Welcome to The Mystical Underground

See that white border that extends over South Florida? It’s the dreaded “cone of uncertainty” that all South Floridians recognize. Maybe, for us, it’s an archetype that warns us to pay close attention. This cone belongs  to Hurricane Rina, forecast to become a category 3 storm tonight, with winds in excess of 111 mph.

Six years ago today, another late season hurricane – Wilma – hit South Florida.It had weakened by the time it passed over the peninsula,  but at its height, was a category 5 hurricane, with winds in excess of 155 mph, and the most intense hurricane ever. Her barometric  pressure was 882 millibars.  When it stalled over our town, it was supposedly a category 1, but at one point our front door threatened to pop out of its frame. We wrote about it here.

I don’t like these late season hurricanes. They’re often tricksters, like Wilma was. With just a month left to hurricane season (November 30 is the official end of the season) people have grown complacent and cocky. Hey, we got through another season with no hurricane. That’s six years now.

So after I looked at the 11 PM forecast tonight at the National Hurricane Center’s site, I felt…uneasy.  One forecast model brings this storm over South Florida, just south of Miami. I turned to my usual online I Ching site and asked if Hurricane Rina would hit us. I’m not too happy about the hexagrams I got: number 21, Biting Through, with 4 changing lines -1, 2,3, 4.

On 21, from the Richard Wilhelm version: “This hexagram represents an open mouth with an obstruction between the teeth. As a result,  the lips cannot meet. To bring them together, one must bite energetically through the obstacle.”

The four changing lines address feet fastened in stocks, a nose vanishing, something poisonous, and biting down on dried, grisly meat. Not of this is particularly good. It brings back memories of other hurricane seasons, particularly the aftermath when there was no power, the heat was awful, and no stores or gas stations were open. Our generator, bought in 2005 and still  in the box, can power perhaps one appliance and a couple of lamps.

With these changing lines, the hexagram changes to one of my least favorite in the I Ching: hexagram 18, Work on What Has Been Spoiled. “We must not recoil from work and danger – but must take hold energetically.”

Yeah, ok. Batten down the hatches, then get busy for the cleanup in the aftermath.

But when you look at the potential path of this hurricane, there’s a chance it moves through the 90 miles of open water between Cuba and South Florida and out into the Atlantic. That’s our hope.

Honestly, I think it’s time to move elsewhere.

We recently watched a movie in which a character was named Mikey. That’s a little kid’s name made famous in an old cereal commercial, ‘Look Mikey likes it!’ In this movie, the character, a 22-year-old, actually introduced himself by that name. Supposedly, it made him lovable, though immature.

That character brought up a memory of another Mikey from our past. At first, the nickname was said fondly, later, sarcastically. This Mikey was a former NASA engineer who gave up his stable job after the Challenger disaster and was living in his VW van. He worked as a handy man and would not only fix what we asked, but go out of his way to repair other things, usually without asking for pay. He would house-sit, though he preferred to sleep in his van in the driveway.

He became a friend and would hang around for weeks, then disappear for weeks or months, only to return and tell us stories of meeting celebrities while working as an extra on movies. We once saw him sweeping the floor in a movie and nearly fell off the couch laughing. He also did a lot of volunteer work with animal and environmental groups. Even though he was well qualified for a lot of regular, well paying jobs and was offered full-time work on occasion, he rejected that life, preferring his vagabond style.

Our relationship with him worked out fairly well for years. Mikey was incredibly adept at fixing anything and saved us money, or so it seemed. He was also good with older people serving as a companion and helper. Trish’s father really liked him.

That was the good Mikey. He was a friend, and a lot of help. Later, the other Mikey took shape, one that gradually shifted from being a helper to a self-appointed ‘manager.’ We noticed that he would no longer do what we asked,  but do other things around the house that he thought were more important. He would also leave a lot of his stuff in our garage. Then he started telling us what needed to be done, attempting to run our lives.

Well, that didn’t last. We realized that we had created a monster, we were depending so much on his help – especially with Trish’s parents – that he was taking advantage of us. He was living off us and bossing us around. But we didn’t become freelance writers in order to hire a boss. So we told him to leave and lost a friend, who was no longer a friend, but an annoying pest.

It was a great relief to have him out of our lives. Then, months later, I started thinking that I was going to encounter him somewhere. I figured it would be at Home Depot. He would be working in someone else’s home and buying supplies. In fact, after one of the hurricanes I thought I spotted him from a distance in Lowe’s.  Then he was gone.

A couple more years passed. I still thought of him from time to time and without exception was glad he was out of our lives. Then one day I ran into him face to face in the most unlikely location.

A friend and I were on a three-day wilderness hike in a rural corner of Palm Beach County. It was mid-morning on the third day and we hadn’t encountered any other people since early on our first day. The trail led out of the forest and across a meadow. But because of heavy rains, the trail was flooded. We stood at the edge of a small lake and looked across to the forest where the trail began again about a hundred yards away.

We heard voices coming from the woods as we stepped into the shallow waters that rose quickly to our calves. One voice grew louder, cracking jokes, including one about alligators pursuing the two guys coming across the meadow. The voice sounded familiar and  I looked up to see three men slogging toward us. The guy in the lead with the loud voice was Mikey. My hiking partner, another Rob, recognized him before I did. He had worked for both of us. So there we all were in the center of soggy meadow, water nearly to our knees.

We talked for a few minutes. Mikey and the others were working on trail repair for the Florida Trail Association. He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him. We talked about getting together, though we both knew it would never happen. Trish and I didn’t want to take a chance at re-opening that door. After that surprising, but long awaited encounter,  he fell off my radar. Since then, I’ve rarely thought about him…until another Mikey showed up in a movie.

The southwest somewhere, 1992. Trish, her parents, and a young Megan

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Regardless of our relationship with our parents or whether they have passed on or are still alive, it seems important  to look at the synchronistic dynamics  of what we, their children,  gained by choosing them as parents. Or vice versa. Each of us has vivid memories – pictographs, moments frozen in time – of these people we call mom and dad.

Carl Jung, in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, writes at length about his relationship with his mother, his psychic bonds with her, but I don’t recall much of what he said about his father. Jung’s mother was apparently the dominant force in his life as a child – and as an adult. Her archetype was the venue through which he began his psychic explorations.

For me, my dad was that archetype.  I adored my mother, she was awesome and caring and a true guiding light; but my dad understood the mystical underpinnings of my life.

I remember when I was 17, I was holed up in my room and trying to do astrology charts by hand, with a calculator, and it was such a joke since I am not math oriented. My dad stopped by and saw what I was doing and said, “Your grandfather was really into astrology.” His father, in other words, who died long before I was born. It was his way of saying he got it.

When I was maybe 12, we were living in Venezuela, and the American newspaper ran a contest: whoever wrote the best essay about why Henry Clay was a famous American would win a dog. I really wanted that dog. It was my dad who edited my essay, who made suggestions, and yeah, I won that dog, a German shepherd puppy. Never mind that I later found out Henry Clay was a guy I wouldn’t have voted for.

When my first novel was published in 1984, my mother read the book and loved it, but was mortified by the sex scenes. My dad, an accountant by profession, never commented on the sex scenes, but started an accounting record of the sales and checked it regularly against the royalty statements. He, like me, hated the cover of the book. “Your antagonist  isn’t wearing a suit and tie when he kills these women,” he exclaimed. “Not in Florida.”

When Rob and I started writing for Omni Magazine in our early freelance days, my dad read the magazine from  cover to cover and in one issue, took the magazine’s Mensa I.Q. test, which led to his  eventually being admitted to MENSA, the high I.Q. society. I don’t think my mother read too many of our articles  in OMNI. What we wrote about just didn’t fit into her belief system

But my dad read everything, even the UFO pieces.  He clipped the articles, created a scrapbook that I found the other day, stowed away on a shelf in a closet in what had been his bedroom. He understood me in a way that my mother simply  couldn’t. It wasn’t a failing on her part, but just that her particular belief system couldn’t accommodate my interests.  I don’t think my dad’s belief system could accommodate these interests, either. But he possessed something  that enabled him to explore, to ask questions, to push beyond his comfort zone.

When Megan was born, neither Rob nor I were spring chickens. But my parents used to arrive at our house on weekends to take Megan out so we would have some time to work. My dad was hunched over, my mother used a cane. But whenever they arrived, Megan knew she was headed somewhere cool and we all knew she would wear them out in a few hours. Yet, when they arrived back at the house, both of them seemed younger and more vibrant. Megan was the one who was exhausted.

“She’s sharp,” my dad said after one of those visits. “She’s curious, like you are. She’s resolute, like Rob. She’ll make you two proud.”

In the final months of his life, when he was in an assisted living facility in Georgia and I was visiting once a month, I brought him a DVD my friend Carol Bowman had sent me.  I’ve written about this before, but the story is important in that it illustrates how our beliefs can change in a split second through something we read, hear, experience.

It was about a case she was researching and 20/20 had covered it. During the three years that my dad lived with Rob, Megan and me, he probably got more than his share of New Age ideas. But after viewing the James Leininger   piece on reincarnation, the DVD Carol had sent me, he wept. “Its the most convincing material I’ve ever seen about reincarnation,” he said.

Several  months later, he released  his hold on life and passed on. He was almost 92. Today, October 20, 2011, he would have been 98. Happy birthday, Buddy, and thank you for choosing me as one of your daughters.

I mean, really. Who can resist a three-year-old activist who holds a sign saying he’s part of the 99 percent?

His mom, Jen, gave us permission to use his photo. Here’s what she had to say.

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Well done, Jen!

Back in my college days, I had a friend named Jeff, who lived next door and worked on campus in the university hospital at a menial job. He wasn’t a student, had never gone to college, but he was bright and well read. He’d gotten drafted, sent to Vietnam, and deserted. He made his way to India, where he lived awhile, before returning to the States, and facing the consequences of his actions.

He accepted everything that occurred in his life, every relationship, every positive event, every negative event as if it were meant to happen.  He talked about his time in India as an important learning experience. But when I asked him if he would like to go back, he said that it didn’t matter whether he was here or somewhere else. “Wherever you go, there you are. You still have to face yourself. The only way to change is by going within.”

I thought of Jeff the other day when I noticed something called The Four Principles of Indian Spirituality that had been posted in the comment section on Marcus Anthony’s blog. The principles are somewhat fatalistic, just as I found Jeff’s beliefs. Yet, the concepts  well worth considering, especially because they suggest an underlying reality that exists beyond our everyday world. In essence, while cause and effect and free will are the order of  our normal reality, the principles suggest that neither necessarily apply on the deeper level of existence. -R

The First Principle states: “Whomsoever you encounter is the right one.”
This means that no one comes into our life by chance. Everyone who is around us, anyone with whom we interact, represents something, whether to teach us something or to help us improve a current situation.

The Second Principle states: “Whatever happened is the only thing that could have happened.”
Nothing, absolutely nothing of that which we experienced could have been any other way. Not even in the least important detail. There is no “If only I had done that differently…, then it would have been different…” No. What happened is the only thing that could have taken place and must have taken place for us to learn our lesson in order to move forward. Every single situation in life, which we encounter, is absolutely perfect, even when it defies our understanding and our ego.

The Third Principle states: “Each moment in which something begins is the right moment.”
Everything begins at exactly the right moment, neither earlier nor later. When we are ready for it, for that something new in our life, it is there, ready to begin.

This is the Fourth Principle, the final one: “What is over, is over.”
It is that simple. When something in our life ends, it helps our evolution. That is why, enriched by the recent experience, it is better to let go and move on.
 I think it is no coincidence that you’re here reading this.
If these words strike a chord, it’s because you meet the requirements and understand that not one single snowflake falls accidentally in the wrong place!

Be good to yourself.

Love with your whole being.

Always be happy