Signs of Arrival

When Daniela and I are ecstatic, we see fiocchi: those quite ordinary ribbons that people tack to a door or mailbox after a baby is born, or use to decorate gift-packages or get-away cars for newlyweds, the kind with as many loops and flourishes and frizzy tassles as possible. We are usually driving along in her car, usually newly reconciled after some minor or major difficulty, and suddenly the ribbons will start concatenating around us like paper fireworks. “Guarda, Cinzia, i fiocchi!” she will call out in utter wonder. It’s not simply a matter of our passing a mailbox and seeing a single pink ribbon-blossom hanging from a post. Our fiocchi announce themselves in excess, in garlands, in impossibile hyperbole. How do we account for an entire clothes-line of fiocchi the size of cabbages? A single “just married” car makes sense, passing us, trailing streams of white fiocchi, but how account for five such cars during a half hour drive from La Bruna to Spoleto? Five weddings, five couples making their honeymoon escape within moments of each other. “Guarda Cinzia, i fiocchi,” Daniela calls out to me, but doesn’t have to call out. I see them, too. I recognize them, too. I feel them blooming inside me, too, as surely as we see them happening beyond us. They somehow belong to our shared emotional life and moments of sudden arrival.

My friend Milena told me her sign was a pumpkin. She wanted some evidence that her sense of the ephemera she thinks are signs comes from a governing and responsive intelligence and are not flukes, simply random. If you are there God or Goddess, send me a pumpkin,” she’d asked and then had let go and gone about her day working at the Centro di Benessere. About half way through the morning, a client came in, and wanted to show her a new product said to be good for the skin. She held the magazine in her hand and already Milena felt that tingle tingle shift in energy, alerting her to the presence of the supernatural. The woman opened the magazine and—BOOM—a full color page of a pumpkin; the product’s chief ingredient was pumpkin. But as if that had not been answer enough, proof enough, she had found herself that very afternoon driving through a field with her husband. Plants she did not recognize filled the landscape. She knew it couldn’t be tobacco. “Honey…what is that world of green?” The plants seemed to go on forever…”Pumpkins,” he told her. Pumpkins.

These mystic flashes happen all the time, everywhere, to everyone, but most of the time we either bat them away like ordinary gnats, fastidious creatures of peripheral vision. Or if we see them and feel the blossoming of light in our hearts that such signs deliver, how soon we talk ourselves out of believing. What can such echoes and signs mean anyway? Am I to base my faith, my love, my work on such ephemera as fiocchi and pumpkins?

Of course I am and I do! Signs are not linguistic tricks or literary conventions, but living pulses from another dimension that fill our souls with light and helium, give us lift. I used to think of such moments as rendings of the veil between this world and the other, and the metaphor does to some extent hold true. But it seems that when one’s heart is full, one’s cup runneth over, so to say, the fullness is so seamless, the wholeness so complete, there’s no room for rending anything, no room for separateness or brokenness of any kind—only joy and only love, only awe. Can I believe in such a place, can I stake out residence here? How believe in anything else?