ART BY MEGAN MACGREGOR
Recently, I was experiencing a synchronicity dry spell. I’d been too caught up in the minutia of living, so there may have been synchros I didn’t notice. I was thinking about it and realized there was a biggie that I’d overlooked.
On February 12, Megan’s dog, Nika, died. She moved in with us right before the pandemic and through the years would spend weeks at a time with us. We joked that we had joint custody. But during the last several years, our home was her home. She and Nigel were companions. She had buddies at the dog park we go to daily. She was a joy and Nigel loved her.
The day of her death was devastating.
It quickly became obvious that Nigel was lonely. The cats noticed Nika’s absence. A couple weeks later, I was going through files in my computer, and saving or deleting the ones I no longer needed. I ran across a novel I’d started in 2020, early in the pandemic, and hadn’t finished. So I opened it and started reading.
The working title was Nika & Noah, a Love Story, which has since changed to The Experiment. Noah was the golden we had when Nika was just a pup. He pretty much trained her. He was also Nigel’s mentor and died when Nigel was two. As I read through it, I realized I liked the story and knew how to develop it now.
The state of Florida – now ruled by an autocratic government that has banned all religions except Christianity, undertaken a war on books, trans people, people of color, and has decided what children can and can’t be taught in schools has now met its climate change changes in a major way. South Florida is underwater. The east and west coasts of Florida have pretty much vanished due to rising oceans, Disney World has moved back to California (supposedly is going to happen) and just some pathetic remnants exist. There’s a high corridor of land just south of what was Disney through central Florida to the borders of Georgia and Alabama.
A lab in Orlando that used to belong to Disney is now owned by the government. Here, experiments are carried out on certain animals to enhance their abilities so they can be used as weapons. The way the story is evolving means that I can describe the impact of DeSantis’s extreme right wing bills that are turning Florida into an autocracy and put Nika’s death into a context that heals.
When I started writing part 2, clueless about where to go, my favorite characters, psychic Mira Morales and her husband, FBI agent Wayne Sheppard, sneaked in. And that’s when I really understood the story as a sequel to my last Mira book, White Crows.
Creativity often acts as the trigger for synchronicity. Now, once again, it has become my haven. So on days when I don’t experience a synchronicity, that magic that transforms the way you see the world and yourself in it, I return to the novel. I’m now 175 pages into it and love playing with the characters lives in apocalyptic Florida.
Unfortunately, the Florida I’ve described may not be that far in the future if DeSantis remains governor or – I shudder at the thought – wins the presidency. Given the negative press he’s getting and his lack of personality, the presidency for him seems distant.
Then again, when Trump ran in 2016, I didn’t think he’d win. So we never know. In a sense, the novel is my buffer against the headlines on any given day.
I agree that creativity does seem to open a portal to synchronicity……….. maybe creativity exists in that liminal zone where unseen “collaborators” can interact with us. So I’ve sometimes thought.