Symbol of Life Buried in Street Rubble

What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?

When your consciousness shifts, your awareness of the world around you shifts with it.

I remember when I first learned this lesson. My tutor gave me a simple exercise:

“Go outside and find five feathers that have fallen naturally from birds.”

So I walked—and looked for feathers.

It sounds almost trivial, but the exercise taught me something profound about attention. Feathers that I would ordinarily have passed without noticing suddenly appeared everywhere. They had presumably always been there; what had changed was not the street but the person walking along it.

Where attention goes, energy flows.

After that, I became far more conscious of my surroundings. I began noticing the small things that appeared along my path and wondering whether some of them carried meaning.

In 2005, I started my journey with the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC. The Order symbolically traces its origins to the mystery schools of ancient Egypt, and during that period I was deeply immersed in Egyptian history and symbolism. My awareness had been tuned to recognise them—and that awareness soon proved fruitful.

I had also learned to regard synchronicity as a teacher. James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy had impressed upon me the importance of being aware of coincidences that lead us towards purpose. Life, I came to believe, places signs along our way. Once we learn to notice them, they can become as visible as actual road signs.

And so there I was: a starry-eyed Rosicrucian walking through Cape Town, thinking about the Egyptian mystery schools and watching for coincidence leading to purpose.

Then, one morning, the street answered.

An AI illustration of my Ank discovery

Half-buried among the street rubble was an extraordinary object: a crudely forged silver ankh, almost the size of a man’s open hand.

It was beautiful, but not conventionally so. It lacked the sterile symmetry of something produced by a machine. Its irregularities revealed the presence of human hands. Someone had shaped it. Someone had drilled the holes. Someone had invested time and effort in bringing it into existence.

The ankh is an ancient Egyptian symbol of life, rebirth and the union of complementary forces—the masculine and feminine joined in the mystery of creation. Finding it at that particular moment felt like an extraordinary confirmation of the spiritual path I had begun walking.

To this day, it hangs on the wall above my bed.

I still wonder who made it. Why did they make it? What did it mean to them? How did something so large and unusual come to be abandoned among the rubble of a Cape Town street?

Those questions have never been answered. Perhaps they never should be. An explanation might reduce the mystery, while the unanswered questions allow the ankh to remain what it became for me that morning: a sign, a confirmation and a treasure.

It still reminds me to pay attention—to remain open to synchronicity and to notice the quiet ways in which life speaks.

And there it will remain until the day I, too, transition from this life and enter whatever mystery of rebirth awaits beyond it.

A Case of Meaningful Synchronicity

A Case of Meaningful Synchronicity

A few days ago, I finished carving my wooden Mjölnir pendant. Thor’s hammer: a symbol of protection, of will expressed through action, and of facing the giants.

I put it around my neck. In the same week, a giant arrived.

Admittedly, this one was in a game.

I have been playing Evony for more than five years. To progress beyond a certain stage, you must finish among the top five players in a server war. For someone who does not pay to play, that goal becomes increasingly difficult. The big players keep getting bigger, and the distance between preparation and possibility seems to stretch a little further each year.

Still, I kept building. Gathering resources. Preparing for an opportunity that seemed less likely with every passing month.

Then something extraordinary happened.

On a server better known for strife than cooperation, an agreement was reached—and not only among ourselves. The opposing server agreed too. The big players would sit out and allow the smaller players to fight for their chance.

For once, the giants would stand aside.

I put my name down.

What followed was a forty-eight-hour ordeal.

Initially, I dropped my shield on my own server and waited, supported by reinforcements. After about two hours, I realised that nothing much would happen if I remained passive. An open door is of little use if you refuse to walk through it.

Like Thor venturing east to confront the giants, I needed to cross into enemy territory.

So I went.

For almost six hours, I held my ground at a temple on the opposing server. But my strategy involved more than fighting. I sent messages to the players who engaged me. We agreed on attacks that would optimise points for both sides.

In the middle of a war game, conversation became one of my most useful tools.

Slowly, I climbed the rankings.

Seventeenth. Tenth. Higher still.

Eventually, second.

Then a rogue player on the opposing side decided that the agreement did not apply to him.

He appeared beside me and hit me so hard—twice—that for a moment I could not remember my mother.

I was zeroed.

There was my giant. And I had lost.

But five years of preparation had left me with more than ambition. I had the resources to recover. I could restore my power without permanent losses.

I returned to my own server, raised my shield and took a deep breath while quenching the fires of my keep.

The kings of both servers reacted promptly. They reprimanded the rogue player and agreed to stop the fighting, preserving the leading positions. I slipped from second to third.

And there I stayed.

After more than five years, the goal was achieved: a top-five finish in a server war.

Placing third in Ebony SVS

It is a game. I know that. But the syncronicity is mind boggling.

And yet, in my world of wonder and mysticism, the timing carried meaning. In the same week that I crafted a small wooden Mjölnir and placed it around my neck, two usually antagonistic communities changed their behaviour. An unlikely opportunity opened. I stepped forward, crossed a boundary, faced a giant, suffered a defeat—and still achieved my goal.

I do not need to claim that my pendant caused any of it. The synchronicity lies in how the outer events and the symbol I had been shaping suddenly spoke to one another.

Victory did not mean winning every encounter. Protection did not mean never being struck. My preparedness allowed me to recover, while the willingness of others to uphold an agreement helped secure the outcome.

There was also a lesson in the long wait. While the odds dwindled, I had continued building. When the opportunity finally came, I had something with which to meet it.

Now, when I feel the small wooden hammer against my chest, it carries a story alongside its symbolism.

I remember the patience to prepare, the courage to cross over, the value of speaking to an opponent, and the relief of discovering that one devastating blow need not decide the whole battle.

My Mjölnir is still a little crooked.

But it has already accompanied me into a story worth remembering.

I Want to Be Paid to Do Nothing

If the salary was the same, what job would you be doing right now and why?

I Want to Be Paid to Do Nothing

If the salary were the same, what job would I be doing right now?

I would want to be paid to sit and do nothing.

Really.

Is that a legitimate answer? Of course it is. I would love to move from being a part-time meditation coach to becoming a full-time one. In meditation, sitting and doing nothing can become the ultimate form of doing.

Of course, meditation coaching involves far more than simply sitting quietly. It requires preparing an appropriate space and bringing your own nervous system into a state of calm so that you can be fully present for another person. It asks you to connect with someone deeply, to put them at ease and to help them feel safe enough to let go.

For many people, sitting still and doing nothing is something they fear. It feels impossible while thoughts rush through their minds and their bodies remain tense. They search desperately for an off switch, but the mind does not have one. The body does not immediately respond to the mental command to relax.

And then, sometimes, something shifts.

The role of the meditation coach is to help each person find the key that unlocks the door into that quieter state. That is what makes meditation coaching more valuable to me than any other paid work I have ever done.

When someone steps across that threshold—beyond comparison, beyond performance and beyond the constant pressure to become something—they rediscover what it means simply to be.

Then something miraculous happens.

The conflicts between body and mind begin to soften. A space of calm opens: a space from which creativity can arise, healing can resonate and the fragmented parts of the self can begin to become whole again.

We live in a society that often scorns inactivity. We celebrate busyness, productivity and constant motion. Yet this apparent “doing nothing” can unfold into something extraordinary.

What is the value of peace? What is the price of quiet confidence, inner stillness and deeper knowing?

To be honest, these things are priceless.

To step off the hamster wheel and drift slowly among the clouds—fully aware, fully present and deeply connected to oneself and the universe—is not laziness. It is a return to being. From that connection can arise love, belonging, creativity, will and compassion.

Could there be a more worthwhile job than helping people enter that space of genuine presence?

So yes, if the salary were the same, I would choose to sit and do nothing.

And I would help others learn to do nothing with me.

Sitting together, doing nothing—fully aware, fully present, with nowhere else to be.

Reclaiming My Creativity—One Crooked Hammer at a Time

Share a hobby you’ve picked up recently — what got you into it?

The internet stole my creativity!

Where are the days I spent painting, when colours collided on the canvas in amateur splendour? Recently, I decided to put down the electronics, close my laptop and return to good old-fashioned handcraft.

To honour my Danish roots, I decided to make a Thor’s hammer pendant—Mjölnir.

It sounded simple enough: take a piece of wood, saw it, file it, sand it, and there you have it.

I drew the shape by hand, only to discover that my saw blade was blunt. I went to the hardware store, but they did not sell loose replacement blades. So I bought an entirely new saw.

It worked perfectly—perhaps a little too perfectly—because I promptly cut one end too short.

Now I faced a serious creative crisis: do I try to rescue the piece, or start again?

After much Libra to-and-fro, I decided to save the miscut. I have always been a sucker for rescuing the rejected piece.

Fortunately, I am the proud owner of a Dremel with all its little gadgets for cutting, refining and shaping. Slowly, beneath the rough edges, a small wooden Mjölnir began to emerge.

It was not perfect, but it smelled like wood, felt smooth beneath my fingers, and the grain gave it a character of its own. I sealed it with teak oil, added a leather cord and suddenly became the proud owner of my own beautifully imperfect Mjölnir.

That imperfection is precisely what makes it special.

In making it, I reclaimed a piece of my creativity. I created something meaningful with my own hands—something I can wear, treasure and enjoy. The feeling of the wood, its smell, its grain and the gradual emergence of the shape reconnected me with the physical world.

A deep satisfaction ran through me—one that no screen can ever replicate.

Perhaps creativity was never truly stolen from me.

Perhaps it was simply waiting for me to put down the laptop and pick up the saw.

I never finished the book because it never finished with me.

What’s a book you never finished but still think about?

There is a book I started reading about twenty years ago called The Mystic Thesaurus, by Willis F. Whitehead.

I never finished it.

Or perhaps, after twenty years, I am beginning to realise that I did—just not in the way one normally finishes a book.

Somewhere in its pages I encountered the practice of working with a black mirror. I made one for myself: small enough to hold in my hands, its dark surface deliberately curved so that the reflection would never quite settle into an ordinary image.

I learned to sit with it. To become quiet. To observe.

Observing the reflection

And I kept doing that.

The book eventually returned to the shelf. Much of what I had read faded from conscious memory. Life moved on. Other books came. Other philosophies. My work, my runes, my spiritual practice, my attempts to understand systems and people and myself.

But the mirror remained.

Twenty years later, I have returned to The Mystic Thesaurus, and something rather wonderful has happened.

I recognise myself in it.

Not because I remember all the words, but because I recognise the way of seeing it was quietly teaching me.

Whitehead spoke of three ways of approaching reality: Occult, Philosophy and Natural Magic.

Today I understand those words rather differently from how I might have understood them twenty years ago.

Occult is the willingness to look beneath what is immediately apparent—to observe carefully enough that hidden patterns and relationships begin to emerge.

Philosophy is what prevents us from simply believing the first pattern we see. We contemplate it. Question it. Turn it around. Ask what it means and whether our interpretation remains coherent when tested against experience.

Natural Magic is where contemplation finally returns us to life. Once we understand something of the relationships in which we participate, we act. Not by demanding that reality obey us, but by understanding proportion, relationship, rhythm and consequence well enough to participate more consciously within it.

See. Understand. Participate. Then observe again.

Perhaps that was the real lesson of the mirror.

The strange reflection was never the important thing. The important thing was learning to remain the observer while appearances changed—and then carrying that quality of observation back into ordinary life.

Looking back now, I can see traces of that lesson in how I think about almost everything. I look for patterns. I explore relationships. I distrust conclusions that arrive too quickly. I allow ideas to mature. And eventually I ask the question that matters:

What does this understanding ask me to do differently?

So what is a book I never finished but still think about?

The Mystic Thesaurus.

Except I’m not sure I really think about the book very often.

For twenty years, I have been thinking, observing and participating through a door that the book opened.

Perhaps some books are finished when you turn the final page.

And perhaps there are a few that you never finish because, somewhere along the way, you stop reading the book and begin living the question it placed in your hands.