The New Normal

New Normal After Coronavirus. New normal road sign. Horizontal composition with copy space. Global Health and COVID-19 pandemic concept.

In a world of – what? 7.9 billion people? – what would constitute critical mass for a paradigm shift? Half of that figure? Two-thirds? Seventy-five percent?

Since we started our podcast, The Mystical Underground, in February 2020, the consensus of our guests seems to be that we are in the midst of a chaotic paradigm shift.You can see it everywhere – in the politics of Covid, in the politics of politics, in industries that are radically changing or are defunct. We’ve heard all kinds of stories. The veil between the living and the dead is thinning, human/alien contact isn’t just happening, but new knowledge is emerging as a result. Some say that trump was a catalyst for this shift, that the war between Russian and the Ukraine is one of the repercussions, and that climate change isn’t just real, but is happening now.

Each of us has an opinion about these events. But the bottom line is that the pandemic changed, well, just about everything.

A lot of us went stir crazy. Others loved the solitude. Most of us just wanted to get back to normal – but no longer know what normal is.

Pre-pandemic, my ideal normal day used to be hit the gym in the morning, go to work, watch news or something else in the evenings, work until one or so and go to bed. In between, my normal included taking the dogs to the dog park, eating out with friends, traveling to Orlando to see our daughter, and at least one, preferably foreign, trip a year.

Well, I haven’t been anywhere foreign since a great trip to Colombia in 2018 and a fantastic visit to Cuba in 2017 . Because of the changing Covid restrictions, I didn’t want to get stuck somewhere. In 2021, we visited Whitefish, Montana for work. Beautiful landscape and the people we were visiting were terrific. But Montana isn’t ethnically diverse like South Florida. It’s a pocket of white nationalism. It’s also incredibly cold, even in May, so forget ever living there.

My normal now, as the pandemic ebbs, is that I do a lot of ghostwriting, have finished a novel – White Crows, which will be released on May 24 – and a non-fiction book Rob and I wrote  coming out later this year. The Shift: Reports from the Mystical Underground. The podcast is definitely part of my new normal and thanks to our guests, has introduced me to an ever expanding world of ideas.

I also joined a synchronicity group that is part of my new normal. It’s headed by Bernard Beitman, University of Virginia professor of psychiatry and author of two books on coincidence – synchronicity. The people he has gathered together for the Zoom meetups each month includes individuals from Australia and Europe and the U.S. Some are academics, most are authors. Bernie’s goal is to spread the concept of synchronicity worldwide. No one has used that term yet, but that’s what this is.

One segment of our podcast each month is my astrology column for the 12 signs. Writing it keeps me current and, hopefully, it enables others to plan a month more carefully.

Recently, for instance, a friend said she and her husband were leaving for the summer, going back to Maine on April 30. There’s a solar eclipse in Taurus on that day, I advised her to choose a date after that, sometime in May. Its not that solar eclipses are necessarily bad for travel, but that I know my friend and her husband are sensitive to astro events. A few years back, he had cataract surgery scheduled during a Mercury retrograde and I advised him to change the date to some point when the retro was finished. But he couldn’t change the date and ended up needing one eye redone.

My new normal now involves a lot of change that has evolved from the changes in my outer world.

What’s your new normal?