Stephanie, the Macaw

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 


Sometimes you travel to a place and something happens that defines the core of your journey.  It might be anything – a conversation with a stranger, a view that captures your soul,  an animal that shadows you on the way back to your lodging, a particular food you sample, a dream, a vision,  people you meet.  For me and my introduction to Costa Rica, that special something was Stephanie, the macaw.

I think we first saw her when we were several miles from Arenal Lodge. We had stopped to take photos, each of us heading off in different directions – into trees, to the lip of a cliff – and a light rain was falling. Megan and I ended up in the same spot at some point and we heard the bird’s cries and looked up.

Up high in the trees, sixty or seventy feet up – a bird with a long tail circled through the mist, its cries hauntingly eerie. “It’s a Quetzl bird,” I shrieked.

“What’s that?” Megan asked.

Well, okay, where did that conclusion come from? Something I’d read, no doubt about the rare Quetzl bird sighted in certain parts of Costa Rica.

Megan got out her camera with its zoom lens, but the bird was simply too high to see clearly. When Rob joined us, he took a look and shook his head. “I can’t see it well enough to tell what it is,” he said.

We drove on through the mist, reached the lodge, checked in. That evening before dinner, we stopped by the bar for a drink. It was dusk, the bar was as open as the rest of the lodge, the cool mountain air flowing in. And then we saw it, the Quetzl, shrieking, crying out, making a wide sweep again the hallucinogenic sky. The bird finally settled at the edge of the bar and the bartender quickly cut up some fruit, put it on a plate, and set it on the window for the most beautiful blue and green macaw I’ve ever seen – and I’d never seen one outside of a zoo.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Stephanie,” he replied.

Uh-oh. He had named the bird. When you name a creature in the wild, it means there’s some anthropomorphic stuff going on. You know, the same sort of exchange that occurs daily with the animal companions who share your life. Except that Stephanie was wild. The bartender, who fed her daily, couldn’t touch her. No one could touch her.  But she knew where to come for her fruit plate, her sugar water, to pose for photos. Then I remembered that the only macaw native to Costa Rica are the red variety, not the blue.

“She’s not doing too well,” the bartender said.  “Her mate was killed a few weeks ago. They mate for life, you know.”

For the next three days, every staff member we talked to about Stephanie repeated the same story. Apparently Stephanie and her partner were brought to Costa Rica from Brazil, by the woman who owns the lodge. The owner is Canadian, was married to a Brazilian, and when he died, she inherited the lodge and its 2,000 acres. From what we understand, Stephanie and her partner arrived about six years ago and were set free on the property.

The male was apparently the friendlier of the two, the more trusting, the one who allowed humans to stroke his feathers and who would eat from your hand if you offered something delectable.  One day, he was in or near the closest town of La Fortuna and pecking at some shiny stuff on a car. The owner freaked and hurled something at the male. In Spanish, the word for this is golpear –  a violent blow–  and that blow killed him.

I was so horrified by this story that I plied the bartender with questions. Was this person male or female? A tourist or a local? How did the lodge find out about it? The person who did it was apparently a male tourist. The macaws were well known in the area and a local brought the bird’s body to the lodge and explained what had happened.

“She mourns,” one waiter told us.

“She isn’t like she used to be,” another employee confided.

Megan, of course, kept trying to get Stephanie to take a piece of fruit from her hand, but Stephanie wasn’t having any of it.  Megan did get close enough to run her fingers across Stephanie’s tail feathers.

Every evening after Stephanie had sampled the delicious fruits and sipped from her glass of sugar water, she would flutter over to the railing and gaze out at the volcano, at the utter lushness of this place.  She was listening, watching, alert. You could see something in the way she held herself, body tense, vigilant. I always had the feeling she was waiting for her mate to return.

Rob asked what the synchro is and I can’t find one. But there’s a deeper meaning here. Really, look at that photo, the bird alone on the railing, the only one of her kind in the entire country (so the employees said), facing the dusk and the impending darkness by herself. Stephanie’s story  resonates with the more profound elements in human life, that of loss and redemption, and a hope that perseveres.

Posted in birds, birds as messengers, Costa Rica | 26 Comments

It’s National Synchro Day in the USA

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

No doubt the most patriotic of all American holidays is Independence Day, aka the Fourth of July. Lots of fireworks and barbecues. It was the day the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, hence creating the USA.

Most people don’t realize that the Fourth of July is also a National Synchro Day. Here’s why.

One of the founding fathers and second President of the United States,  John Adams, died on July 4, 1826. That was 50 years to the day after America was born. Just before PresidentAdams died, he muttered, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” The two elder statesman had regularly corresponded with each other in their twilight years.

However, Adams didn’t know that  Jefferson, the third president, actually had died a few hours earlier, also on July 4.

What are the chances that two presidents would die on Independence Day? Before making any calculations, the story isn’t over. The fifth President, James Monroe, also died on July 4 of 1831. So, three of the first five commanders-in-chiefs died on Independence Day.

Clearly, early America was shrouded in mysticism that spanned from the mysterious Freemason pyramid with the eye on the back to one-dollar bill to the mystical elements of architecture of Washington D.C. to the deaths of those three presidents on Independence Day.

 


 

Posted in death, global synchro | 7 Comments

The Kids Are All Right

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

With Megan home this summer, the TV is on more frequently than usual. She’s a true movie buff, this one, who attended an acting school during her high school years and perhaps still entertains this dream of doing movies. At any rate, one of the movies she recorded today was The Kids Are All Right, starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo.

The premise? Two kids of a gay couple, a boy and a girl  conceived by artificial insemination, bring their sperm donor birth father into their family life. Okay, the tag line suggests the movie could be a real joke. But I remembered seeing the trailer and laughing, so we gave it a whirl.

Given the recent turn of events in New York state, where gay couples are now allowed to legally wed and receive the same benefits as heterosexual married couples, this movie couldn’t be more timely. And Bening and Moore are such terrific actresses that you feel as though you are inside these people’s lives, living their angst, uncertainties, doubts. The kids, played by Mia Wasikowska, (Alice in Wonderland) and Joshua Ryan Hutcherson, a pair of Libras born two days and a couple of years apart, are perfectly cast.

So imagine it: you’re a teenager with two moms and you and your brother  are actually half-siblings because you share the same sperm donor. High school is weird enough without having this added complication, right?   One of your moms is a physician (Bening, a control freak) and the other one is still trying to figure out what she’s going to be when she grows up. Julianne Moore studied architecture, but didn’t finish her degree, and is now starting a landscape business. When they meet the sperm Ruffalo (Shutter Island, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) all bets are off.

The movie was nominated for four Oscars and won two Golden Globes. When you watch, you understand why. The raw emotional impact in this movie is shocking. At some point, you forget you’re  watching a movie. When Bening discovers that Moore has been sleeping with Ruffalo, her pain is your pain, the anguish of anyone – male or female – who feels betrayed in a relationship. Her face squishes up in a way that communicates a soul torn open, shredded, beyond salvation.  When Moore apologizes to her family, she does so by muting the TV and announcing she has something to say. Bening is sitting between their son and daughter and her face crumples like  crepe paper as Moore makes her apology.

There are synchronous moments in this movie, but not in the way you expect. A clump of hair in a drain addresses the intimacies of living with  a partner and is the dead giveaway for  Bening’s discovery that Moore is sleeping with Ruffalo.

The teenagers are perfectly cast and communicate what it’s like to be a kid raised by two mothers. One of Megan’s male friends from college had two moms as he was growing up. It sure didn’t hurt his SAT scores, his IQ scores, or anything else about his intelligence or his ambitions. But as we watched the movie, we kept talking about Ross, whom we consider our surrogate son, the kid who is always welcome here, for as long as he wants to stay. When Megan did her month-long internship at Dolphins Plus, she stayed with  Ross’s mom. What does Ross think of the movie? We don’t know yet.

The traditional family of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best and the Donna Reed Show are dead. That was the 1950s, when fewer than 50% of women worked, when the Cold War raged, Russia was our arch enemy, and China was some backward Communist country.

The Kids Are All Right is the new norm. Even the blah title tells you that. The world and its paradigms are in flux, the family is redefining itself,  and the fact that New York has recognized same sex marriage  is a game changer. And yet, you still have the Repugs up there in front of the cameras, raging about how gay marriage will undermine the  American family.

Eventually, these Repugs will die off, their silly arguments will vanish in the dark corridors of other silly arguments, and Megan’s generation will assume the helm.  And her generation does not recognize differences in skin color,  sexual orientation, religious biases or anything else. They are the true egalitarians. Live and let live, that’s  their motto. They not only believe it, they  actually live it.

 

 

Posted in movies, politics | 14 Comments

Inside Out and the Green Frog with Red Eyes

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Costa Rica frog

Daz, who lives in Australia, experiences synchronicity frequently, which you can read about on his blog. Whenever he sends one of them to us, we’re always astonished at how his synchros are like cascading dominoes, with one collapsing into another.  In this synchro, you’ll see it.

+++

The other day I read your Costa Rica post and saw the green frog with the red eyes, and thought how weird it looked. Because over here we have green tree frogs that look similar, but don’t have red eyes. It’s the red eyes that really struck me, I couldn’t remember seeing a green frog with red eyes.

Anyway, I went grocery shopping with my wife and was aisles ahead of her, so I started reading the magazines in the magazine section of the store while she caught up. I picked up a mag called “Inside Out,” flicked through it, but couldn’t decide if it would make any difference to my life if I bought it or not. So I thought, If I flick through again and find a synchronicity somewhere in the pages, I’ll buy it. That’s when I came across the second photo of a frog with red eyes within three hours of seeing the one on your blog.  Needless to say I now own the magazine.

The frog Daz found in the magazine, which appears to be a general decorating  magazine for home projects:

 

Posted in Costa Rica, frogs | 5 Comments

Solar Eclipse: July 1, 2011

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

Eclipses are weird – not just in the science of what happens, but in the effects they have on us here on Earth. A solar eclipse, which happens only on the new moon, is when the moon passes between the sun and the earth. A lunar eclipse, which occurs only at a full moon,  is when the moon passes behind the earth, so the earth blocks the sun’s light from hitting the moon. Can you visualize that? I can’t.

Solar eclipses tend to concern external events and often represent new opportunities according to the sign and house place of the sun in our birth charts. Sometimes with  SEs, we have to give up or surrender something before we receive whatever the eclipses promises. Lunar eclipses revolve around internal events, emotions, culminations.

On June 1, we had a solar eclipse in Gemini, followed two weeks later by a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius. These two eclipses were positive eclipses. The solar eclipse in Cancer on July 1 may be a bit more problematic. This one forms a cardinal cross and it’s easier to visualize: t.  The t can be arranged in any direction. Like this: |— (with that dotted line solid) or —| or with the long part of the T facing up. It’s called a cardinal cross because the aspects among these planets occurs in cardinal signs – sun and moon in Cancer (water), Uranus in Aries (fire),  Saturn in air sign Libra, and Pluto in earth sign Capricorn.

Cardinal signs indicate the beginning of every season. They are initiators. So you can expect big changes in your life, which will be as positive or negative as you make them. These changes will be triggered by an external event. Even though the event will be as irritating as a grain of sand in your eye, just remember that we, the people, still exert more power collectively than any group of politicians.  Through networking, we empower each other. We have to tend to our families, make sure that we are as sustainable as we can be, given where we live and what we do. We must not be afraid to take risks. Regardless of the time we have left on the planet, a day or 80 years, goals are important. They focus our desires.

This eclipse falls in my natal ninth house of publishing, which makes me a bit uneasy since the  paperback for Esperanza just came out, and sometimes the effects of an eclipse can be felt several days before the actual event. The other day, a Google alert came up for Esperanza. I clicked the link and it led me to a pirate site, where Esperanza was available for free download.

I didn’t want to jump the gun on it, so I sent the link to my editor and asked if she knew anything about the site. She said it was a pirate site – i.e., copyright infringement – and that I should send them a DMCA takedown notice.

I had to Google it to find out what to do and decided to send an email first to the site administrator. Within a few minutes, the administrator wrote back to tell me the link had been removed. So it all turned out fine. Meanwhile, my editor sent the link to the publisher’s legal department.

For more information on this eclipse – and the month of July – take a look at astrologer  Susan Miller’s excellent site. Click your sign and read away.

 

 

 

Posted in solar eclipse | 17 Comments

The $137,000 Snafu

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Trish and Rob

The one thing you can count on during the presidential campaign season is  global synchronicities.  This one is about Republican candidate Michele Bachmann, whose  ignorance of American history is appalling. She thinks, for instance, that  the founding fathers abolished slavery. She’s against all forms of social programs – Medicare, the health program for seniors, and Medicaid, the health program for the poor.

Yet, her husband’s mental health clinic in Minnesota accepted Medicaid payments for more than $137,000. Marcus Bachmann is president of the clinic. When we heard this on the radio during our drive to the dog park this afternoon, I burst out laughing. $137,000? She’s  history. Here’s why I think so.

Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel laureate and one of the early supports of Jung’s theories about synchronicity, wrestled with the  implications of 137 for most of his life. It’s a prime number that can be divided by 1 and by itself. Or, put another way, a prime number is a positive integer that can’t equal the product of two smaller numbers. That makes 137 a prime number and a particularly baffling one. In Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, Arthur I. Miller refers to this number as the “DNA of light.”

When Pauli was admitted to the hospital at age 58 and learned he would be in room 137, he supposedly said, “I will never get out of here.” He was right. He died shortly afterward.

So 137 – the DNA of light– has exposed Bachman for the hypocrite she is. My remark to Rob was, “She’s toast. That’s Pauli’s death number.”

 

Posted in 137, politics | 19 Comments

More Travel Synchros

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Trish and Rob
Traveling, as we’ve often said, seems to attract synchros, and our recent trip to Costa Rica was no exception. One that startled and surprised us took place in Santa Elena, a small village in the Monte Verde cloud forest. Trish had been considering using the village as a site in her next novel in the Esperanza series. We were paying attention to details in the village, so much attention that we nearly missed a synchro that stood out in bold letters.

On our third day in town Trish suddenly stopped in the middle of the street. We were a block from our hotel. She stared in silence for a moment, then hurried across the street as an SUV raced our way.
“Did you see it?” she asked. “How could we have missed it?”

“Missed what?”

“Go back and take a look at the sign right next to the market.” I stepped out into the street, and there it was. I’d missed it, too. In large letters above a shop were the words: SOUVENIRS – ESPERANZA.
Then there’s the fog that rolls in like clockwork every afternoon, eerily reminiscent of the fog in Esperanza.
***
Another synchro involved yoga. We were at the counter in the market next to the Esperanza shop when a woman in line next to us said hello. I noticed she was wearing a black t-shirt that said Namaste.

I turned to Trish and said, “She’s wearing your t-shirt.” Trish has one just like it.

The woman smiled, then turned and said, “Does yours have wings?” Her shirt had angel wings painted on the back.
We started talking and it turned out she and her husband owned a yoga studio 2 km away. I mentioned  I was a yoga teacher and she invited me to the studio. I went later in the afternoon and practiced on my own. It was a beautiful studio in the cloud forest. Before I left, she offered me a chance to teach classes there in exchange for a small house where we could stay while visiting. Wow!

We might take her up on the offer. Like attracts like.

***
During our week away, I read two novels, Siren’s Song, by Kent Holloway, and Pirate Latitudes, by Michael Crichton. Siren’s Song is a tale about a secretive outfit called ENIGMA  that  hunts mythological sea monsters that have come to life complete with hi-tech implants. I would go back and forth between books, which got somewhat confusing when the pirates encountered a sea monster, the mythical kraken. It was as if the two sea tales temporarily merged.  More like attracts like.
***
Finally, as authors of two synchronicity books and this synchro blog, I can’t overlook our golden scarab story. As many of you know, the golden scarab was at the heart of the most famous tale of synchronicity told by Carl Jung, who recognized the importance of meaningful coincidence and was even encouraged by Albert Einstein to pursue his idea. (Einstein, according to Jung, said synchronicity was fully compatible with the new discoveries in physics.)
One of his Jung’s clients was resistant to psychotherapy and the notion of transpersonal realities. During the analysis of one of her dreams that featured a golden scarab, Jung related the mythical meaning of the scarab beetle, but to no avail. They’d reached an impasse, when Jung heard a sound of something striking the window. He walked over and found a shiny rose chafer beetle, the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that was found in his region. He caught the beetle, showed it to his client, and the synchronicity was the turning point in the therapy for the woman.
So one day in Costa Rica, while taking an early morning walk through a rain forest, we came upon a butterfly sanctuary. While looking at a rack holding a variety of cocoons and chrysalises, a man who worked there showed us several dead beetles that he had collected and saved. Two of them were golden scarabs. I arranged them on a palm leaf as if they were holding a meeting.

 

Posted in Costa Rica, esperanza, yoga | 25 Comments

Our book report…

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Time for a little self-promotion. We’ve got new stuff coming out this summer and into the fall. Just yesterday, the paperback edition of Esperanza was released, and a box of books arrived at our door.

Next week the paperback edition of The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity comes out, and along with it will arrive The Synchronicity Journal, where you can collect your synchros.

In August, we’ve got two new books coming out including our second synchronicity book, Synchronicity and the Other Side. Plus, Rob’s novel Time Catcher, featuring anthropologist Will Lansa, will be published in both print and digital. In late September, Double Heart, another Will Lansa novel (a prequel to Time Catcher) will be published.

Just to make sure the books sell well, we’re calling upon the power of the golden scarab. Here he is, photographed by Rob in Costa Rica.

Posted in books, Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Ghost Buster

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Trish and Rob

About three months ago,   a writer friend asked if Rob and I could visit and do her and her family a big favor. She explained that her middle daughter, L, has been experiencing ghostly encounters in her room at night, and she won’t sleep in the room any longer. L also insisted that Trish was the only person who could rid her room of the ghost.  We first wrote about it here.

I’ve never tried to banish any spirit to anywhere, probably because I’ve never had the need to do so. However, in preparation for this, I solicited advice from friends who are psychics/mediums, read up on the subject, and came up with a technique I felt might work. Belief seemed to be a huge component in this picture – L’s beliefs. The above drawing, in fact, is her depiction of what she has seen in her room. Creepy little sucker, isn’t it?

The ghost busting venture finally came to pass. First, Rob took photos in L’s room and in different areas of the house where everyone in the family had felt a presence – the bathroom off the guest room where we were sleeping, and in the youngest daughter’s bedroom. Nothing showed up on the digital pictures.

We saged everyone out on the porch,  taking turns, arms extended, legs spread. We jokingly referred to it as the TSA position. I also told L I’d never done anything like this before, that it was as much an experiment for me as it was for her. She’s an old soul, this one, and understood that I was grappling in the dark, just as she was, that it was a joint venture into the unknown. But she joked, “Gee, great. That’s a vote of confidence.”

L’s mom has a gorgeous Salvator Dali tarot deck, so I pulled out the 22 major arcana cards,  fanned them out, and asked L to draw four, to represent the four directions. Her selections: The Magician for the north, the Empress for the south, the Star for the east, Justice for the west.  I used tarot cards because it’s how L and I initially connected. She was interested in the tarot, so I had sent her a copy of the book on the tarot that I co-authored with Phyllis Vega.

The flash on my camera obscured the top card and I had to Google the image to find it.   After she’d chosen the cards, I removed the stones I had brought out along – a large rose quartz and a large amethyst. L laughed and showed me her selections – a piece of rose quartz and an amethyst, smaller, but the same stones.  We knew we were on a synchronistic roll.

In her room, I drew a circle on her floor with white chalk. We placed the tarot cards at the appropriate directions. In the center of the circle went out stones, a candle, , holy water from the Vatican that L and her family had brought back from a trip to Rome, a rosary, sage for smudging.

L’s mom had prayers and blessings to say. L and I stepped into the circle. It wasn’t large enough to include her mom (the room was crowded with stuff), so mom sat just outside the circle and the three of us  held hands and visualized a white dome of protection around us. Then we said the Lord’s Prayer.

I should note that we aren’t traditionally religious people, that none of us adhere to any particular religious belief, but we recognize that certain rituals are powerful statements. The holy water and rosary, for example, were L’s choices, symbols that are meaningful to her, so we used them. Since Mom had some prayers that were meaningful to her and L, we used those, too.

Once this was done, I told L I was going to step outside the circle, smudge the room with sage, and bless the room with the holy water. While I was doing that, I asked her to  bow to each direction, hands pressed together, touching the center of her chest, the Namaste salutation in yoga. The divine light in me recognizes the divine light in you. I also said that while she was doing these salutations, she should ask the spirit/ghost to move on, that it had nothing to fear in the after life, that it wasn’t welcome in her room, this house.  While I saged and sprinkled the holy water around the room, I silently told the spirit it was time to move on.

We repeated these rituals in the younger daughter’s room and in the guest bathroom.  I saged every inch of the house, sprinkled windows and doors with the holy water. I never felt a presence in the house, never felt threatened or intimidated by anything unseen. This led me to believe that the spirit L had seen was drawn to her because of puberty, her psychic energy, to awaken her to her own intuitive ability.

That night, for the first time in eight months, L slept in her bedroom – with all the lights on.  But as her mother noted, “She’s in there. That’s what is important.”

So, we’ll see.

PS It’s now late June, six weeks later, and L is still sleeping in her room, but with the light on. I wonder if I can add ghost-busting to my resume.

 

 

Posted in ghosts, tarot | 29 Comments

The Tree

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Trish and Rob

I found this on Brizdaz’s blog and wow, is the trailer powerful. One more must see!

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments