation and a recording of her reading the last few lines of the poem with a whispering voice: when she read it the first time she thought it was a very sonic experience and reminded her of ASMR so she decided to give it a try. Last night I had a conversation with my friend Charles about ASMR. I didn’t expect him to be into that kind of content and I told him that my wife started watching ASMR videos last year, which is funny because in our couple I’m the nerdy one who's into recording quirky sounds and soundscapes wherever I go. This gave me the idea of recording the entire tautogram to highlight the ASMR aspect of its alliterations in S.

Funny enough, I wrote this tautogram right on the cusp of the vernal equinox, between March 21 and April 4, the beginning of the new flowering season, reminiscing the element of spring in the poem ("sudden sensual storms, spring symptoms"), along with thousands of birdsongs in concert all around us ("songbirds serenade sensational symphonies "). This is even more surprising given that my wife and I are currently temporary guests in the home of an amateur birdwatcher and sustainable development expert ("self-sustaining salutary structures and sequestration and sapiens solipsistic simulation"), and her partner, a reporter for the New Yorker (I was having the conversation about ASMR with him).

ASMR compilation by the Youtube creator Coromo Sara ASMR.

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The featured image of this article is nother marvellous example of the many mindblowing coincidences that happened to me. On the left side, you can see HBO's interpretation of the fictional town of Cittàgazze, from the book series His Dark Materials written by Philip Pullman, one of my favourite book trilogies ever. The mainland from which the little peninsula-town comes out from was filmed on the Nā Pali Coast of the Hawaiian island of Kaua'i, which happens to be where my wife grew up and where we currently live! To the right of the same image you can see my hometown, the village of Orbetello, in Italy. You would agree with me that the resemblance between the two is quite striking, but that's not all. You can read for yourself here that the creators of the show personally travelled to Italy and all around the Mediterranean to research and draw inspiration from several places to build the set for Cittàgazze. Its very name means "City of Magpies" in Italian, while the main landmark of the city, La Torre degli Angeli means "Tower of Angels" in Italian. The author of this other article guesses at the Croatian town of Korčula as the possible real-life main inspiration for Cittàgazze. But the truth is that, although many places around the Mediterranean Sea could have been the model for the otherworldy yet grounded crossworld town of Cittàgazze - such as the island of Ischia in Italy, the port of Ceuta in Morocco, Cape Palos in Spain, and many others, the geography of my hometown Orbetello is with no doubt one of them. Just look at the exact curve of the coast on both sides of both pictures: they simply changed the proportions and took out the lagoons, turning the peninsula into one unified land mass. Needless to say that, when my wife and I, sitting on our couch in our Kaua'i home, first saw season 2 of the show on HBO Max and immediately recognized both locations, we were jaw-dropped speechless. Especially because, throughout her life, she often felt that TV and music would speak directly to her personal life in eerie ways. Many movies and shows have been filmed on Kaua'i (Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean) so that's not odd in itself, but none of them ever featured our respective hometowns on screen, in the same scene, with that level of accuracy! The closest thing is White Lotus, filmed on 'Oahu, Hawai'i and Sicily, Italy.

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So after all this serendipity and strange coincidences, you may be wondering "what's your point, man?"

Well, I guess my take-aways are:

1. Thank you Vocal for this awesome challenge. It was, well, very challenging, but also incredibly inspiring and I felt it made me grow as a writer and as a person and brought even more magic and marvel into my life.
2. If you don't already keep a diary of all the coincidences and serendipitous things happening to you, start right now! Personally, it really helps me look at my day-to-day life in a different way, keep track of what things I let influence me and, like I said, which events are only coincidences and which ones are more important signs, hiding a deeper meaning that I should potentially look into with a more attentive eye. So, always keeps your heart open and never be immune to life's surprises and the little gifts it has in store for you.
3. But most of all, "seek source", "sense synchronicity" and remember to always appreciate nature and her vital rhythms all around you, wherever you are on this beautiful planet wandering in the "sinusoidal starry spiral" we call home.

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