The Web He Keeps Weaving– Flowers, Synchronicity, and the Grace of Neem Karoli Baba

There is a road I drive often — Highway 49, winding through the Sierra Nevada foothills, gold and green depending on the season. I have had some of the most ordinary and extraordinary moments of my life on that road. It keeps giving me things to think about.

About a year ago, I was driving the 49 in the middle of a storm. Rain sheeting down, visibility low — and there on the shoulder I saw a woman picking flowers. Who picks flowers on the highway in a rainstorm? I thought, genuinely alarmed. I noticed her and kept driving, the image strange enough to stick.

Later, I found out it was someone I hadn’t even met yet.

We crossed paths at a kirtan not long after. She ended up renting a room from me, and we became dear friends. It was only then that she told me about that day on the highway — and I realized the stranger I had watched in the storm was standing right in front of me.

She had been sent out by her boss to pick those flowers. In the rain. On the highway. Because her boss had demanded them.

When my friend eventually came to live with me, she shared what working under this woman had been like. The control. The narcissism. The particular cruelty of someone beautiful and powerful who uses charm as a weapon and treats people as instruments. I had met this woman briefly myself by then. She was stunning. She was also someone I felt I could not trust — that particular energy that feels honeyed and hollow at the same time.

I held a quiet resentment on my friend’s behalf. Not dramatic, not consuming — just a low ember. The memory of those flowers in the rain. The image of someone I loved, soaking wet on a shoulder of the highway, because someone who had power over her wanted flowers.

Fast forward to this past week. I was driving the 49 again — this time on my way to lead kirtan with two dear members of our satsang, a community my friend had brought me into. All long-time devotees of Neem Karoli Baba, woven together through Bhakti in the way only Maharaj-ji seems to orchestrate.

I was telling my friend the story of my friend on the highway. Right there on the 49, as if the road itself was listening.

We stopped at the grocery store so I could pick up roses for the altar.

And there she was — my friend’s former boss. Standing in the store, staring at me. Me, with roses in my arms for an altar.

I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t want to ignore her. Mostly I wanted her not to take up space in me — this woman I barely know, who nonetheless represents something I’ve carried since watching my friend in the rain. I saw her and felt a flicker of something uncomfortable. Something almost like fear. Not of her exactly, but of her type — that combination of beauty and cunning and carelessness, the kind of person who moves through the world taking what she wants and calling it her due.

She has a sweet daughter. I know that. They came to kirtan once. There’s something in that worth holding too — the whole person is never just the shadow.

But I was on my way to lead kirtan, with roses in my arms for an altar, and I was not available to be destabilized.

This is where I feel Maharaj-ji’s hand.

For those who don’t know my story with Neem Karoli Baba, I wrote about it in Bhakti, Shakti & Synchronicity — the unlikely, unmistakable way he revealed himself to me, a woman who was a Westerner, a rock and roller kid, someone who never wanted a Guru and didn’t understand the concept. The Guru, I have come to understand, is the one who removes darkness. And Maharaj-ji has been removing mine, layer by layer, for years now — always with perfect timing.

What he does is weave. I have written that before. Neem Karoli Baba keeps weaving a web for all of us Bhaktas. It’s the only way I know how to describe it — the way people arrive in your life through three degrees of connection that only make sense in retrospect. A friend comes to live with me. That friend introduces me to a satsang. The satsang becomes family. I find myself on the 49 leading kirtan with the people my former housemate brought into my life — on the same road where I once watched her be humiliated in a storm.

And on that same road, on the very day I am doing all of this, I walk into a grocery store to buy altar roses and find the woman who sent her out into the rain.

It is almost too neat. But Maharaj-ji has never been subtle with me.

What I think this synchronicity was asking me is this: Put it down.

Not for her sake. She owes me nothing and I owe her nothing. But I have been carrying something that was never mine — a wound I witnessed, a story I held because I loved the person it happened to. Resentment on behalf of someone we love is a real and tender thing. It is also a weight.

The image that strikes me is this– I walked into that store holding flowers for an altar, and there was the woman who once sent my friend into the rain to pick them. The flowers that began this whole story were now in my arms, going toward something sacred. And she was just watching.

That’s not coincidence. That’s darshan — the sacred seeing, the moment where the teaching makes itself visible.

What I saw was how far I had come from the first image. I was not my friend in the rain anymore, and I didn’t need to stay tethered to her pain. I was on my way to kirtan with roses in my arms.

Maharaj-ji teaches through love and through what has been called “fierce grace” — the sometimes uncomfortable precision with which the divine arranges things so you can’t look away from what still needs to be released. He doesn’t always make it comfortable. He makes it clear.

I am still learning to be a clean vessel for this practice. Still learning that the altar I build inside myself matters as much as the one I arrange with flowers and incense and intention. And that means releasing what I carry — even the righteous stuff, even the resentments born of love.

The 49 keeps teaching me. Maharaj-ji keeps weaving. And I keep showing up with flowers.

Jai Neem Karoli Baba. Jai Ma.

If you’d like to read about how Neem Karoli Baba first revealed himself to me, visit my blog post “Bhakti, Shakti & Synchronicity.”