Amid the chaos of life, sometimes there seems to be an unseen order, or at least something intelligent attempting to make order. My favorite example of this, to date, also showed me that invisible something can have a great sense of humor.

I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered the phone. A woman from my car insurance company wanted to discuss the claim that had just been filed against me for the accident on August 20 at Letort Park in Carlisle. Wait, what? I quickly flipped through my calendar. That was 11 days ago, a Sunday, a weekend my kids were with me. I’d taken them to the Unitarian Church in Boiling Springs, which is close to Carlisle. The recollection of church restored a sense of virtue inside, though maybe not enough to make up for rear-ending someone’s car with kids in my own. I stopped at LeTort Park once, and sat on a bench, reading a book for my book club. I distinctly remember reading something extremely validating as I sat there, as a matter of fact.

The voice on the phone asked if I know Carl Jung. She really had my attention then, as if I wasn’t already free associating enough. Free association was Freud’s idea though. Anyway, I kept going with mine. I knew Carl Jung, not personally, but his ideas about psychological type are the basis for the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which I’d used a lot. He also wrote about the collective unconscious and archetypes, like the animus and anima, the mother, and shadow. My divorce was a whirlwind of all those archetypal energies for sure. In fact, I wondered momentarily if this was some kind of legal stunt, coming on the heels of the domestic relations hearing a few days prior. I think Carl Jung missed an archetype, the trying-not-to-be-paranoid-divorcing-person.

Yes, I knew Carl Jung & Carl Rogers too. I’d been a big fan of them both for years. When I landed my first job as a counselor, I named my next stray cat after them. My he rest in peace. May all those Carls rest in peace, actually. My career at that place of employment was gone too, and that was not resting in peace with me yet at all. But I digress. Of the many thoughts to cross my mind, the only thing I remember actually telling the lady on the phone was that the only Carl Jung I knew had been dead for a while, so I couldn’t have hit him.

It later occurred to me Carl Jung may not have had a car. I wondered when they were invented. I even checked, and decided he probably did. Either way I was growing more certain there’d been a big wacky mistake. Wait, what time? 1 am?! I was in bed! I may have expressed that a little loudly, but I felt completely vindicated. My son would have climbed in bed with me by 1 am. I generally sleep so soundly, I wouldn’t have noticed until morning, but he was my alibi, my partner in innocence. We were 20 miles away from the scene of the crime at that time, sleeping. “Let me check & get back to you,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.

Soon thereafter, she called back to confirm what we were both sensing. There’d been a mistake. The Carl Young who filed the claim, and whose last name I then realized was probably spelled with a Y, was hit by a driver with an insurance policy one digit different than mine. Relieved to have that cleared up so quickly, I thanked her, and carried on with my day.

I like to make meaning of things, and I have been known to make meaning up, reading between the lines, sometimes. That situation kept tugging at my subconscious, though. Seriously, what were the chances of that happening? I felt a bit like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca lamenting “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world and she walks in to mine.” Was that a gin joint moment for me? Was the universe calling my attention to the Carl Jung I knew? The dead one, whose words lived on for me to read as a counseling student? I shared my tale on Facebook and re-read it a few times as the emojis trickled in – likes, surprise and laughter. I’m grateful for the help holding my attention there, in the midst of a busy evening caring for children solo. By night time, the light bulb went off in my mind, and my body responded with a tingly feeling, validating my insight.

Synchronicity. Those other ideas about Myers-Briggs and archetypes, they influenced me, but not recently. Synchronicity had a place of palpable importance in my life for the past few years. Those were years of upheaval for sure, a dark night of the soul, with no visible light at the end of the tunnel for months on end. There was, however, something like a breadcrumb trail of coincidences reassuring me I was going somewhere and just might be okay on the other side of it all. I sat down to write them all out once, all the coincidences. I’ve tried to find that list, but I must not have saved it. The details weren’t as important anyway as the encouragement they provided, especially considered together.

I knew I wasn’t the only one to have a dark night of the soul, as lonely as mine felt, that’s just the way they work. Elizabeth Lesser wrote about a phoenix process of death and rebirth in her book Broken Open. The crucifiction and resurrection is, of course, central to Christianity. In myth, it’s the hero’s journey, or heroine’s perhaps.

I associated synchronicity and Carl Jung with a story about a scarab beetle and a window pane, so I googled a few of those words to refresh my memory. So the story goes, just as a patient shared a dream in which she was handed a golden scarab, Carl Jung heard tapping at a window, opened it, and caught the bug that flew in. It was the closest thing in those parts to a scarab beetle.

Out of curiosity I googled “scarab beetle” too. I learned that it’s associated with the Egyptian sun god Khepera, who rolled the sun across the sky, much as the dung beetle rolls, well, dung. Unbeknownst to the Egyptians, the dung beetle laid eggs in the dung after rolling it in a ball, before leaving it in a hole. When they hatched, they seemed to be self-created. Holy shit! Literally. A scarab beetle is a symbol of an earthy fertile phoenix. Sometimes making lemonade out of lemons isn’t bitter enough, and the metaphor has to be a little shittier to really fit the situation.

I hope you remember this story when life gives you a pile of fertilizer. I hope you take heart in knowing you’re not going to die. It just might be a funny invitation to become like a scarab beetle, and recreate yourself.