As I’ve written before, I am one of those people who has a synchronistic relationship with 11:11. 11:11 was my original wake up call, and it continues to be sort of a master number for me. But 11:11 opened the door to a whole river of synchronicities that I swim most every day. All kinds of things can be synchronous. I keep my eye out and try to follow the strings when they occur. They are breadcrumbs marking the way.

Numbers other than elevens show up synchronistically in phases. They are a subtle line of communication between me and my higher self, or so I think anyway.

For a while I had sets of consecutive twos showing up all over the place. Then it was fives. Lately it has been consecutive fours. Fours all over the place. One of the more striking examples of this is that I keep jolting awake from a deep sleep and looking at the digital clock on the other side of the room at 4:44 a.m. exactly. It occurs so often that I now wake up my husband as a witness when it happens. All I need to say is: “4:44 AGAIN!”

The other night I woke up early on with anxiety about work. In desperation, I asked the universe to help me learn from and heal my job situation. I fell back asleep and hours later woke with a start. I sat up to check the clock on the other side of the bed. Sure enough, it was 4:44. I thought that my higher self was trying to tell me something about my work. I had the thought that fours mean transfiguration. Then I fell back asleep.

I dreamt I was in a bookstore café. The guy at the next table had Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012 book in front of him. I commented on it, telling him I had read it and it was good, though actually I haven’t read it yet.

There was a young woman sitting at the table behind me. She had two books in front of her. I started a conversation with her and told her not to buy the books. I said I would check for them at home and give them to her if I had them.

The first book was Look Homeward Angel. I have never read this book. I have never intended to read this book. I haven’t even thought of it twice before now, though I’ve known of its existence.

The identity of the second book was unclear in the dream, but I left the young woman at the table thinking that I had to look at home for Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren, so perhaps the second book was All the King’s Men.

Okay, once again, I have not read All the King’s Men, nor have I read anything else by Robert Penn Warren. I have not felt the urge to. I knew of their existence – both book and author, but that’s it.

I woke up as I was leaving for home to go look for the books.

In the waking world, I went to work (ugh), where I googled the second two books and authors because their presence in the dream was odd to me. I learned that Thomas Wolfe set Look Homeward Angel in a thinly fictionalized version of his hometown — Asheville, North Carolina. I didn’t know Asheville existed until recently when it came up synchronistically in another context, so the dream connection got my attention. Then I learned that both Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren died on September 15th. I have no idea what significance this has, if any. It just makes me think I should visit Asheville, North Carolina. Perhaps on September 15th.

Have you checked out Asheville, North Carolina online? There is a website where someone makes the claim that if you’re into 2012, Asheville is the place for you.

Okay, maybe I am babbling. Then again, maybe not.

I will end this post with the following thought, which has nothing to do with anything else I’ve written . . .

I want to be able to say that I stand by what I perceive in the world.

That’s all for now.

Back to the choice we face as we spiral down the hourglass of the age. In 2012: Two Paths, I talked about LOVE vs. FEAR and then relayed a dream of a global catastrophe in which I did not choose as I would have hoped. As strongly as I feel about choosing LOVE over FEAR, some unaligned levels of my being have their own ideas.

LOVE vs. FEAR is the essential struggle within me.

I know FEAR. I am something of a specialist in it. My childhood was marked by trauma, and this designated me the likely heir to the legacy of my female forebears on my father’s side: panic, anxiety and agoraphobia.

But modern American life didn’t offer me the option of staying home and cooking elaborate family recipes all day, so I battled back, or else it seemed I would fall off the face of the earth.

I refused meds but tried some mainstream behavior therapies. I made what was called progress, but I have to say that much of my adult life was a white-knuckle ride, with me endlessly struggling to “overcome my fears” and coming away from both victories and defeats with the same raw, battered, exhausted feeling that told me I was just too fundamentally defective to deal with the world.

Basically my life was shaped, circumscribed and defined by FEAR.

Somehow, though, another way of thinking unfolded in my consciousness. It started with 11:11 and the chain of synchronicity that I began following at that time. The Kybalion came my way, and through it I learned of the Principle of Polarity and its conscious manipulation: To change an undesirable mental vibration, concentrate on the opposite pole. For me this was a profound revelation. You don’t overcome or otherwise eliminate the darkness. You let in the light.

So that’s path I’ve been traveling. It has been a transformative period. A period in which I’ve come to realize that the way is not to eliminate my “defects” or to adopt “ideal” behaviors as they are defined in American culture, but instead to fully become who I am.

I also came to understand that the opposite side of FEAR is not courage – it’s LOVE.

But while I’ve been moving toward LOVE and away from FEAR, the dominant culture around me has been moving sharply, aggressively, emphatically in the opposite direction. I happen to live in a stronghold of the dominant culture, so I am swimming in waters that are cold, dark and inhospitable. The contradiction is intensely painful – I long to find my Right Place in the World, but that is another story. The point now is simply that the culture in which I live does not support heart-centered living. Instead it is like Michael Corleone’s Family – it keeps pulling me back into my own negativity.

So the LOVE/FEAR polarity is a dynamic opposition within me. The Global Catastrophe dream is a gift because it dramatizes my contradictions and gives me an opportunity to resolve them.

Two points stand out for me:

Although my intention is to choose LOVE, I have trouble actually receiving it. Case in point: the dream opens with me moving to the place I love most in the world. I have longed to move to Maine for almost twenty years now. And there I am in the dream, in the early stages of buying a house there. I went out into the backyard and took a handful of earth, breathing it in deeply because that’s how overjoyed I was. The opening scene is LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Sadly, my dreaming mind could not allow me to receive this abundance. It recoiled from LOVE and put me in a place many people I know FEAR. I lived in Newark for several years. I know better than to react to it with knee-jerk FEAR, like the average white suburbanite around here. Nevertheless, it was not the most pleasant place to live, not back then. It is currently undergoing a renewal, but then it was grim and dilapidated — and very inconvenient in terms of access to reasonably priced goods and services. It had still not recovered since the time of the Rebellion. Newark history and politics aside, when I lived there, my life was circumscribed by scarcity and FEAR.

So my dream consciousness turned from LOVE to FEAR. It diverted me from my ideal place to a place of grim limitation. I need to think more deeply about the ways in which I am not accepting LOVE and instead living in self-imposed scarcity.

The second point concerns my anxiety about how I might react in a crisis of horrific proportions. Up until now, I have been assuming that – in the event of a global catastrophe – evolving might not mean surviving. I guess on some level I was thinking that a global catastrophe would involve a quick exit from this plane. I was not prepared – mentally or otherwise – to live in a post-catastrophe world of slow death by radiation, starvation and mob violence. When faced with that world in the dream, I reverted back into base-level FEAR, absurdly wishing I had stashed cash so that my family and I could somehow finagle our own little way to some semblance of safety.

Clearly I have work to do. The question is not which energy I am carrying because I have both LOVE and FEAR churning within me. I don’t have the answers, but I do know the path lies in the heart. I will continue to work on the heart chakra and on expanding the LOVE that flows through me.

I can’t say that I know what it all means, but in honor of the day, here’s how it happened for me:

I was feeling profoundly restless. I was looking for something I could sense vaguely but didn’t understand. Mostly I was casting around in the dark, but I was trying to follow the chain of synchronicity that was just then returning to my life after many years of absence.

On September 11, 2002, I was driving home from work when I happened to look down at my odometer – not something I do often – and saw that it was showing all ones across. I thought it was a coincidence that my car should hit such a milestone on the first anniversary of 9/11 and that I should happen to look down just then to see it. Then my mind moved onto thoughts of the previous year.

Barely two hours later, my sister was telling me about her recent vacation when she mentioned that the friend she had visited was “into portals and the eleven-eleven.” Huh?!

It felt like there had been a radio playing a half-tuned station in the next room for a long time – just white noise to me – and then, in a flash, it tuned in and I registered it consciously.

“Wait, what is this eleven-eleven?”

My sister said it had to do with “ascension” and “portals.”

“Portals to where?”

She didn’t know. The idea of portals was tantalizing to me even though it made no sense. Now I know that there is a range of interpretation on 11:11, but then my ignorance was total . . .

“But why is it ‘eleven-eleven’?” I asked.

My sister explained that her friend sees elevens everywhere — the number comes up synchronistically for her. I had goosebumps. I told her about how I caught my odometer showing all ones across on the way home from work that very day. I said it was four ones – 1111 – because at the time that’s what I thought, but actually it was five – 11111 (shows how little I pay attention to my car’s mileage).

The odometer turning to all ones on that particular date . . . me noticing . . . then my sister mentioning “eleven-eleven.” There was a convergence of coincidences that felt powerfully synchronous to me. And that was the beginning. Elevens started turning up everywhere. Bill totals, receipts, license plates or signs on cars and trucks cutting me off, email time stamps . . . Odd little things — and some big things — started occurring at 11:11 to draw my attention to the clock at that moment. Some nights I found myself jolting from a deep sleep to look at the clock at exactly 11:11 p.m. Elevens were speaking a secret language to me through the random details of my life.

I did some googling and became familiar with various things people say about the phenomenon. I used to be more interested in reading these theories and speculations, but I’ve lost track of that research. I guess eleven-eleven was indeed a portal and it has led me to other mysteries.

Some say that 11:11 is a wake up call that we coded ourselves with prior to this incarnation. Maybe that’s true. It certainly worked as a wake up call of sorts for me. Whatever the case, I felt the onset was an invitation to the grail quest. I accepted and have been traveling that path ever since. I see the elevens in my life now as little breadcrumbs along the way.

On 11/11/04, at 11:11 PST, Uranus stationed direct in the sign of my Ascendant, Sun and Moon, beginning a long series of transits that are now lighting up my chart like a pinball machine. On 11/11/06, unbeknownst to me, something happened a few hundred miles away that ended up bringing a major crisis into my life for the winter and early spring. When I learned that it all started on November 11th, I knew that however bad it felt at the moment, it would somehow be a transformative experience. It would be a portal to the next level. And it was.

And as many have observed — per the U.S. Naval Observatory — the Winter Solstice will occur at exactly 11:11 UT on December 21, 2012 — which of course is the date posited by people like John Major Jenkins as the culmination of the Mayan Long Count.

I don’t have the answers, but in my experience, the elevens mark the doorway. Approached in a mindful, heart-centered manner, they can lead toward positive transformation. Let’s go through.