Welcome to The Mystical Underground

This is a scary story about a stalker. Having been the target of one, we can sympathize. Because this stalker is still on the loose and threatening the life of his target, we’re not using names, not even the name of the person who related this story. We do, however, use the name of St. Jude, who we’ve written about here, and who again comes into a story as a synchronicity–a connection between a deeper reality and our often crazy everyday world.

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“A friend of mine has been seriously stalked for some months now. It began on Facebook and e-mail. So she gave up all social networking, but the stalking continues through the mail for months. Twice a week she would receive notes sent to her business and home addresses.

“She employs 28 people in her business and this week the stalker wrote to many on the staff. Posing as the woman and forging her signature, the stalker told the staff that they all would get terrific salary raises and bonuses!

“More sinister, though, is the fact that the stalking has escalated to include  death threats sent to her home address. The stalker knows the names of all her family and her two dogs. He always names the dogs and posts their photos, along with photos of family members, which were taken from her FB page.

“Her father is a close friend of mine and as you can imagine is beside himself with worry. So today I recommended petitioning Saint Jude for help. He replied he had a visit from a child called Jude yesterday and had been playing Hey Jude last night. And then I came along and mentioned the name. So he’s going to try it.

“The police are involved and now are taking it most seriously. However, they are unable to trace the post marks on the envelopes because the post office doesn’t stamp letters that way anymore. So all the letters pass through a big city for sorting, regardless of which town they were posted in locally.

“This young woman is also a friend of mine. It’s interesting that a clairvoyant we both use told her as soon as she walked in that she was being stalked and letters would start arriving at her home and business addresses. The clairvoyant thought there are two people involved, but had no more to offer.

The latest threat involved a collage created on a computer that showed a coffin and a party going on around it. The message with it said: “You’re your funeral party!’

“Meanwhile, her father performed his first invocation to St. Jude. Afterwards, he texted a friend and the predictive text that appeared spelled Jude, which wasn’t even close to the word he was texting. He and a friend had just read a book about the Beatles and were texting in ‘John Lennon speak,’ when he used the term ‘luff,’ which generated Jude – the Lennon song.

Certainly it served as confirmation. He seems plugged into the right frequency. My cards suggest divine intervention in this situation. I can only hope they are right!

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Apparently, the young woman has no idea who is stalking her, which must make it even more frightening and frustrating. In our case, we were able to track down the stalker. But when we confronted him, via e-mail, he called the police and reported that we were stalking him! That was after he had destroyed three of our computers, let us know he knew our address, and threatened to come after us. We could’ve used help from St. Jude at that point. But we received help from another source, and once the FBI’s Internet division took an interest, he immediately ‘un-stalked’ us…and stalked away elsewhere.

 Our daughter, Megan will be teaching her second paint night class tonight, at a bar in downtown Orlando. Tonight’s painting will be the image depicted above.

So last night, Rob and I were her test students on whom she tried out her particular teaching technique for this painting.  Usually, the students have paper plates that serve as palettes. Since we didn’t have any paper plates, we used pieces of aluminum foil. We had four basic colors: black, yellow, red, blue.  We each had three brushes with tips that were small, medium, and large; a Styrofoam cup filled with water water to clean the brushes; and copious amounts of paper towels.

First, we started with the background – a sunset. The top half of the canvas was a mixture of red and yellow to create a vibrant orange that gradually melted into a soft butter yellow, a bit of green, and purpose to suggest shadows.

The tricky parts were, well, the rest of it – the elephants in silhouette with their trunks forming the heart.  Megan wisely broke the elephants down into shapes and advised us to do the shape in yellow or red, so we could blend our mistakes into the background.

We had a big mistake with our original hearts. They were too big and didn’t leave enough room for the elephants. We blended our mistakes into the backgrounds and started over.  “Go midway across the canvas,” Megan said. “Go down the length of your index finger, and on the left hand side of the canvas, go in a hand width in and leave a drop of paint. Go down a knuckle on your index finger and leave a second dot directly beneath the first one. Now, create the outline of a heart, starting with the uppermost dot and ending at the lower dot.”

Done.

From this point, she broke down the elephants into shapes – rectangles, trapezoids, Cs, straight lines at angles.

Once we had all the shapes, we began filling in the lines with black – the silhouette effect.

And wow! I’m much happier with my version of this painting than I was of the wine glass painting we did several weeks ago. This process is relaxing, stress-free, fun, and a non-artististic person like me can leave with something to hang on the wall at home!

OK, so the tusks are a bit weird. They look like worms. But oh well!

Daughter Megan is an avid fan of Reddit, where the news Saturday night was about the death of Paul Walker, 40, the star of the Fast and Furious franchise, the first of which was released in 2001.

Walker played an undercover detective in 5 of the 6 films about illegal street racing and heists. He died as a passenger in a friend’s Porsche while en route to a charity event to aid Filipino victims of the recent typhoon.  Apparently, the driver was speeding in an area known for racing and struck a streetlight. The car was demolished and engulfed in flames. The first fire rescue team to get there pronounced both men dead within two minutes of arriving.

It’s easy to see the eerie similarities between Walker’s fictional life and the real life incident that ended his life. When these two worlds collide for actors, the defining event can be startling and deadly. Since actors essentially live the role they are playing,  even if for a short time, the stage is literally set for them to attract synchronicity through the dark trickster. While these occurrences are rare, when they do occur, they shock us and we might pause to wonder about the deeper mechanisms of reality. Here are some other tragic incidents involving actors that reflected their work:

Christopher Reeves. His last role before the horseback riding accident that paralyzed him was that of a paraplegic. A few hours after the first news conference about his accident, HBO aired—as previously scheduled—a film starring Reeve that had debuted only a week earlier: Above Suspicion. Reeve played a police officer, who was paralyzed after being shot in the line of duty.

Brandon Lee. He died while filming a scene in his last movie, The Crow. In the scene, he discovers his girlfriend being raped by thugs who kill both of them. Funboy, one of the film’s villains, fired a gun at Brandon’s character as he walked into his apartment. The gun was loaded with blanks, but a dummy cartridge had lodged in the barrel and the detonation of a blank propelled it through the barrel, killing Brandon at point-blank range.

Bruce Lee. Eighteen years earlier, Brandon’s father died on the set of another movie, ironically called, The Death Game. Both Bruce and Brandon were playing characters who died and then returned to life. Both deaths were ruled accidental, though highly suspicious. The dark trickster was present at the end of both of their lives.

David Carradine. He played a deadly swordsman, the head of a family of assassins, in Quenten Taratino’s Kill Bill movies, and died in 2004 in a luxury hotel room in Bangkok during the filming Kill Bill Volume 2. He supposedly hung himself, but may have died accidentally in a dangerous sexual act.

Heath Ledger. The dark trickster also came to play in the death of Ledger. At age 28, he was already a legend, an Oscar nominee for his role in Brokeback Mountain. He had just completed filming his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight. The movie made box office history, Ledger was praised for his portrayal of the dark character and won an Oscar for his performance. Unfortunately, died of an accidental overdose of prescription medication six months before the release of the movie. Ironically, Ledger played the role of the dark trickster himself.

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Life imitating art.

 Cougars. Usually when we hear that word, we think of sleek, gorgeous wild cats. But this cluster of cougar synchros we experienced over a period of about 48 hours didn’t have anything to do with cats, wild or otherwise.

The first one occurred when I was reading through the revisions Hilary had made on our script for Ghost Key.  There’s a scene where Hannah, who works for the Bio-Terrorism unit of the Department of Homeland Security, is interrogating a 16-year-old who was involved in the events on Cedar Key. The scene is written from Rocky’s perspective and the way Hilary had written it was something to the effect of: “Already freaked out by this Cougar…”

And I thought, Huh? What’s that mean?

Then, when Megan was home over Thanksgiving, Rob mentioned a young man who was dating an older woman and Megan said, “Oh, a cougar.”

My synchro detector instantly perked up. “Wait a minute. You know that phrase?”

Megan rolled her eyes. “Mom, you need to watch South Park. It’s all about popular culture. A cougar is a woman who likes younger men.”

So after we’d had our fantastic Thanksgiving dinner that Rob had cooked, we finally settled in to watch a movie. Megan picked The Way, Way Back, about  a 14-year-old kid who has trouble fitting in and finds an unexpected ally and friend in the manager of a water park. The synopsis sounds kind of lame, but the movie is actually quite good, with great performances by Steven Carell and Sam Rockwell, who plays an archetypal role of mentor.

And in this movie, a cougar is mentioned. Cougar, as in a woman who is attracted to younger men. So there you have it, this weird cougar cluster. I have no idea what it means in the bigger scheme of things. But when we were joking about it later, Rob said, “Hey, Trish, maybe it means you’re attracted to someone younger than you are. And hey, guess what. That’s me.”

Rob is a year younger than I am, so I’ll claim that one. But I think the synchro also points to the importance of staying current with the language and archetypes of Megan’s generation, people in their 20s and 30s, who are ushering in not only new language idioms, but the birthing of new paradigms.

Now, this cougar thing has become something of a family in-joke.

 This morning, our neighbor, Annette, knocked on the door and burst in, excited about a synchronicity she’d just had.

Her stepmother is visiting for the Thanksgiving holidays and Annette asked her what sort of pie she would like. Her stepmother said the only kind of pie she really loved was pumpkin cheesecake pie, something neither Rob nor I had ever heard of.

“So I told her I could make pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread, but didn’t have a clue about how to make pumpkin cheesecake pie. I started looking in the pantry for the ingredients and realized I didn’t have any pumpkin filling. The grocery stores were closed, so it looked as if we were going to just have apple pie for dessert.”

About five minutes after Annette and her stepmother had this conversation, her doorbell rang. It was the kid she drives to school, who had a present for her: piping hot, fresh out of the oven pumpkin bread – AND pumpkin cheesecake pie!

Annette was blown away by the almost instantaneous manifestation. As Rob remarked, if it had just been regular pumpkin pie or pumpkin bread on Thanksgiving, the synchro wouldn’t be nearly as impressive. Everyone eats pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, right? But what are the odds that the exact two things she wanted to bake – pumpkin bread and pumpkin cheesecake pie – appear within moments?

The significance? Well, Annette and her family are in litigation about their mortgage – about who actually owns it, a fallout from the financial debacle of 2008. I remarked that if she can manifest dessert for Thanksgiving so quickly, then she and her husband can manifest a positive outcome to their mortgage litigation just as fast!

For anyone interested in baking one of these, here’s a recipe.

  In the U.S. , Thanksgiving falls on the last Thursday in November, a date that was established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. In 1942, the date was amended to the fourth Thursday in November. The holiday supposedly goes back to 1621, when the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts  held a feast to give thanks for the year’s harvest.

Whatever its genesis, it has always been one of my favorite times of the year. When I was growing up in Venezuela,  it meant a four-day weekend, long enough to take a trip or just hang loose with friends and family. Even though Venezuelans didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, there were thousands of Americans in the country back, then – many who worked for American companies – so a lot of schools and offices closed.

Later, when I was in college in upstate New York, it meant a long weekend in Florida with my family – and a respite from the cold. But always, it meant the holiday was about appreciating what you have, giving thanks for it.

In recent years, the holiday has become weirdly commercial. First, there are the frozen and fresh turkeys overflowing in bins at the grocery store. Some years ago, when we were semi-vegetarians who ate only fish, we did vegetarian turkeys on Thanksgiving. No matter how you cooked them, they really didn’t taste good. That has probably changed.

When my dad lived with us, he asked if we could have something other than tofu or fish at dinner, so we started eating  turkey and chicken again.  We haven’t eaten pork or meat (beef of any kind) in more than 20 years and I would probably get sick now if I did. Can’t say I miss burger or steaks or pork chops. But I would certainly miss chicken and turkey. And yet, when I walked into the grocery store the other day and saw all these neatly bundled turkeys, I felt sad for them, sad for what they have come to symbolize in American culture.  And suddenly I wondered if I could eat turkey on Thanksgiving.

Then there’s Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving – now touted as the biggest shopping bargain day of the year. There are always stories about the consumers who spend all night lined up outside their favorite stores so they can be the first inside for the bargains when the place opens. Really? You lose a night of sleep for this?!

The other consumer aspect of Thanksgiving is that it’s the busiest time of year for the travel industry, even bigger than the Christmas/new year holidays. According to CNN, more than 43 million Americans will be traveling during the holidays- but that’s more than a one percent decrease from last year.  It means airport security headaches, cancelled flights and more highway accidents because of inclement weather.

This year, like most Thanksgivings, we’re staying home. Our daughter will be here, friends will drop by, there will be plenty of food.  We won’t be shopping on Black Friday. We’ll have Noah and Nika – our dog and Megan’s – and a third visiting dog, Ollie, Megan’s roommate’s dog. Yikes. Three of them and 2 cats. We’ll see how that works out.  Weather permitting, there will be Frisbee Golf,  dog park visits, bike rides, board games, movies, and the company of people we love and enjoy.

But for me, it will also be a time to appreciate and give thanks for where I am now in my life, for the people who have helped and accompanied me along this path, for the myriad of experiences that have brought me to this NOW.

So, to all of you who have contributed to our collective knowledge of synchronicity and the deep mysteries, may your day be filled with appreciation and grace.

This documentary, about a woman who is an animal communicator – specifically with baboons- is well worth your 52 minutes. It’s one of the most moving documentaries I’ve ever seen. Here’s the synopsis from the website. Thanks to Daz for alerting us to this one.

Synopsis: What if you could talk to animals and have them talk back to you?

Anna Breytenbach has dedicated her life to what she calls interspecies communication. She sends detailed messages to animals through pictures and thoughts. She then receives messages of remarkable clarity back from the animals.

Anna can feel the scars hidden under a monkeys fur, she can understand the detailed story that is causing a birds trauma, she transforms a deadly snarling leopard into a relaxed content cat – the whole animal kingdom comes alive in a way never seen before – wild birds land on her shoulders, fish gather around her when she swims, and wild unfamiliar baboons lie on her body as if she is one of their own.

This is the first full length documentary film on the art of animal communication.

In the last 24 hours, I have encountered the word SOMA three times. It’s not an ordinary word. It sort of sounds like it might want to become SOMNAMBULIST. Or SOMNAMBULENT.  Except for that pesky N in both words.

Before you run off to Google it, here’s how this cluster unfolded.  The first instance was in an email from the retired veterinarian, Sandy, with whom we shared synchros over lunch. She was writing about her early life, when she was in vet school, and the people and events that led to her encounters:

He was a visiting researcher from the Swedish Herbal Institute and I was working in the lab as a technician in the neurobiology department of North Carolina State University when he arrived. As we worked together on projects, we would share deep conversations about the nature of thought.

He said he had two friends whose work I would appreciate; one was a man named J Krishnamurti (JK) and the other man was a physicist named David Bohm. He told me to buy a book called Freedom From the Known that was transcripts of one of JK’s talks. Again I was shocked…I had this very book at home but never read it. I received it when I was 17 and went into a small bookstore while at the ocean with my friends. A man in a Buddhist robe behind the counter came up to me and handed me a small orange book and told me I am suppose to read it. I didn’t have any money, so he gave it to me as a gift. I never got around to reading it, and it sat forgotten on my bookshelf for the next 10 years. It was JK’s book Freedom From the Known. This man  also knew the physicist David Bohm and he happened to have a first draft of one of his papers that he was editing for Bohm titled Soma-significance, so he gave me a copy. This was a real turning point in my life.

The second SOMA in this cluster occurred while I was reading Stanislav Grof’s terrific book, When the Impossible Happens. I first read about this book on Daz’s blog,  when he reviewed the book. I read Amazon’s free portion of the book, and was hooked and downloaded it.

Grof, a psychiatrist, is talking about his encounter with an Indian guru, Swami Muktananda: “In the course of our discussion, I asked Baba about soma, the sacred portion of ancient India that is mentioned more than a thousand times in the Rig Veda and that clearly played a critical role in the Vedic religion. This sacrament was prepared from a plant of the same name, the identity of which got lost over the centuries. I found the reports about soma fascinating and hoped that Swami Muktananda might know something that would lead to its botanical identification and, ultimately, to the isolation of its active principle. Discovering the secret of soma was at the time the dream of many of us who were involved in psychedelic research.”

The third instance involved Brave New World, the dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley, where everyone takes the drug soma.  It’s a drug that induces bliss, interconnectedness, a feeling that all is well even if it isn’t.

I Googled it.

According to medical sites, soma is a muscle relaxer and may be habit forming. t’s also a song, a fabled psychotropic, a weird mushroom induced story.

So from these various definitions of soma, there sees to be something looming on the horizon that promises a blissful state of interconnectedness that sounds a lot like some big synchro.

We’ll see.

Soma.  A simple word but weird, and not a word I’m likely to forget. SO-MA. Almost like a mantra.

Music-related coincidences are one of the most common ways people experience synchronicity. Because it’s music, maybe it’s easier to find meaning in these experiences. In The Synchronicity Highway, we referred to Daz’s music synchro that was first posted here in the introduction. He was burying his cat in the woods, his car nearby, the radio on when Peter Gabriel’s song, Digging in the Dirt, came on, expressing exactly what he was doing.

I experienced two such music synchros today on a trail ride through the woods on my  mountain bike. I usually ride early on Tuesdays with my friend Don, but I’d skipped our ride for a dentist appointment and went out alone the next day. Interestingly, Don had told me that on his most recent solo spin through this trail, which is considered moderate to expert level in difficulty, he had fallen twice. He blamed his lapse in concentration on the fact that he’d taken his iPod along and the music distracted him.

In my case, the music seemed to serve as a warning. I was moving along on the trail approaching a new branch that is more challenging – lots of roots, steep uphill mounds and sharp drops, twists and turns. At one point, there’s a series of protruding roots that are challenging, especially since if you fall to the left you roll down an embankment and into a canal. That would be no fun.  I was wondering whether to go for it or skip it when the lyrics to an old Grateful Dead song, Ripple, caught my ear: “If you fall, you are alone.”

Yikes, I thought. It sounded like a direct message. I continued on, bypassing the new cut. The trail was somewhat wet after a rainfall the night before and a few minutes later, as I made a turn and went over an angled log, my back tire slid out and I barely caught myself with my foot as the bike went down. Just as all of that was happening, Cosmic Love, by Florence & the Machine, was playing and she was singing “falling star…”

That one was more of a joke than a warning, a trickster synchro that sent on my way to the end of the trail…and home in one piece.

Dogs, like people, sometime meet one of their own kind who trigger the wild side of their personalities. That other dog – or person – brings out something strange and vastly different in your personality that urges you to take risks, to move against the status quo, to do what you are not programmed to do. You are suddenly and wonderfully liberated from taboos, feel pumped up with self-confidence, you’re in the flow, the moment.  

This is the space that Noah, our golden retriever, and Nika, our daughter’s dog, inhabit when they are together. It’s actually an incredible thing to watch.

Rob and I lead fairly quiet lives. When Noah is alone with us, he adapts to that quietude, meditating with Rob on the porch in the mornings, thumping his tail against the floor when I come out into the kitchen long after that meditation is over, often nosing through the fallen leaves in our yard, looking for the omniscient squirrel.   

But when Nika is here, all that energy changes. Noah is suddenly eager to be doing whatever Nika is doing – on the hunt for avocado seeds and squirrels, lizards and squirrels, toys and squirrels. Always, it comes back to these squirrels.

Since our time change the first Sunday in November, where we supposedly gained an hour of time, Noah and Nika started getting restless between 3 and 4 PM, which used to be 4-5 PM, when we would take them to the dog park.  So now, shortly after three PM, we leash them and pile in the car. As soon as we pull into the park, both dogs are hanging their heads out the window, scanning the area for squirrels.

The moment the doors open, the dogs leap out. Sometimes, we can hold them back until we reach the gate. Other times we do so at our own peril and just release the leashes. And off they go, tearing through the front part of the park, the unfenced part, and race from tree to tree, leaping, barking, on the hunt for squirrels. It’s then they are running on the wild side, the wind at their backs, their snouts in the air, pursuing scents we can’t even imagine.

If Nika isn’t visiting, Noah can’t be bothered to race through the park. She brings out this wildness in him.

When the four of us manage to reach the gate with the dogs still leashed, they whimper and bark to get inside the park. We take off their leashes, unlatch the gate, and off they go, moving at the speed of light to the farthest corners of the park, happy to simply run together beneath the vast blue sky, and ever hopeful to spot a squirrel scampering along the top of the fence or up the trunk of a tree. Watching them, my heart soars.

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Interestingly, while I was writing this, the Rachel Maddow show was on in the background. She was talking about how Republicans continue to pursue distractions rather than real issues. The dogs were curled up on the floor between our offices.

And Maddow  said, “Distractions – squirrel- distractions – squirrel.” And the dogs suddenly came fully awake and ran to the door just as Maddow uttered a third squirrel.

I think that would qualify as a squirrel cluster!