Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Chapter VI: ‘Flocking birds’ synchronicity by Anne M Carson.
This chapter is an excerpt from my manuscript Flocking Birds: Synchronicity as a path home, which grew out of the methodology chapter of my recently completed Creative Practice PhD. The text traces the thinkers (and some of their critics) – particularly Carl Jung and George Sand who have been influential in finding my own pathway ‘home’. I have adopted Jung’s definition of synchronicity as ‘meaningful co-incidence’, where he posits meaning as an ‘ordering force’ and where ‘similar things coincide’.
It was 2019 and I was out of town overnight, staying in the leafy outskirts of the regional city of Daylesford in an Airbnb with majestic trees towering over the yard. I had come on a road trip to see if I could entice regional booksellers to stock my latest book. In the hour before check-out time, I had been writing about a surprising connection I had found between my poetic biography subject, George Sand and psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung (who I had studied in the 1980s); both had an uncommon relationship with birds.
When Sand was forced to spend a number of weeks in 1823 in bed-rest, preparing for the confinement of her first child, she tied fir branches to her bed and covered it with a green cloth to make it an attractive haven for the birds who were suffering in that particularly harsh winter, at her rural estate at Nohant.[1] She had taken to her bed on the basis of advice from her family medical advisor, François Deschartres. The birds flocked inside for warmth and food. They perched on Sand’s feet, and some ate from her hand. Contrary to prevailing attitudes of her day, there was no hard divide for Sand between herself and other creatures, in this instance birds, leading me to call her ‘the Bird-woman of Nohant’.[2] Sand had learnt this avian rapport from her mother, and maternal grandfather who was a bird seller on the Quai D’Oiseaux (‘Street of birds’) in Paris.
Jung also befriended birds, and Jungian scholar, Tjeu van den Berk describes one bird perching on Jung’s head for ten minutes as he sat outside his retreat at Bollingen, and another taking hair from his head for her nest.[3] van den Berk describes Jung paying attention to …
… sudden or unusual movements or the appearance of animals, flocks of birds, the wind, storms, the suddenly louder lapping of the lake outside the window of his consulting room, and similar phenomena as possessing symbolic relevance for the parallel unfolding of interior psychological realities.[4]
Back in Daylesford, I made notes and adjustments to a poem I had started some weeks before, dealing with these themes. That iteration was called “George Sand converses with Carl Jung about birds.” I focused in on the flocking behaviour of birds – trying to feel my way into the viscerality of this occurrence, searching for apt words to describe their ‘swirl’, ‘circle’, their ‘wheeling’ in the sky, their navigating dexterity as members of large flock on the wing.
I wondered if Jung and Sand were both modern augurs – although in ancient Rome it was only men who played this role of interpreting the ‘will of the gods’ by studying events such as bird flight and calling. I meant it in the sense that augurs discerned meaningful connections between happenings in the natural world and used them for human guidance. Dismissed in modern times as superstitious, maybe augurs relied on connections to birds similar to Sand and Jung. It made sense to me that augurs would look to birds and insects for guidance as these creatures are particularly attuned to danger for survival – for example in the weather. I could see the logic in augur’s responses and the ancient ways of attuning to them.
Many threads wove into my interest in contemplating Sand and Jung as modern augurs, serving to compress and intensify the energy of my thinking. I had long for instance had interest in people who had special relationships with creatures, or who lived in so-called ‘wilderness’ areas, (and wrote about them). Most recently the documentary “My Octopus Teacher” had enthralled me. I craved this kind of ‘bioegalitarian’ intimate relationship, almost more than human connection. Apart from mice, my relationship with otherkind has to date been with numerous domestic animal companions, mostly cats. These have been vital and sustaining relationships but of a different order than those my favourite authors describe. I have wondered what drives this yearning for cross-species communication with non-domesticated animals; always having felt kin to them, registering keenly harm done to them. But deeper, recognising that I too am an animal, I have a profound desire to have that animal nature recognised by other animals. It reverses the more conventional social view that animals are found wanting when human standards (of intelligence for instance) are used to assess them. This has been a theme which I have explored in a number of poems over the years. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose writes that the hierarchy of anthropocentrism leaves animals with “a cluster of inabilities”.[5] Rather than this dismissive attitude, my own view is that animals have wisdom and skills not only that humans are not privy to, but that against which I feared I could be found wanting. My thirty-five years of vegetarianism grew out of these orientations. As had my seven-year stint living surrounded by bush in a mud-brick cottage without electricity or mains water. I was driven by the desire for co-existence. Or as Deborah Bird Rose gleans from living with Indigenous Yolnu people, “… participants [exist] in tangled co-becomings: nothing stands alone. Everything, at pretty well every scale, depends on others through flows of energy and information.”[6]
Did Sand and Jung also tune into this sense of ‘tangled co-becomings’ – perhaps this was behind their connection with birds. Ronald Hayman in his biography of Jung writes, “… [g]iven silence that was almost tangible, it seemed possible to make contact with thoughts that were centuries old, to experience trees and birds as an extension of himself.”[7] This accords with notions of animism said to be “the attribution of a living soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena,”[8] as well as panpsychism, (which I explore elsewhere). The climate emergency is forcing change upon us, and this is reflected in the academy, although it is painfully slow. Dominique Lestel calls the emerging recognition of nonhuman subjectivity “the true scientific revolution of our time”. The import of this revolution is that ‘the human being is no longer the sole subject in the universe’,[9] a fact many of us have always known, but is yet to infiltrate decision makers.
I had long been alert to opportunities for cross-species connection where they presented themselves. While at in my mud-brick cotteage I read a book, title now forgotten, whose author advised how to behave when tracking birdsong. Become aware, the writer coached, that as soon as you enter their domain birds perceive you as threat, and express this by stopping their calls. The first time I applied this listening I was amazed to hear, just as the author said, that as soon as I entered the forest adjacent to my cottage in St Andrews, the orchestra of bird voices fell silent. What a rude awakening. I knew in theory I was a potential predator of course but I had never before felt myself as birds would experience me. It was salutary. I found a posse, sitting and leaning against a tree, rugged up with winter woollies, gloves and a beanie. I let my heart rate settle and tuned into what surrounded me – dusty, faintly eucalypt smells, patches of sky visible through the canopy. I sat quietly long enough for the small woodland birds who surrounded me to realise I was not a threat and resume their calls. I had turned, as long as I didn’t move, from a potential predator into the benign presence I hoped to be.
In one of her novels, Indigenous American novelist Louise Erdrich describes the training which would refine a simple listening process such as I had undertaken into knowledgeable receptivity;
She taught her how to tell from the call of birds what animal had entered the woods, how to tell from the call of birds which direction and what type of weather was approaching, how to tell from the calls of birds if you were going to die or if an enemy was on your tail.[10]
Sand was not Indigenous but her working class mother and bird-handler maternal grandfather passed on unusual and highly developed avian skills. Sand writes;
As for me, the sympathy for birds is so deeply ingrained that my friends have often reacted to it as though it were some prodigious feat. I have, in this regard, done some miraculous training, but birds are the sole beings in creation on which I have ever exerted a power…[11]
The kind of ‘power’ Sand exerted over birds, can be inferred in a passage from her novel Teverino (1845). This text explores bird-tamer Madeleine’s avian relationships. An advocate for the girl expresses the nature of Madeleine’s power as “a particular intelligence, a sort of secret magnetism, entirely exceptional”.[12] I believe the “miraculous training” Sand received from her mother allowed her also to exert this kind of “magnetism”, and for this to be the source of the “power” she claims to have exerted on birds.
So, augurs were probably highly attuned to the natural world, skilled in understanding their ‘normal’ behaviour as well as behaviours which deviated for normal. One of the consequences of living predominantly inside a built environment is that we are often protected from such ‘natural’ phenomena, and for Anglo-Australians, at least, collectively we have lost wisdom in knowing how to ‘read’ the behaviour of birds and insects, the approach of storms, or to connect our inner and outer worlds symbolically and meaningfully. Perhaps the Climate Emergency forces this upon us (disproportionately on the poorest members in our global community) with extreme weather events.
Meanwhile, in Daylesford, it was almost check-out time. Putting pen and thoughts of augurs and birds aside, I took a couple of bags out to the car. A strange rumbly sound coming from the east, approached me, and stopped me in my tracks by the car. Some moments passed before I realised it came from a flock of birds. I heard them before seeing them; wingbeats, a grumbly, whooshy sound, and their voices, energised, excited, exuberant. They hurtled into view, first the leaders, then the main body, pushing forward, dark shapes against the light, whipping across my field of vision – not very far above. They were Little Corellas; I could see their orange eye feathers. There were so many of them, I felt both dwarfed by the hugeness of the space they took up and somehow strangely taken into it. Their arrival and departure happened very quickly, but I was caught, pinned to the spot by surprise. I was contemplating the connection between Sand, Jung and augurs. Then I myself was standing under, but somehow aurally enclosed within, a flock of birds. My heart started hammering, adrenaline fizzed. Energy surged into my nervous system, lighting it up. Is this really happening? I was critiquing it, trying to assess the likelihood of its occurrence, attempting to minimise its charge. At the same time, I was enclosed within it, affirmed, amazed, full of wonder and buzzing. Suddenly Jung, Sand and myself were brought startingly close together.
The most striking element about this synchronistic experience was how it collapsed the usually hard boundary between psyche and matter – between my internal thinking/feeling self (Sand, Jung, and birds) and what was outside me, between me and the world. These two domains – inner and outer – had intersected simultaneously, “shrinking the space/time gap between them to zero”, as Payne-Towler describes a hallmark of synchronicity. Immersed in ideas about augurs and words for flocking birds, my internal reality matched momentarily with the external reality of an actual flock of birds flying low overhead, seeming to swerve in my direction. Of course this could be dismissed as mere coincidence but the simultaneity felt uncanny. As I had felt with previous synchronicities, it felt pointed. No-one else would have had that confluence of connections had they walked out while that flock of Little Corellas flew overhead, unless they too had been honing in on birds’ flocking behaviour. Such an encounter may have been impressive, as large numbers of animals en masse often are, but the experience would not have joined up internal and external realities rendering the experience personally significant.
So uncanny does this internal/external matching seem to be that it raises “awkward and unanswerable questions”, as Payne-Towler calls them, making one feel observed, making it feel like one’s thoughts are not confined to one’s mind alone.
Who is out there/in here, reading my mind? How could this event be so clearly reflecting and answering my inner dialogue …? Even the first hint of this thought breaks open the unspoken existential questions … Who or what is witness to my inner acts? What is this reflective medium that registers and responds to my self talk? What is it that receives my psychic declarations and stances, which in themselves have no material dimensions, but which magically dictate the shape that my outer life takes? Collective consciousness doesn’t even supply a word we can use to discuss these considerations.[13]
Because such occasions strike the recipient so forcefully, because they have struck me so forcefully, breaking through usual modes of siloed self-perception, the meaning they carry seems charged. The next step is to unravel that meaning.
‘Focussed intensity’, I had learnt through PhD research, was one of the preparatory attitudes for synchronicity ‘generation’. When I first began my research even the notion of synchronicity ‘generation’ was new to me – putting emphasis on the role of individual agency. According to Payne Towler and (other researchers such as Austin and Beitman) the role of individual consciousness is central in synchronicity; playing roles both in leading up to synchronicity, as well as permitting recognition and discernment of meaning (“witnessing” in Payne-Towler’s lexicon) when it occurs. She claims that the ‘catalytic individual’,
… must possess the necessary emotional charge to trigger the potential outcome into manifestation. The triggering of a synchronicity doesn’t have to be consciously sought or envisioned, but the energy for it must be latent in the personal unconscious. This component of personal responsiveness specifically ties a human ego to the ultimate manifestation, marking it out as “mine, for me, because of me” in no uncertain terms.[14]
When Payne-Towler writes “mine, for me, because of me” I don’t read this as an egoistic claim – I interpret it as meaning that synchronicity is individualised and personalised to a high degree – the energy and meaning for the synchronicity has been sourced from the personal unconscious and is addressed specifically to that individual.
I felt tied to the ‘flocking birds’ synchronicity in this most personal and keen way. In contemplating it, I felt affirmed in how I was connecting Jung and Sand – as contemporary (from the vantage point of ancient Roman) augurs, as if the synchronicity legitimated the connection I had made. I like to think of these two impressive humans – transgressive thinkers, activists for change and self-transformation as my literary/creative forebears. I like the idea that they may also have been drinking from the same well, both having an unusually deep connection to the ‘natural world’. In legitimating the connection I had made between them, I felt in turn legitimated in the way I was becoming a scholar.
I also felt that Sand would not have been unhappy with the connections I had made between her and Jung (though she never met him, preceding him by decades) as she herself read meaning into her connection with insects, as one biographer, Belinda Jack makes clear after a grasshopper named Cri Cri which she had befriended while her marriage disintegrated was accidentally killed by a domestic worker inadvertently slamming the window on it.
She read the death of the insect as an augury. Unlike the grasshopper, she would not allow herself to be crushed to death at Nohant. She would find another way out. Writing offered imaginative escape, but it also suggested possibilities for real escape.[15]
You could say Sand wrote her way out of the prison her marriage had become. But writing became much more than that – giving her the opportunity to become over the course of her prolific literary life one of the most celebrated writers of her day.
I became engaged by the creative writing potential of my ‘birds’ synchronistic occurrence, particularly its proto-poetic aspects. But despite multiple drafts, I couldn’t make the poem fly imaginatively. I got bogged down in describing how the synchronicity had worked – rendering my words clunky. Dissatisfied, I put it aside. Some months later, I found a totally new beginning with the supposition ‘what if’, positing certain propositions, all attending to the question of ‘how could this have happened?’. I found a poetic way to reflect my questions.
Say it isn’t all about me
Say birds have agency
Say flocks have group minds
Say they turn them outwards, scanning the environment
Say they register planes of energy, vibration
Say they discern disturbances in the field, changes in air pressure
Say they recognise planes of resonance
Say my trying to find words to describe their flight generates thoughts and feelings
Say my thoughts and feelings vibrate at certain frequencies
Say these bird-empathic thoughts and feelings emit energy, create a plane of resonance
Say my thoughts and feelings are not confined to my physical body
Say my bird-empathic thoughts and feelings are a field or a plane
Say that plane is recognisable to the flock
Say they recognise me on that plane
Say it’s not personal; that beings recognise signals from other beings
Say they resonate to this plane
Say the flock swerves my way
My poem acknowledges the agency of a flock of corellas and the possibility of them responding to human focussed intensity. It also endeavours to represent one of my keenest, even uncanniest experiences of cross species connection and synchrony. In commenting on Deborah Bird Rose’s writings about ‘shimmer’ a group of scholars suggest that,
If we were to hold ourselves open to the experience of nonhuman groups, we would see multispecies gifts in this system of sequence, synchrony, connectivity, and mutual benefit.[16]
Even though I’m uncertain what benefit the birds could have obtained from a moment of synchrony with me, perhaps curiosity is sufficient. This essay has explored my own openness to synchrony as well as involvement in ‘new immanent modes of existence’ with other species and how this was demonstrated in a powerful unanticipated event of flocking birds.
[1] This anecdote and the following details are taken from Sand’s autobiography: Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand: A Group Translation), ed., Thelma Jurgrau. New York: The State University of New York Press, 1991.
[2] I explored these themes in an essay titled “The Bird woman of Nohant: exploring George Sand’s avian relationships” forthcoming in George Sand Studies.
[3] Jung quoted Beitman, “Synchroners”, 281.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Rose, Shimmer, 18.
[6] Ibid, 24.
[7] van der Berk, Jung and Art, 36
[8] Oxford Languages, retrieved 25/4/24. https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+animism, n.p.
[9] Bird Rose, Shimmer, 73.
[10] Louise Erdrich, LaRose. London, Corsair: 2016, 199.
[11] Sand, Story, 78
[12] Sand, Teverino, in The Collected Works George Sand. Delphi Classics, Series Thirteen #2. UK, 2022. E-Book, retrieved 21/12/22. https://www.delphiclassics.com/shop/george-sand/.
[13] Payne-Towler, “Synchronicity”, 70.
[14] Payne-Towler, “Synchronicity and Psyche”, 76.
[15] Belinda Jack, George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large. New York: Vintage, 2010, Kindle, loc2958 of 8525.
[16] Malone, Karen; Marianne, Logan; Lisa Siegel: Julie Regalado; and Bronwen Wade-Leeuwen. “Shimmering with Deborah Rose: Posthuman theory making with feminist ecophilosophers and social
ecologists” in Australian Journal of Environmental Education (2020), 1–17 Retrieved 24/3/21. doi:10.1017/aee.2020.23
Works cited
Beitman, Bernard. “Synchroners, High Emotion, and Coincidence Interpretation.”
Psychiatric Annals (May 2009): 280-286, doi: 10.3928/00485713
20090423-02.
Erdrich, Louise. LaRose. London, Corsair: 2016.
Jack, Belinda. George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large. New York: Vintage, 2010. Kindle.
Malone, Karen; Marianne, Logan; Lisa Siegel: Julie Regalado; and Bronwen Wade
Leeuwen. “Shimmering with Deborah Rose: Posthuman theory making with feminist ecophilosophers and social ecologists” in
Australian Journal of Environmental Education (2020), 1–17 Retrieved 24/3/21. doi:10.1017/aee.2020.23
Payne-Towler, Christine. “Synchronicity and Psyche”, Jung Journal, 14:2, 64-90.
Retrieved 25/9/20. DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2020.1742556, 80.
Rose, Deborah Bird. “Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed” AURA,
5/9/14, Retrieved 18/2/19. https://vimeo.com/97758080.
Sand, George. Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand: A Group
Translation), ed., Thelma Jurgrau. New York: The State University of New York Press, 1991.
Teverino, in The Collected Works George Sand. Delphi Classics, SeriesThirteen #2. UK, 2022. E-Book. Retrieved 21/12/22.
https://www.delphiclassics.com/shop/george-sand/.
van den Berk, Tjeu. Jung on Art: The Autonomy of the Creative Drive. London:
Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebrary.
Website
“Animism” on Oxford Languages website, retrieved 25/4/24.
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+animism, n.p.
© Anne M Carson
Anne M Carson is an Australian poet, essayist and visual artist whose poetry has been published internationally, and widely in Australia, receiving numerous awards including Commended in the Ada’s (2024) and shortlisting in the SWW NSW 2024. The Detective’s Chair: prose poems about fictional detectives was published Liquid Amber Press (2023). Her PhD, comprising poetic biography of George Sand – prolific novelist and social progressive – as well as accompanying dissertation, was awarded in 2023 . It was recognised with an Outstanding Dissertation Prize from the Visual and Performing Arts SIG of the American Educational Researchers Association in 2024.