The Wool Ball, the Smelly Cat and the Cranky Corpse

Manny Mak’s new book is an engrossing ethnographic memoir of healing, coincidence, and dream work. Combining the reflective precision of a social scientist with the sensibility of a contemplative artist, Mak charts a psychological and spiritual journey through intertwined crises of personal loss, family illness, and collective upheaval. Each chapter weaves meditative painting, dream analysis, and Eugene Gendlin’s method of “Focusing” to show how synchronicities—meaningful coincidences—accompany the unfolding of consciousness.

As Rob Foxcroft observes in his foreword, Mak’s prose recalls Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections and The Red Book. Yet Mak’s cultural lens, shaped by East Asian spirituality and ethnographic practice, adds a distinctive pluralism to the exploration of psyche and symbol. His recurring motifs—dragons, sacrificial lambs, and shared human suffering—bridge inner experience and the collective unconscious in the Jungian sense. The narrative’s emotional core lies in the author’s portrayal of his daughter’s struggle with depression and anorexia, where coincidence becomes an act of relational compassion rather than abstraction.

Readers familiar with my own Life-Changing Synchronicities will recognise kindred intuitions. Both works understand coincidence as an invitation to self-reflection and empathy. Where I describe “coincidence sensitivity” as a capacity for attunement between mind, body, and environment, Mak embodies that sensitivity in narrative form: his coincidences arise through the interplay of dreams, family bonds, and moral imagination. Both affirm that synchronicity is not random but a participatory bridge between inner and outer realities.

In a time of fragmentation, The Wool Ball, the Smelly Cat and the Cranky Corpse offers a gentle, artful reminder that healing begins where attention meets mystery. It is a valuable contribution to the contemporary dialogue linking psychology, spirituality, and the science of meaningful coincidences.