Coincidental Plan

I’m a firm believer in Murphy’s Law and the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, but please tell me, what strange circumstance fashioned this?  I wrote about it yesterday, but it was all so weird, I’m still processing what happened – and trying to determine what one calls this?

• It started when I selected a poet’s name at random from a list of 800 American poets from the 19th century. I picked Horace Biddle.

 

• I looked up Mr. Biddle on Wikipedia and discovered that he was a lawyer, judge, poet, musicologist, and famous hermit. That hermit bit sounded intriguing.

 

• The article mentioned very little about his life in seclusion, though.  However, at the bottom of the page, I spied with my very own eye a link to “American Hermits.”  Seriously?  You know I had to click on that!

• As of yesterday, there were 25 names listed on the page; Mr. Biddle was among them. I recognized two others (the Collyer Brothers and Ted Kaczynski).

 

• Completely at random, I clicked on a name, Sarah Bishop.

 

• I was simultaneously amused and horrified to read that Ms. Bishop was “an affluent American woman who was forced to become a female pirate during the years of 1778–1780. She escaped from the ship, swam to shore, and lived in a cave as a hermit for about thirty years until she froze to death.

 

• On her Wikipedia page I learned that a poet by the name of Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793 – 1860) wrote a poem about her entitled "The Hermitess.”  (LOL…”Hermitess.”  The 1800s were so quaint.)

 

• I laughed when I read Mr. Goodrich’s middle name, “Griswold.” (#iykyk) I clicked to his page and discovered that Mr. Goodrich was an author and politician who established the children's magazine Merry's Museum,  Plus, I learned that he was “better known by his pseudonym Peter Parley.”

 

• Then, as I’m about to move on from his page, I spied again with my very own eye, “Emily Dickinson mentions ‘Peter Parley’ in one of her poems.”  Say whaaaa???

 

• I immediately checked the online Dickinson lexicon.  Yep, Peter Parley was there.  Twice.  Under “Peter Parley” it states, “see Parley, Peter.”  Under “Parley, Peter” it states, “Pen name of Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793-1860); New England author of Geography for Children; man who wrote a series of travel books for children; [fig.] educator; adventurer.”

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• I then discovered not one but TWO poems by Dickinson which mention “Peter Parley.”

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Now tell me – isn’t that weird?  I clicked on various names and links at random, and all roads led to Dickinson? 
 
BTW:  For me, this is eerily reminiscent of the day the planets aligned and some unknown, unseen force directed me to the giant coffee cup and saucer in Milwaukee, but I’ll save that story for another day.   In the meantime, I’m going to look into Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity and David Hand’s Improbability Principle to see if, perhaps, they can explain what is going on.
 
The truth is out there.