Synchronicity and the Poetry of Life

Poetry – literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm

I don’t think of the readings on my website Funerals -Today as strictly poetry, but happily others do. These readings are mostly (by my reckoning) lyrical words written to recite at funerals and memorial services.

Since I started to write funeral readings eight years ago, I noticed something weird and wonderful often happens… it seems that the synchronicity of life produces patterns whereby some readings are well used at one moment, while others that were used a year ago feel and even sound all wrong. There are definite moments of popularity and preference. Is it fashion? The season? Zeitgeist?

Over the last three months it seems that a lot of strong, elderly ladies have passed away. Summer is not a season for many people to die, but this year there have been many deaths, and nearly all of them have been elderly, powerful ladies who seemed to be at the centre of extended families. And so the most widely used reading on the Funerals-Today website is one called The Matriarch.  The families I served at funerals chose this reading and it has been accepted without question. This happened so often, I started to find it a little uncanny… so when I went to visit one family, without a copy of the reading on me – thinking that the lady concerned might have been too young to have been described as a matriarch – the family carefully explained the reading they wanted, an explanation so specific that I had to get out my iphone, and recite The Matriarch to them; they responded saying that these were exactly the words they wanted, as if they had written them themselves. Apparently ‘Synchronicity’ is all about events that are more connected by meaning than cause. Suddenly things happen that fall into patterns that appear at very particular moments in life.

Here are three pictures of my fabulous maternal grandmother, with her kids. Her name was Annie Victoria Schoental (later Marks) born November 20, 1887, died June 1985 – 30 years ago.

She was the matriarch of matriarchs  – brilliant, beautiful, brave and authoritarian. She went out to work to support her three children when her husband failed her, selling insurance door to door and playing the piano for silent movies. I think The Matriarch reading is dedicated to her… and some might even call it poetry.

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