When a Honda Element Becomes a Divine Breadcrumb
Synchronicities, therapy metaphors, and the bumpy path forward
When you decide to mine your life for stories to tell, and the horrors of the world feel especially present, potent, unending, and you’re in the midst of a particularly emotional stretch of weeks, how do you focus? How do you find the path in the freezing cold, with all these snarled, icy roots you keep tripping on?
A couple of years ago, my therapist gave me a visualization. I was standing at a fork in the road. I could take the same path I always took—the one that had led me to a place where I didn’t recognize parts of myself, where I was prone to screaming at the top of my lungs when I didn’t know what else to say. Or I could take the path that looked bumpy from the start: overgrown, pitted with potholes, requiring some new kind of stamina.
Every day, I wanted to take the bumpy path. It was very hard to take the bumpy path.
I’d make it a few steps in and then, often filled with shame, backtrack to the familiar one. It became shorthand between us. I’d log onto our video sessions and say, exasperated, “I tried to go down the bumpy path but then this happened…”
Eventually, there was nothing left but to get jostled. I couldn’t do anything but choose the bumpy path.
One of the tools I developed for staying on the path is what I call “raining in Felicity moments.” It was probably a year into trying to remain on the bumpy path when I wrote this down:
I’m watching Felicity and it’s raining in the episode, and suddenly I realize it’s raining outside here too. It’s hard to tell which rain sounds are real and which ones are coming from the TV. I get the feeling, a warm sensation, that everything is going to be okay. It’s like I’ve chosen the other door, the bumpy path, but it all makes sense. The episode is about endings and beginnings.
There is no other path to be on except the one I’m on. But sometimes, because I need the hope, I look for small synchronicities that feel like confirmation. Not proof—just a wink.
For the The Artist’s Way heads, Julia Cameron calls these synchronicities. The divine breadcrumbs are delivered through chance encounters, unexpected resources, tiny serendipities. I don’t think they appear unless you’ve slowed down enough to notice them. It also helps to be eternally optimistic.
A few months ago, I stopped at Rising Tide Co-op in Damariscotta. I was hungry and indecisive, which is a financially dangerous combination I employ often. A few ideas turned into $70 worth of spontaneity: pot de crème in tiny glass jars, French yogurt in purple terracotta, ravioli, fresh pesto, trumpet pasta, dried mango, sliced fruit, a gluten-free cherry granola brownie. I was thrilled by every single item, like I’d never been inside a grocery store before.
The cashier loved my It’s-It sweatshirt and recognized the ice cream sandwich without explanation. This has happened to me here before. I suspect a strong Venn diagram overlap between co-op regulars and Bay Area ice cream sandwich literacy.
When I got back to the parking lot, I noticed the green Honda Element parked next to my car had a Florida license plate. The only bumper sticker read: Body by Satchel’s—from my favorite pizza place in my hometown of Gainesville.
I froze. I took a photo and sent it to a friend who would understand instantly. (She and I, very old friends, had bumped into each other on a narrow path on a random peninsula in Maine that summer. We had not been close or very much in touch for years, but that encounter launched us into a return to our bond, a creative reignition. Another divine breadcrumb, this one of epic proportions.) She was shocked too. We wondered, who could it be?
I couldn’t help but also think of a man I once dated who had owned a Honda Element (blue, not green) when he worked at Satchel’s. I once told him I wanted to make a shirt that said: Body by Cake.
I sat in my car and waited for the owner to return. I was in a hurry, but I felt cosmically obligated to see who this person might be. Eventually, I ran back inside and walked every aisle, scanning faces like a woman with a very specific and unexplainable mission. If I’d had more time, I might have started asking shoppers directly if the Honda outside was theirs. I may have even asked my fellow It’s-It-loving brethen to make an announcement on the intercom.
Then, two weeks ago, I was back in Gainesville for the first time in eight years. Everything was exactly the same and a little bit different. Every giant mossy oak nearly made me cry. Every street felt deeply imprinted on my psyche.
I tried not to think too hard because the weight of really thinking was almost too much.
I walked by the apartment I was born in. I drove past the one-bedroom apartment my family lived in. I slowed down at my elementary school. There was the house I loved most. There was the street I’d biked down six thousand times.
Then, on a main road heading toward my oldest friend’s house, I realized I was directly behind a green Honda Element.
With a bumper sticker that read: Body by Satchel’s.
I took a photo of the license plate for confirmation, but I already knew it was the same car.
I couldn’t see the driver. And when they kept going forward and I needed to turn right, I didn’t follow them. Part of me felt it was better to let them remain mysterious. A roaming symbol. A traveling breadcrumb.
But I thought: this is the wink. This is the breadcrumb. This is the rain in Felicity. This is the universe saying, it’s going to be okay.
Maybe sharing synchronicities is a little like sharing dreams. They don’t land with quite the same symbolic force for other people as they do for you.
But for me, they are enough to keep going.