Synchro of the Year

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We’ve posted at least two hundred synchronicities this year, probably more, and we’ve selected one that we believe stands out from all of the others for a number of reasons.

First, it’s very easy to understand what the synchronicity is. It’s also easy to realize why it is a meaningful coincidence. In addition, it is a synchronicity for which the odds of it happening can be quite easily calculated. Finally, it is a synchronicity about synchronicity, which makes it sort of a double synchronicity. Besides all of that, the synchro has a personal element directly related to us and the blog.

It came to us as a comment on Dec. 20. Like many coincidences that happen in our lives, it could have been overlooked or dismissed with a shrug. Darren, however, who writes as Brizdaz or just Daz, noticed the synchronicity, even though at the time he didn’t understand how unusual it was.

Here’s what happened. Daz came to our blog, read the daily entry, and decided that he wanted to read something else about synchronicity. So he looked down the list of 52 blogs on our blog roll at the right of the page below the book covers.

He picked H2O Radio, one that he’d never visited. He entered the site and saw that there was a broadcast playing. He clicked on and was surprised to tune into an interview with Trish and me. He’d even entered it near the beginning. He figured out that it was a recent interview, but he didn’t realize that it was live!

So what are the odds? Well, let’s figure it out. First, he picked a blog from the list of 52. Let’s simplify it and call it 50, especially since one of those in the list is his own blog. That’s one out of 50.

But what are the chances that he would click on exactly on the hour that we were being interviewed? Well, the H2O blog has been on the list since August. Again, to simply let’s say it has been available for 100 days– a low estimate. So 100 days times 24 hours a day equals one chance in 2,400. Now multiply that by 50 and we have odds of 1 in 120,000. Pretty slim odds of his tuning into us by random chance. Clearly, he found it meaningful.

There’s also the big picture of how we are all interconnected at the conscious and unconscious levels or, to put it another way, we are connected both at the everyday level and in a reality that exists outside of cause and effect. On one hand, it’s amazing that Daz who lives in Brizbane, Australia could press a few buttons on his computer and hear us talking live from Florida to a radio show based in New York.

Then there’s the deeper level, of course, that he was able make this connection outside of cause and effect. We know that because we had not publicized the radio interview on our blog or anywhere else. In fact, we’d almost forgotten about it.

For all of these reasons, we’ve picked Daz’s H2O synchro as the best of 2011. It was Daz-zling!

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 16 Comments

Synchros as Confirmation

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This evening, I was thinking  that I haven’t experienced any synchros in the last week, then realized I heard a good one this morning – from Megan.

A little background. Our daughter, Megan, graduated from college last May with a degree in art and a minor in animal psychology.  She moved back home and eventually found a part-time, minimum wage job at an indoor playground facility for young kids. It’s an upscale place with a café and lunch menu that also has special art, dance, and movie events for kids. Non-stressful. Megan usually works in the café and has learned to make great cappuccino.

During these months, she’s been applying for internships and jobs at zoos, in animal training facilities, at Sea World, Disney,  you name it, she has put in applications.  She has the credentials for this. She spent two weeks at a wildlife refuge in Ecuador, had a month-long internship at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo, working with dolphins. She has also worked with lemur monkeys, manatees, birds. Her art thesis was on the fragmented perceptions we have humans have of dolphins. We posted some of the paintings she did for this thesis.

She has had several interviews – with Ringling Brothers (nope), Palm Beach Zoo (offered, no pay, she didn’t take it), Sea World (nope), and Disney.

She was offered the Disney internship and apparently beat out 600 applicants.  For the next six months, she’ll be working with manatees and dolphins – she has experience with both – and her hope is that at the end of the internship, she’ll be hired from within Disney for an actual job.  The pay isn’t great, but the work is exactly what she wants at this point in her life.

Here’s the synchro: last night she went to a local birthday party a few blocks from where we live. She got to talking with a young woman who works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service , a bureau within the Department of the Interior. When Megan told the woman she was headed for the Disney internship, the woman was astounded.

It turned out she had taken a semester off from college last year because  she’d been hired for a Disney internship in their conservation program.  Because it’s Disney, the internship is prestigious – i.e., it looks good on your resume.   She loved it. She even lived in the housing that Disney provides for their interns – which Megan isn’t doing – and said that was the only thing she would change about her experience. However, she suggested that Megan attend the orientation for interns, so she can get to know them. She was surprised that Megan, as an art major, had gotten the internship.

“These internships are so competitive. It’s rare for them to hire someone that doesn’t have a major in animal psychology, marine biology, and or one of the sciences. It means your hands-on experiences really counted with them.”

The synchro confirmed the path she’s taking and she recognized it. She also recognized the fact that the woman isn’t just doing what she enjoys, but is getting paid well for it.

 

 

Posted in disney world, synchronicity | 9 Comments

Wow!

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We ran across this video on Marcus Anthony’s blog. It’s stunning. Here’s part one:

 

And part two: no need for any explanation.

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On Christmas Day, 18-year-old Ben Breedlove died. Fifteen hundred people turned out for his funeral.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 18 Comments

The Stranger and the $20 Bill

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This synchro came from Renee Prince, whose stories we’ve used before. This one really underscores how synchronicity connects us to other people.

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My mother and I were  at a Native American (Indian) casino when she called me from somewhere inside the building and asked me to meet her because “something weird” had happened and she couldn’t tell me over the phone. When I got to her, she wore a stunned expression and an amazed smile.

She told me that she had been sitting at a slot machine, feeling really, really bad. She was agonizing over her husband’s Alzheimer’s and worrying over how she would pay for her husband’s nursing home when he had to go, worrying over the possibility of her having another stroke… But she hadn’t been talking to anyone—she was just sitting by herself.

Then a cocktail waitress came up to her and handed her a $20 bill. The waitress said that a man had given her the bill and asked her to give it to my mother “so she would know things weren’t as bad as she thought.” When my mother asked the waitress to point him out, the man had disappeared. She was very touched and awe-stricken—nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She says she will keep the $20 bill and never spend it.

The next day, my mother had just gotten dressed, and came out of her room wearing a “new” necklace and a strange expression. The necklace was a beaded thing with a tiny Native American “medicine pouch”, and it was a used item, something my sister Sonja had given her a few years ago as a stocking stuffer. Sonja often buys bags of jewelry at garage sales, hoping for diamonds or gold in the usually costume stuff, and she had just given my mother the beaded necklace without looking inside the pouch, since it seemed flat and empty. But for some reason my mother had looked inside when she put it on that morning and found—a $20 bill.

 

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The Help

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Christmas Eve, we started watching this movie – it’s long, two and a half hours, so we saved the last hour for Christmas day. It’s not a comfortable movie, by any means. It takes place in Mississippi during the early 60s, when wealthy southern white families employed black help – maids – who raised their children, did their laundry, cooked and cleaned and basically took care of the household while the white women lived superficial lives.

Then one white woman,  portrayed by Emma Stone, enters the picture. Emma has aspirations to write, to be a journalist, a novelist, and begins to befriend the black maids, encouraging them to tell them her stories.  And their stories are so profoundly tragic you wonder how they survived long enough to relate them to this young white woman.

At first, only one of the black maids is willing to talk to her  – Aibeleen, portrayed by Viola Davis – and her performance is stunning, genuine, and will probably win her an Oscar nomination. This woman feels what her characters feels, she is there.  Once Aiebeleen begins talking to the Emma Stone character, other black maids gradually come on board, and we see the under currents of what their lives are like, how the KKK burned their children, razed their homes, and terrorized them to the point where they accepted crumbs simply to remain employed, so they could send their children to college.

During this era, I was living in Venezuela, so I never saw this blatant indentured servitude. During the movie, though, Rob remarked that I did see this kind of attitude – I’m better than you – with the way Venezuelans were treated by the Americans who worked for the oil companies.  “You had maids,” he said.

Yes, many American families did have maids – but they usually were from Spain or some other country, immigrants who needed work and were given lodging, food and a salary. Generally, these maids did not raise their employers’ children.  They were not substitute parents. There was a definite difference.

However, when we used to return to the U.S. each year for vacation, I clearly recall the segregated bathrooms at the Florida turnpike rest stops and remember asking my mother what that was about. There are several powerful scenes in The Help about blacks and whites using the same restrooms – they carry diseases, one white woman tells her young daughter –  and it’s really hard to believe that anyone capable of rational thought actually believed any of it. In this sense, white American women are viewed as stupid, clueless, and cold.

But maybe that’s the point of this movie. In that particular era, before blacks even had the right to vote, the hierarchy in society was blatant. Unless you were a white man, you were pretty much invisible and as powerful or as powerless as the white person for whom you worked. Still, it’s difficult to believe that white women were as shallow and mindless as most of the women depicted in this film. Yet, in retrospect, I clearly remember my mother commenting years ago that I should apply to Vassar, where women would meet men who could support them. Good husbands, in other words. And yet, my mother wasn’t a superficial woman. More than anything else, she was a product of her time, her generation, and wasn’t  able to move beyond that.

When The Help first came out, I remember that MSNBC had Melissa Harris Perry, an African American professor at Tulane, review the movie. She tweeted frequently during the film, and her bottom line was that the movie was good, but didn’t provide the full story about that era, that it was a white woman’s story about what was happening to black women.

Or, put another way, it had the same theme as Avatar. In that movie, the Americans move in to study the culture and help them to overthrow the evil corporation that is attempting to mine the planet’s minerals.  Outsider arrives, strives to right the wrongs, leads the people to freedom. That archetype. It’s the greatest  weakness of The Help. And yet, when the disempowered and the helpless find a voice in someone who has the ability and connections to communicate their plight, do color and ideology matter?

Yes, Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement in the sixties. But it wasn’t a movement that pertained only to African-Americans. It spoke to the larger group of disenfranchised individuals, women and men of all color. The greatest strength of this film is that it speaks to all people who have been abandoned, disenfranchised, minimalized, shuffled aside in favor of the few who have it all. In the end, maybe it all boils down to the Occupy movement.

The 99 percent versus the one percent. But maybe even that disparity doesn’t address all of it. The Help will certainly be an Oscar contender.

 

 

Posted in movies, synchronicity | 12 Comments

Words of a leader-sage

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Sometimes it seems the world of politics  is filled with corrupt, power hungry leaders looking out for their own interests and those close to them. They may spout religious values, but their actions often belie any sense of true spirituality.

So with the recent passing of Vaclan Havel, playwright and former president of the Czech Republic, it’s worth highlighting the words of a man who saw a greater vision than what we typically see among politicians.

Futurist Marcus Anthony, who calls Havel a ‘leader-sage,’  said this on his blog: “Havel epitomized three vital aspects of the human archetype: conscience, courage and compassion. These are three qualities that are badly needed in today’s world, in today’s leaders.”

Here are Havel’s words from a talk he gave in 1995 that was recently republished in The Futurist.

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What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and what perhaps has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the awareness of our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man’s understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.

A modern philosopher once said: “Only a God can save us now.”

Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, the cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbours, and thus honor their rights as well.

It logically follows that, in today’s Is multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies–it must be rooted in self-transcendence:

Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.

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So where are the leaders of the western world who think like this? Who speak like this? Who believe  this?

Posted in synchronicity | 13 Comments

Ornaments

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Trish and Rob

For me, the Christmas season is about memories, not religion. We have  a Christmas tree because the lights and decorations and the faint scent of pine are beautiful and peaceful. I’ve often thought of growing a Christmas tree  in our back yard and keeping it decorated year around.  Fat chance of that in south Florida.  We have the tree up for about three weeks, longer if the needles are still green.

Every year, I eagerly climb the ladder to the attic for the boxes of Christmas decorations. And in these boxes are some real treasure, ornaments that have been in our family for decades, ornaments with memories attached to them.

This little Santa Claus, in fact, holds some of my earliest memories. The Christmas before my sister was  born, we were living in Maracaibo, in what was then known as an “oil camp,” where employees of Exxon were housed. Mr. Clause, I recall, hung from a low branch and my grandmother – my mother’s mother – moved him to a higher branch. She was visiting from Oklahoma because she was going to help out once my sister was born in January. She was Russian born, in Odessa, I think, and for some reason thought that Mr. Clause belonged higher up on the tree, maybe so our dog couldn’t eat him. Through this ornament, I recall how pregnant and beautiful my mother was, and how sure I felt that the baby was a girl, my sister.

Somewhere on our tree is an ornament bought around the time my dad decided the political situation in Venezuela was deteriorating so fast that it was time to leave. Next to that ornament is a violin – or a fiddle ?- that I inherited from my first editor, Chris Cox,  after he died from AIDS.

It turned out that Chris, like me, collected unusual ornaments in his travels. Shortly after his death in the early 1990s, a package arrived filled with his Christmas ornaments. I’m not sure who sent them – his sister, his fellow editor, Cheryl Woodruff, or his angel of mercy and close friend, Susan Sarandon, who paid for Chris’s private nursing care in his final days.

One ornament is a picture of Jessie, the Golden Retriever who was with us for eleven years, and another is of Megan, when she was three or four. There are a number of frog ornaments given to us by friends or family  who know how much we like frogs or that I bought because they were so irresistible.

Here and there are impersonal ornaments, fillers that aren’t attached to any emotion or memory. Their home is at the back of the tree, so the wall won’t be lonely.

Every year when I open that container with the ornaments and the lights, icicles from the previous year still threaded through the wires, a peaceful nostalgia claims me. I touch the special ornaments, the ones connected to memories of people, and am grateful  those people have graced my life. These ornaments have changed my feelings about that word. Ornaments aren’t just the superficiality of who we are. Sometimes, they are the very core of who we are.

Happy holidays to all! May 2012 bring you health, happiness,  prosperity- and many ornaments that hold important memories.

 

Posted in christmas, synchronicity | 13 Comments

Parking Lot Synchro

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Today as I was leaving the grocery store, pushing my cart out into the parking lot, I thought how perfect it would be to experience a synchronicity. It didn’t matter what the synchro was, what it concerned, I just wanted one. That desire, I think was the result of a dream I’d had early that morning.

In the dream, I was driving a VW Bug ( we don’t own one in real life) and backing out of a driveway. Suddenly,  the brakes didn’t work and I kept backsliding. The terrain in the dream, as where we live, was very flat, so it’s not like I was backsliding down a steep incline. I was backsliding along a flat surface but couldn’t stop. Then I jerked the steering wheel to the right and backed into a neighbor’s yard. I may have hit the mailbox. At any rate, the engine died, I stopped.

I’m sure this dream relates to my fear of backsliding professionally, because the publishing industry is changing so fast and dramatically. It unsettled me.  So I felt a synchro would be a nice confirmation or guidance or something to balance out the dream.

En route to my car, I saw a frail, white-haired woman struggling to make a call on her cell phone while restraining a leashed dog hobbling around on three legs, its front right paw curled up close to its body.  Then I recognized the woman, J. She used to attend Rob’s yoga classes and has always impressed me with her lively intellect. She’s a Gemini, like me, and is an enthusiastic reader of our books. The last time I ran into her inside the grocery store, she told me that her husband had recently died and she and her Rottweiler were doing fine in the house, that she was still selling real estate.

Now here she was and nothing looked fine with either her or the Rottweiler.  I hurried over, my cart rattling across the concrete, and asked if I could give her a hand.

“I can’t get a signal here, Trish.”

“Who’re you trying to call?”

“The vet. I need someone to come out and help me carry her inside.” She gestured toward the dog.

The vet’s office is in the shopping center, wasn’t that far from her car, but the Rottweiler obviously knew she was going to the vet’s office and wanted none of it.  I took the leash and said I would coax the dog closer to the vet’s office and J hobbled off toward the office to find someone to help. It was then I realized that J was wearing a boot on her right foot, the kind of boot you wear when your foot is broken. Right foot, right front paw.  There was my synchro.

The Rottweiler is large, muscular, I knew I couldn’t pick her up by myself. So I decided to coax her toward my car, get her inside, then I would drive up to the curb in front of the vet’s and get her out. Nope. The Rottweiler refused to budge. She kept moving back toward J’s car.

Suddenly, I hear someone shouting, “Hey, hey, can I help? You need help?

I glanced around, didn’t see anyone, kept trying to coax the dog to follow me. Then this woman barrels over to me, a woman from a cafe where Rob and I get coffee a couple of times a week. I don’t know her name. But I know she’s a single mom with a twelve-year-old daughter, who lost everything in Hurricane Andrew in 1992, when that monster storm devastated part of South Florida. These are the kinds of details you learn about people as you’re waiting for coffee.

“I can lift her,” she says.

“We can both do it,” I replied.

First, she held out her hand to the dog, talking softly to her, explaining we were going to help her. A dog whisperer. Then the two of us lifted the Rottweiller and carried her over to the curb in front of the vet’s. The dog saw J, standing in the open doorway, calling to her, and hobbled toward her.

We got the dog inside, into the examining room with J.  And then it struck me. The bottom line message of this synchro had zero to do with my dream and professional concerns.

In J, I saw my mother or my father in their advanced years, both of them frail and sick and unable to care for themselves, In J, I saw the patients in the Alzheimer’s unit where my mother spent her last several years, men and women whose  minds and bodies were so far gone they didn’t even know how to use a fork.  In J, right then, I was suddenly reminded of what’s really important in life.

We’re all on a journey, and are at different ports of call. We sometimes get so wrapped up in our own concerns and issues that we fail to see what’s right in front of us. We are blind to other people’s needs, deaf to their whispered pleas. In J, right then, I was reminded of how important it is for strangers to help strangers, for friends to reach out, for doing some small act for a person in need. I was reminded that our humanity is what, ultimately, matters the most.

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There seems to be another layer to this synchro. Two days after this event, I was telling my neighbor about it and she got the strangest look on her face. “Now wait a minute, either I’m having a deja vu or I saw this happen.”

The grocery store closest to our neighborhood is one we both use. But I’ve never run into her there. “What did you see?” I asked.

“These two women trying to carry this big dog across the parking lot to the vet’s. Then they set the dog down in front of the vet’s office and I saw the dog holding its foot in the air. That was you?”

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May Santa bless your Christmas with laughter, joy, and the company of people you love.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 14 Comments

New Moon in Capricorn

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Trish and Rob

from center for touch drawing

 

On December 24, we have the last new moon of the year, in Capricorn, a focused, determined earth sign. Before we even get started about this new moon, check out your natal chart to find out where Capricorn falls. That house will be most impacted by this new moon. Go here to find out what the houses means.

This new moon is at 2 degrees Capricorn, so for me it  lands in my third house of communication, writing, siblings, education, travel, my neighborhood, my conscious mind. I can expect new opportunities in any or all of these areas.

One thing you can count on with the Cappy new moon is heightened ambition, strategy, planning. You’re suddenly a paragon of the efficient. You’re the arrow headed for the target, right into the bull’s eye. Listen to your intuition and then act accordingly.

One of the things this new moon represents for Rob and me is the empty nest again. Megan has been living with us for the last seven months, since her graduation from college. Even though her activities are quite separate from ours, the three of us inhabit the same space, come together as a family when we need each other’s support and unconditional love. Her internship with Disney begins in mid-January, she’ll move  the weekend before it begins. But for you, this new moon could mean a new job, a new career, partnership, creative endeavor. NEW. That’s the operative word.

If you’re an earth or water sign, or have your moon or rising in earth or water, you’ll be as pleased as a pig in mud. But because we all have Capricorn somewhere ,  you will  enjoy something new in whatever house Capricorn falls.

Pluto falls within five degrees of this new moon, so whatever this new opportunity is, it has the power  to transform some area of your life.  Uranus, the planet of sudden, unexpected events, forms a challenging angle to this new moon. It could mean some tension in the air, but it also suggests that the new opportunities come to you out of the blue. Surprise! Here I am.

Then, the really good news: Jupiter in Taurus forms a close, beneficial angle to this new moon and that is certainly cause for celebration. It means the new opportunity expands some area of your life. Even though Jupiter is retrograde on the 24th, it turns direct the next day, so once Jupiter is behaving, you’ll start to see some action.

Happy New Moon!

Posted in astrology, synchronicity | 6 Comments

Who Is This Guy?

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Trish and Rob

He looks like one of the nerdy guys in your high school or college yearbook,  right? You know the type I mean. This is the guy who sits alone in the back of the cafeteria during lunch, thumbing through a fat book on Greek mythology or advanced calculus. But with this particular nerd, the book was probably something along the lines of business or issues management strategy.

Never heard that last term? Well, I hadn’t, either, until I Googled, Who is Grover Norquist?    He refers to himself as an issues management strategist. To me, that’s fancy speak for someone who manipulates how people think about issues. You know, political and social issues that actually impact people’s lives.

Norquist has never been elected to a public office. Yet, he managed to convince 238 house members, 41 senators, 13 governors, and 1,249 state legislators to sign a pledge that they would oppose all tax increases. He was able to do this, apparently, because his organization, Americans for Tax Reform – ATR – has millions of members who – oh shudder, be afraid – might vote you out of office if you disobey the pledge. And he’ll do that by galvanizing, you know, the loyal right wing troops.

When I look at this guy’s photo, when I hear him speak on TV, I cringe. I feel soiled. This is the man, after all, who says that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2012, as they’re slated to do, is the equivalent of raising taxes. Yet, the $4 trillion that would be raised as a result would help to cut the deficit and save the social programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security from severe cutbacks. Programs that seniors and the poor depend on.

As one author put it in the Huffington Post, “Master Norquist, you see, says that allowing said cuts to expire as promised is raising taxes, and he’s willing to demolish any Republican who says otherwise. The facts apparently have no place in this matter, so it’s a very small step to say — as many are right now — that Master Nordquist and his friends at Koch Industries are deliberately destroying the Republican Party — not to mention the nation…”

When the Super Committee met to discuss how to cut $1.5 trillion from the federal budget, they failed to reach any consensus. As Senator John Kerry, a member of the committee said,  “But unfortunately, this thing about the Bush tax cuts and the pledge to Grover Norquist keeps coming up. Grover Norquist has been the 13th member of this committee without being there. I can’t tell you how many times we hear about ‘the pledge, the pledge.”

What about the pledge all members of Congress take to uphold the constitution? If so many members of Congress are adhering to a pledge they made to a guy who was never elected, then they apparently don’t give a damn about we, the people.  You know, the people who are losing homes and jobs, the 99 percent for whom the so-called American dream is fading. Norquist exemplifies everything that’s wrong with government.

There’s obviously no sychro here. But with the world perched at the edge of some sort of paradigm shift,  it seems important to pinpoint some of the individuals in the dying paradigm who fight to maintain a status quo that serves the few at the expense of the many.

 

 

 

Posted in politics, synchronicity | 10 Comments