Like a great lone eyeball, the Wheel of Self-Reflection gazed upon Love Field on Saturday, surveying the crowd gathered for West Marin’s 10th annual Far West Fest. One reveler, Carol Kasparek, approached it curiously that afternoon, and Bill Braasch—a Bolinas software engineer who likes to call himself “Bill Bo”—rose from his lawn chair to greet her.
As the wheel’s “Calibrator,” Bill Bo guides each visitor through a series of steps that touch on Chinese astrology, Jungian philosophy and the universal tradition of fortune-telling.
“It tells you something about yourself that you probably already knew but didn’t pay attention to,” he said. “And it guides your life forever.”
The brainchild of Bolinas artist Stuart “StuArt” Chapman, the wheel will make its third appearance at Burning Man next month. For the second time, it has earned a group of Bolinas residents—known as “Camp Berlinus”—an honoraria grant from the festival’s organizers.
(Originally called the “Wheel of Life,” the wheel’s name was changed this year in keeping with this year’s “Carnival of Mirrors” theme at the annual desert spectacle.)
What began as a carnival game has transformed into an investigation of synchronicity, a concept coined by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe coincidental, apparently random events that may in fact be meaningfully related. For StuArt, the wheel offers clues into whether instances of meaningful coincidence might signify the existence of a higher, divine intelligence.
“It’s real,” said StuArt, who on Saturday was dressed in a gold two-piece suit speckled with spirals and a gold cowboy hat bearing a burgundy question mark. “But you have to believe. Or at least suspend disbelief.”
The wheel’s design is simple yet skillfully executed, composed of three concentric, painted wooden wheels superimposed on a larger, five-foot-diameter wheel that spins along an axle fixed atop a scrap-lumber beam. The smallest circle, at the wheel’s center, depicts the yin-yang symbol. It’s like a pupil on the ocular wheel.
Above the largest wheel juts a clothesline clip fastened to a block: it’s on this clip that Bill Bo sticks a tarot card
Ms. Kasparek drew from a deck. (That was after she announced her birth date, which identified her as a “Yin Water Snake.”)
She chooses the card “Balance.”
“Ah!” Bill Bo says. “Balance! Interesting. Let’s begin.”
He instructs her to step onto a bathroom scale placed at the bottom of the beam. As she does, Bill Bo loosens the screw that’s keeping the concentric wheels in place, then rotates them to match Ms. Kasparek’s astrological sign: the “Yin” side of the smallest wheel facing straight upward, “Water” upward on the next wheel and “Snake” on the third.
The scale on which Ms. Kasparek stands is the wheel’s latest addition (StuArt found it at the Bolinas Freebox, a community goods exchange). With its pound-measurements face covered in red paint and a pink heart, the scale acts as a platform whereon participants jump up and down to generate “qi,” or energy, the source of the wheel’s fortune-telling power. Ms. Kasparek stands on the scale, waiting.
“Okay,” Bill Bo says. “Give it a spin. She heaves the largest wheel counter-clockwise.
“Jump!” commands Bill Bo, and she starts jumping.
“Don’t forget to breathe!” he advises. “The cranial adaptor is sucking your energy up. It’s all being channeled into the wheel.”
Beneath Ms. Kasparek’s feet, the scale’s dial quivers wildly. Meanwhile, as the big wheel spins, the tarot card slaps against a ring of pegs that encircles the wheel’s outer rim. These pegs apportion the wheel into colorful pie-piece sections, headlined with words like “Money,” “Joker” and “Stuck.” Gradually, the wheel loses momentum and comes to rest on the piece called “Love.”
In action, StuArt’s wheel looks like the “Wheel of Fortune” of the popular game show. Instead of cash prizes, kitchen appliances and cars, the Wheel of Self-Reflection deals in scraps of rolled-up papers that, unfurled, reveal phrases scrawled in StuArt’s calligraphy. As the wheel’s “Cosmologist,” it’s also his job to interpret these phrases—such as “Dig It,” “No Resistance” and “Sweet Nothings.” More often than not, he’s found the messages uncannily apply to the situations or circumstances of participants’ lives.
It’s serendipity, StuArt says, that is the source and soul of life “I think [synchronicity] is the mind of the universe. But I’m still investigating this,” he says.
Expectant, Ms. Kasparek watches as Bill Bo takes the paper from the peg and hands it to her. She reads out loud.
“Puppy Love!” she says, smiling, while her friend Gary Fine, manager of the Palace Market, laughs nearby. Before leaving, she slipped a dollar into an “Alms Box” attached to the wheel’s base. The proceeds went to KWMR.
A benefit evening to help Camp Berlinus get to Burning Man next month starts at 7 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 7 at the Bolinas Community Center, with stories, movies and photos from the group’s past years at the festival.