These days, it takes time to plan a getaway. Whether your travel is by car or air, you need a destination.
And one by one, our destinations for a road trip appeared last May. Mercury was still retrograde when I started planning this road trip, and now that we’re on the other side of it, I realize I would have planned differently. By my probably terrible calculations, the trip covered nearly 1800 miles. We went from: Wellington – Orlando-Marietta Georgia, Blue Ridge Georgia – Asheville, Seven Devils, Charleston SC, Orlando to Wellington. You begin to feel as if you and the car at joined at the hip.
In each of these places, we intended to visit with family and friends we haven’t seen for awhile. In Orlando, there was Megan. Synchronicities fly around when we’re at her place, and this time it involved the updated agent query for her novel, The Dark Silence. We loved it.
In Marietta at my sister’s place, we got together with my youngest nephew and his girlfriend, prototypes of Bradbury’s Illustrated Man ( and woman). They’re moving into a new tattoo salon and the front room is reserved for a tarot reader. I have an open invitation.
In Blue Ridge, Georgia my sister and I went shopping while the guys played Frisbee Golf. We talked about the various synchronicities that had defined our lives. Both of us bought a carved wooden hand. We liked the symbolism, a life open to receiving.
From Blue Ridge we drove to Asheville, North Carolina, where our friend Cassie manages the horses and stables at the Biltmore Hotel. She’s a sister Gemini and lived with us for a couple of equestrian seasons with her two dogs. Like us, she’s entertaining the idea of moving elsewhere if the repugs sweep the senate and house in 2022, paving the way for another term of trump or one of his clones, like Florida’s governor, deathsantis.
After lunch, we stopped by Cassie’s cool place on the Biltmore property, then drove on to the Boone area to visit Hilary and Jeff, writer friends from Florida who moved to NC several years ago. What I love about these two is the ease. We talk about publishing, the triumphs and travails and weirdness of it all. We talk about our kids, their plans and weddings and dreams, and we talk about the books and stories we have yet to write. Synchronicity is woven into all of this.
In Charleston, we checked into the airbnb I’d reserved. Nancy Pickard showed up minutes later and she was barely out of the car when we threw our arms around each other. It had been at least a decade.
We first met in 1985, when she and her then husband spent winters in Fort Lauderdale and she came to the first signing for my first book, In Shadow. We discovered we’d both read Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts and loved tossing the I Ching, and have been friends ever since.
After spending most of her life in Kansas, Nancy moved to Charleston as the result of synchronicity, and loves living there. She showed us around for dinner and breakfast the next morning, we inadvertently found a great dog park on the beach, and the squirrels were in rare form, tantalizing the dogs. Reconnecting with her was wonderful.
At each of these junctures, my appreciation of reconnection deepened. Yes, we are independent beings. But we’re also interconnected and synchronicity often shows us just how that works.
