An Orca Encounter (reader contribution)

John Hand’s strange day began one Saturday morning while making cold calls door to door in an Orange County middle class neighborhood in Irvine near the University of California.

Hand, a local real estate agent who also lived nearby, found it beneficial to his business to get out and be seen in his “farm area” every now and then. He liked to do this on Saturdays between the hours of 10 a.m. and noon because studies showed people were receptive to chatting on the weekends during this time slot.

Hand was hoping to add listings to his portfolio of homes for sale. During this time in real estate history, home values were high, interest rates low and there was an overall shortage of inventory in desirable neighborhoods. He found that homeowners were often surprised at the value of their homes. As way of an ice breaker, he would introduce himself and then invite homeowners to an open house in the area. If no one answered he would leave a flyer on their door with the open house invitation.

Hand did not stop at every house. Some definitely had more curb appeal than others. And, he also had developed a feeling about some homes. On this morning he had an especially strong attraction to a modern style two story suburban home at the end of a nicely maintained cul-de-sac. He especially liked the black and white whale weathervane on the home’s roof.

Hand went up to the house and ringed the doorbell. A friendly woman who looked a little younger than himself answered the door. She continued smiling even after he began his spiel on home values – always a good sign.

But, after he finished she patiently answered a few questions and told Hand she and her husband had owned their house for less than a year and had no plans to put it on the market any time soon.

Hand thanked her for her time and presented her with the open house flyer as well as his business card – just in case.

He was about to leave, but suddenly had an overwhelming need to ask the friendly woman her name. Normally he didn’t do this when there was no interest in adding a listing for fear homeowners might think he was crossing the line. Last thing he wanted was to come off as a creepy salesman.

But she gladly told Hand that her name was Emily and her husband’s name was Michael. They were Michael and Emily Wilson. She even volunteered additional information: Her husband was a clinical research assistant at the University of California and they had no children – yet.

The woman’s name stabbed at him, ripping open a wound that had never completely healed. A sadness grew inside him that he couldn’t stop. Emily noticed.

“Are you all right?” Emily asked.

“My sister’s name was Emily,” Hand said.

The woman waited for more. Hand wasn’t the kind of person to share personal information easily, especially with someone he just met, but there was something about the Emily standing before him that made him want to open up.

“Did something happen to your sister?” she asked, being careful not to say the wrong thing.

“She was taken to Australia many years ago and I haven’t seen her since.”

Emily hesitated, “I lived in Australia.”

Yes, Hand could now detect the Aussie accent, although faint.

Emily asked John Hand if he would like to come in for a cup of coffee. He wasn’t sure why, but he accepted.

He didn’t make any more house calls that morning.

The Pain of Separated Children

Once inside with coffee and a sweet roll in front of him, Hand poured out his heart. He told the “other” Emily about how he and his younger sister were separated when he was seven and that they hadn’t seen each other for over 25 years.

Emily Wilson listened intently without interrupting Hand as he told the painful story of how his parents were killed by a drunken driver during one long Easter weekend. Since their extended family was a small one, none of his parent’s relatives stepped up to look after Hand and his sister. Finally, an uncle who was much older than Hand’s father said he would take Hand. But he couldn’t care for two kids. Eventually, Hand’s sister was taken by a cousin who lived across country and later moved to Perth with her husband and two other children.

The animosity between the brother and the cousin began immediately. Neither really wanted the children and then they became resentful of each other over assets left by Hand’s parents.

While there was some communication in the beginning, it soon stopped with each of the children growing up in separate worlds left with diminishing memories of one another. To complicate matters, Hand’s uncle died after a few years and his younger wife remarried taking her new husband’s last name and changing Hand’s through legal adoption.

Something similar happened to Emily. Her last name was also legally changed when the cousin divorced and remarried.

Hand said when he got older he tried to find his sister but all attempts failed.

A good 40 minutes later, Hand had finished. Wiping a tear from his eye he thanked the woman for the coffee and especially for listening to him. He said he was sorry for carrying on like he did, but he did feet better – much better.

Then Hand experienced he most extraordinary moment of his life. Emily Wilson stood up and lightly touched Hand’s shoulder. Her face was dead serious.

“John,” she said, “I think I’m your sister.”

The Improbable Placement of Time and Space

Over the next several months, Hand and his sister happily became reacquainted sharing details of their lives apart from one another. Emily and her husband often had Hand over to their house for home-cooked meals. Emily even set up a couple blind dates for her bachelor brother.

Despite their separation, they enjoyed catching up discovering many similarities in tendencies and interests. For example, they both loved Shamu, the black and white orca whale made famous in seaside performances at San Diego’s SeaWorld. They even had named their pets Shamu. Hand had a black and white Havanese dog; Emily was allowed to keep a black and white street cat that followed her home from school.

Then there was the black and white Shamu weathervane atop Emily’s house that Hand had noticed on that first day.

But of course the detail they kept coming back the most was the incredible odds of reuniting the way they did. Sometimes when they recounted it, they were so blown away words escaped them and they could just shake their heads. None of their friends could believe it.

And yet, it got weirder.

One night when Hand was over at Emily’s house for dinner, his sister brought out photos. Hand had seen many of them before when they first began catching up, but Emily insisted this was a different album. Because of their love of Shamu, Emily wanted to show her brother photos from a trip she made to SeaWorld with her adoptive parents when she was 11.

“You were in California and you didn’t stop to say hello?” Hand said.

“Stop,” Emily said, and punched his arm. “I didn’t know where you were. No one ever told me anything.”

There were many photos from the trip to the U.S., which included at stop at SeaWorld and the iconic Shamu show.

Hand sorted through them, first with a lot of interest, then more politely as the photos began looking alike. He was about to return the album to Emily when his eyes snapped back to one photo in particular on the last page.

“Shit!” he screamed.

“What?” Emily said.

Hand pointed to a photo of Emily posing with wet hair behind the Plexiglas of Shamu Stadium. He told her to take a close look at the teenager, also wet from the show, sitting a couple rows up on the bleachers behind Emily.

“That’s me,” he said.

“Oh my god.”

Beyond Coincidence

People who have never experienced an amazing synchronicity will probably think of them as just coincidence. In general, most people pretty much have to see a ghost to believe in them, or witness a flying orb to believe in UFOs.

And maybe it should be that way. But how do you calculate the kind of odds of running into a separated sibling not once, but twice (or maybe more and not knowing it)? Yet stories abound of this happening or people meeting up with their non-biological twins.

Some feel there is a lot more going on, as in activating a sense that is unleashed on the universe as a kind of synchronistic lasso. Do the things on our minds bleed out into the world around us terminating in meaningful results? Is it possible that by just intensely thinking about someone you can activate a normally dormant probe that brings objects of our thoughts into three-dimensional reality?

For Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, random wasn’t enough. He came up with an alternative explanation. Jung believed coincidences were meaningful events that couldn’t be explained by odds, as in cause and effect. He believed there was another force outside the realm of causality to explain them. This is what he called synchronicity in his now famous book “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.”

Jung also introduced the idea of unus mundus (one world) in which he postulated that there is an underlying order and structure to reality. In fact he believed there was a network that connects everything and everyone whether you live in Australia, Orange County or Mars.

Studies on twins separated as babies would seem to support this. Take a University of Minnesota study on twins separated after one month. Later reunited as adults they discovered amazing similarities in their lives that went beyond a genetic connection:

• They were both named James Alan by their adoptive parents
• They were both married to a Betty and had divorced a Linda
• They both had adoptive brothers named Larry and a pet dog named Toy
• They suffered from tension headaches
• Both vacationed in Florida within three blocks of each other

Particularly strong connections between individuals often produce non-empirical results like the dizziness a husband experiences at the exact moment his wife is having a miscarriage; or the unexplainable choking fit someone might experience at the same time a dying parent on the other side of the country is gasping for that last breath.

That connection can also be a non-familial one – just individuals who exude extreme non-ordinary energy. In my life I have constantly crossed paths with curanderos, psychics, metaphysicians and even remote viewers without trying to. These include people like Carlos Castaneda, Uri Geller and ufologist J. Allen Hynek.

But the aspect of synchronicity that I find most interesting, and deserving of more research, is how the “synchronicity spectrum” widens for those who pay attention to it and treat the topic with curiosity and reverence as opposed to writing it off as coincidence.

This same synchronistic frequency widening has also been observed by people who pay close attention to their dreams and even write them down in journals. The more effort spent on thinking about dreams, the more livid and frequent they become, and they can even be useful as a source for problem-solving.

In the late 1990s I wrote a column for the Arizona Republic newspaper called Offramp, which focused on synchronicities experienced by readers. The more I thought about these synchronicities submitted by readers, the more oddities popped up in my own life. Additionally,  it’s as if this topic developed a “presence” around my cubicle that reached out to journalists around me who also began to experience synchronicities.

When I stopped writing the column the synchronicities also stopped.

Since I’m writing the columns again it will be interesting to see where this leads.