A Synchro at the Rally & March for Immigrant Families

Posted on July 4, 2018 by Trish and Rob

This is what freedom looks like. Happy July 4!!

On June 30, we joined five or six hundred protesters for a Families Belong  Together march on trump’s Palm Beach hideaway, Mar de Lago. On our way across town to the march with our friends Estis and Marcio, our phones suddenly started blaring.  An amber alert:

A Florida Amber Alert has been issued for three children out of Volusia County. 

  • Three kids missing out of New Smyrna Beach
  • Kids may be in the company of grandmother
  • Anyone with info to call 386-424-2220 or 911

Law enforcement is searching for 3-year-old Akeem Dorset, 8-year-old Makylah Brown, and 10-year-old Aaliyah Brown. Officials said the kids were last seen in the area of the 800 block of Oleander Street in New Smyrna Beach. 

Officials believe the kids are in the company of their grandmother, 65-year-old Venita Porter-Carter. They may be traveling in a 2010, white Suzuki Grand Vitara with the Florida tag number 632RKB. 

The actual alert said “multiple children.” I didn’t think much about it until we were at the rally before the march when an immigration attorney – herself an immigrant – spoke. She noted that on her way to the rally this morning, she’d heard an amber alert about multiple children and thought it was “ironic” and somehow fitting since this rally and march were about stopping the trump policy of separating children from their familiar at the border.

As soon as I heard her say it, I realized she had recognized the synchronicity and Rob and I had missed it!

The rally and the march across the bridge to Palm Beach were a wonderful mix of old and young and everything in between. Several politicians attended – Representative Lois Frankel, the mayor and West Palm Beach and the former mayor. A rabbi gave an outstanding speech in both English and Spanish and later on, in our way across the bridge, I heard him speaking both French and Creole to several Haitian women.

Due to construction on the bridge, with traffic reduced to a single lane, we were allowed into Palm Beach only in groups of 40. A woman in front of us had brought her two young daughters and for a while as we crossed the bridge, they were directly in front of us. One of the girls, who was 5 or 6, remarked, “Trump is as bright orange Cheeto!”

On our way in, we passed the “service entrance” to trump’s palace.

Here’s the palace. Rather phallic.

His place straddles both sides of the road.

There was a strip of grass just beyond the curb and two men on trump’s property told us to stay off the grass because it was “private property.”

The con man wasn’t home.

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Time Travel Views

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Trish and Rob

   

 

We are long-time fans of time travel stories as writers, readers and viewers. Trish has written three time travel novels, Running Time, Kill Time, and Black Water. My time travel novel is called Romancing the Raven. As readers, Trish and I both think that Time and Again by Jack Finney is perhaps the best time travel story ever written. As viewers, in recent months, we’ve watched two television series recently that feature time travel—Travelers and Timeless.

Travelers, a Netflix series, is a post-apocalyptic tale, in which teams of travelers come back from the 24th century and attempt to alter some events that will change their history and save the world. It’s an unusual time travel story in that it takes place in our present! The time travelers come to us. Very tricky. They take over the bodies of people who they know are about to die. The team leader, for example, takes over the body of an FBI agent who was about to meet his end on a case. So these folks from the future have to fit into the lives that their new bodies were living. That, of course, leads to some interesting scenarios.

The travelers apparently are never going home. They’re stuck in these bodies. Their rules include: Never jeopardize your cover. Do not call each other by future names—”Leave the future in the past.” Do not use future knowledge for personal gain. Don’t take a life; don’t save a life, unless otherwise directed.

The other TV series, which is on NBC, is Timeless. It’s more of a traditional time travel story with a time travel machine taking them to significant past events—a trip through history. So we meet famous people and view famous incidents, such as the explosion of the Hindenburg, the assassination of Lincoln, the fall of the Alamo, the Watergate scandal, Charles Lindburgh’s cross-Atlantic flight.

Of course, there’s a purpose to these journeys. Someone has stolen a time machine and is attempting to change history. So while the travelers from the future in Travelers attempts to change the past (our time), in Timeless the time travelers are attempting to prevent the group in control of one of the time machines from altering the past, which would change the world and their own lives. In Travelers, the nemesis is another group from the future aligned with a different power base with different interests.

In both series, the time travelers live communally in dinghy warehouses equipped with really advanced computers. Both series have some flaws, which can be overlooked by letting go of your sense of disbelief. For example, in Timeless there’s an annoying telescoping of time after they arrive at a new time frame and abandon their time travel vessel. We never see how they get from the rural, isolated areas where they usually arrive, to the city or place of action. They often arrive in 21st century street clothes, but then must go and buy new duds. We never see how they pull that off.

In Travelers, the shortcoming is how these people from the future manage to adjust not only to the 21st century sensibilities, but how they are able to fit into their new families and jobs without betraying who they really are. We manage to overlook these lapses in storytelling and enjoy the episodes.

Time travel fascinates. There’s no doubt about it. Another TV series we enjoyed—at least for two seasons—was Outlander which is set in Scotland. But, for me, what’s even more fascinating and mind-boggling than any of these shows is a story of true time travel.

If we are to believe former Coast Guardman, John Murphy of North Carolina and his friend Barbara. Those two seemingly moved back in time nearly 200 years for at least two hours in 1964 on the island of Bermuda. Their story is summarized here. It’s also included in detail in our book, Beyond Strange: True Tales of Alien Encounters and Paranormal Mysteries. 

Unlike time travel in those two TV series, John and Barbara required no advanced technological device to move them back. Yet, somehow they walked through a window in time,  and into a 18th century village and out again, only later to discover that the village no longer exists, that it was destroyed in the so-called Great Hurricane of 1780. It’s hard to imagine that this pair would make up the story, especially since they had lost contact shortly after the incident for more than four decades and Barbara had no idea that the village didn’t exist until John asked her in 2008 if she recalled walking into that village with him.  She did, and then was told the rest of the story.

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Auspicious timing through astrology

Posted on June 30, 2018 by Trish and Rob

Whether you’re moving or applying for a job, signing a contract or buying a lottery ticket, having surgery or launching a company, taking a vacation or getting married, there are auspicious times to act – and times when it’s best to lay low. In this 5 hour workshop, we take a look at common situations and learn when the deck is stacked in our favor.

The sessions will run for 75 minutes, once a week for 4 weeks, on a closed Facebook group. The only prerequisite is that you come with a couple of questions – like those in the list below – and email them to me before the workshop, with your birth information – date, time, and place of birth.

Best times to:

Move
Sign a contract
Get married
Buy a home
Pitch an idea
Get divorced
Start a creative project
Review and revise
Initiate a legal matter
Find a doctor
Have surgery
Beautify personal appearance
Plan a vacation
Travel
Buy a lottery ticket
Send out resumes
Look for a new job
Schedule interviews
Have a party
Publicize a product
Start a new job
Adopt a pet

1st session: Each planet and house of a horoscope rule particular situations and areas of our lives. We explore the roles of the moon and sun, and planets, what areas they rule, and do the same for the 12 houses in a horoscope. We then discuss the auspicious angles or aspects that transiting planets make to our natal planets to help determine the success of the endeavor.

As an example, we’ll look at a good date and time to buy a lottery ticket, then compare it to your natal charts to see how the date and time fit. This one is fun to experiment with, finding several times to buy a lottery ticket between this class and the next and seeing what unfolds.

2nd Session We explore the roles certain astrological points play in the timing of an event. These include the North and South Nodes, the elusive Vertex, and the part of fortune. We discuss the auspicious angles in detail – the conjunction, sextile, trine, and some of the astrological patterns that help bolster the chances for success. Then we’ll take several timing situations you’ve emailed me during the week and will analyze the charts to determine the success quota.

3rd session: We explore the most common situations that people ask about in terms of timing and discuss the specific steps to determine the planets, houses, and aspects involved. These situations include: – moving, signing a contract, getting married or divorced, buying a home, interviewing for a new job, having surgery, starting a creative project. We delve into any specifics questions you have about the timing of a particular event.

4th session: Now we put it all together and test what we’ve learned. We explore any upcoming events and situations in your lives where timing may prove to be critical.

When: July 11, 18, 25 and August 2, 7:30-8:45 PM. I’m flexible on times.

Price: $111, Venmo or Pay Pal

Contact: trishjmacgregor@gmail.com

I’m capping the workshop at 7 so that everyone gets individual attention! Please let me know by  July 4. Once you’ve paid, I’ll send you an invitation to the closed FB group.

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I Ching Meditations

Posted on June 28, 2018 by Trish and Rob

 

The I Ching is a 5000 year old divination system that was popularized for the West by Richard Wilhelm, who spent most of his life studying and translating the ancient Chinese text. In 1949, Carl Jung wrote the foreword to Wilhelm’s translation, The I Ching or Book of Changes. It was the first time he publicly discussed his theory of synchronicity.

“…whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time,” Jung wrote. “To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast.”

“This assumption,” Jung continued, “involves a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality… synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.”

In other words, when you ask your question and toss the coins, the hexagram you receive is like a snapshot in time, making manifest the internal.

For the Western mind, however, the definitions of the hexagrams sometimes seem obscure, couched as they are in references to life as it was 5,000 years ago. You may come away from an I Ching reading thinking, How does a hidden dragon relate to my question in the 21st century? Or: Who is this great man I’m supposed to see? Fortunately, Adele Aldridge, writer, artist, and I Ching connoisseur, provides a Western woman’s interpretation of the I Ching in her superb book I Ching Meditations: A Woman’s Book of Changes.

Back in the days before the Internet and personal computers, Adele decided she would define and illustrate every line in the I Ching’s 64 hexagrams. That should be 384 lines, but she has chosen to use 7 illustrations per hexagram, one for the image at the beginning and then an illustration for each of the 6 lines. So that’s 448 images! As she herself remarks, “A work of madness!”

She started this massive undertaking with a set of black and white abstract woodcuts that integrated the use of astrology symbols with the I Ching trigrams. She made 64 prints that she laminated onto canvases and strung them together in a large wall construction. She also made two sets of these prints on rice paper, bound them into books, then made a similar set in color. Her n3ext step was to translate these designs into acrylic paintings that were 36”x 48”.

A lesser mortal would be exhausted by all this. But Adele was just getting started, a testament to her passion for this work. She created limited editions books for hexagrams 1-16 with illustrations depicting women and created black and white pen and ink drawings. And all this happened before the introduction of the Macintosh computer in January 1984.

In many ways, her journey with the I Ching reminds me of Wilhelm’s, the total dedication to a vision. Where Wilhelm sought to open Chinese spirituality to the west through translating the I Ching texts from Chinese to German, Adele seeks to define the 64 hexagrams through the perceptions of an American woman and artist. “Because the Chinese language is pictorial and not linear, I felt that by giving the work images, along with linear text, it provides a broader experience for the meaning of the text, however subjective that may be.

This book takes us through hexagram 32, half of the I Ching, and what a stunner it is.

I tossed some coins on a roofer that is coming out today to give us an estimate for a new roof. I got Hexagram 32, Duration. Adele’s interp: “A relationship that endures is self-contained and self-renewing, maintained in a cycle with a a new beginning at every ending.” I had lines 1 and 2 changing. Her interp for line 1: “Something that lasts long begins gradually” and for line 2: “Commit to the relationship.” bThe illustration for this hexagram is at the top of the page.

Because of the changing lines, suggesting the situation is in flux, the hexagram changed to 30, The Clinging Fire. “Cling to what is correct action. Articulate. Illuminate. Discriminate. While doing all that try not to get burnt out.” Here’s the illustration for hexagram 30:

This makes perfect sense. Finding a roofer in South Florida is challenging. There was so much damage around here from Hurricane Irma last summer that roofers are booked for 3 and 4 months.

However, the reading turned out to be correct. Brad gave us the best estimate, can begin in July, and asked for a reasonable downpayment upon signing and first day of work – 10 percent and 10 percent. This contrasts with the 80 percent we were quoted by another roofer. Just as importantly, we like him – line 2, according to Adele – commit to the relationship. We have!

Thank you, Adele, for a stunning book!

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The Afterlife of Budd Hopkins

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Trish and Rob

In the world of UFOlogy, Budd Hopkins was a big deal, an investigator, who rather than focusing on sightings of crafts, zeroed in on the abduction phenomenon in his books. In doing so, he opened himself to criticism from not only mainstream science and media, but also ufologists who rejected the abduction scenario. We met Hopkins once at a UFO convention and drove him to the home of an abductee, where he regressed her and she re-lived her experience.

Budd, who was also an artist, died in August of 2011 and we wrote about him here following his death. In the hours that we spent with him, we observed a man with a large, dominant personality, one who focused on his work with the woman and was convinced she was a true alien abductee. That may be so, but there was an elephant in that house that Budd didn’t seem to recognize.

The woman’s husband, a large man with a mane of gray hair and a full beard, wore a prominant gold Satan pendant around his neck. His black shirt was open at the top and the pendant was visible. He told Trish and I, when we inquired, that he was a former Baptist minister who had switched sides. We don’t know what role, if any, that played in the abduction scenario, but it wasn’t anything that Budd considered relevant, if he was even aware of it.

I bring up this oddity because I recently read something surprising about Budd’s attitude about life after death, and also that he supposedly has made at least one return visit since his departure.

The information comes from journalist/author Leslie Kean, who has written a phenomenal book, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. Kean also is the author of fascinating UFO book that focused on interviews with generals, pilots, and government officials. At some point, she interviewed Hopkins and they became  friends.

Kean writes that after she found out that Budd was seriously ill, she brought him a few books that offered evidence of life after death. When she next saw him, he told her he wasn’t interested in reading the books because he didn’t believe in an afterlife. When you’re dead, you’re dead. That brush-off surprised Kean who knew Budd as an avid reader with an expansive  curiosity.

Sometime after his death, Kean had a reading with a medium named Laura Jackson, who had been highly recommended. It was Kean’s first reading, and it was undertaken as part of the research for her book. In preparing for the reading, she had focused on Budd and her late brother. However, she didn’t tell that to the medium, who conducted the reading by phone and didn’t know anything about Kean, only that her first name was Leslie.

Kean found the reading astonishing. After a few minutes of tuning in, Laura told her that an “eager male” was “bursting through,” and was very excited to talk to her. Laura accurately described him as 12 to 15 years older than her, that he’d died two to three years earlier, and she wasn’t married to him. She came close to his name. She said, “I see a big B—a B-name, it’s short like Bub or Bubba.” She said it was a nickname, that there was another name. (Budd actually was his middle name.) Laura later corrected the name to “Buddy” and said there was an ‘E’ related to his name. (His first name was Elliot.)

She also accurately picked up that Budd died of cancer, that Kean was with him when he died, that he had one daughter, that his third marriage was a big mistake, that he died in late August, that his lungs had filled with fluid. (He died Aug. 24.) He also wished her happy birthday, and indeed it was Kean’s birthday.

Beyond those accurate comments, Kean was startled early on when Laura relayed this message: He says, “You were right. You were right!” Laura added: “I feel like it’s like you were right about the other side; you were right about this.” Kean said she knew immediately what it meant, and Laura confirmed it.

Kean also was surprised that Budd’s “big ego” personality came through. He dominated the reading and wanted all the time for himself. Laura said: “He acted as if  ‘This is all about me.’”  Indeed, Kean remembers Budd as having “a big, shining, sometimes overpowering personality.” Kean was amazed and said it was as if Budd, the person, was present.

Interestingly, though, not a word about UFOs!

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Uranus in Taurus

Posted on June 24, 2018 by Trish and Rob

This photo, of a street performer in Cartagena Colombia, typifies for me the Uranus transit through Taurus.

On May 15, the planet Uranus entered Taurus after 7 years in Aries. In astrology, Uranus rules the sign of Aquarius and, archetypically, represents sudden, unforeseen events, genius, electronics, psychic insights. This photo typifies Uranus – the seemingly impossible right in front of you.

Uranus shakes  things up so we’re tossed out of our familiars ruts and routines, many of which no longer do much of anything for us. Once the old stuff has dropped out of our lives, there’s space for new people and experiences, new insights, new everything.

Taurus is an earth sign, solid, stable, dependable, stubborn. It’s not particularly comfortable in Uranus, where it will be until November 7. Then, because it’s moving retrograde, it slips back into Aries for a final rally. It turns direct again in the first week of January 2019 and finally, on March 6, 2019, it enters Taurus again and will be there until April 2026, when it enters Gemini.

So this window we have between May 15 and November 7 provides us with insights about what the longer transit beginning in March 2019 will look like. Globally, we’ve had volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, trump’s meeting with the North Korean dictator,  two Cat 4 hurricanes in the Pacific, kids being ripped away from their parents at the southern borders of the country, children detention centers, Paul Manafort’s $10 million bail being rescinded for witness tampering. And that’s just the highlights. Google news events between May 15 and today for a fuller global picture.

On a personal level, here’s how this transit has unfolded so far for me. It requires a little backstory. During Hurricane Irma last fall – September 10, 2017 – our house sustained some roof damage. Leaks in 4 rooms, dry walls saturated, ruined air conditioner. We didn’t realize the extent of the damage until the first heavy rain after Irma and in late September filed a claim with our homeowner’s insurance company. They issued a small check that didn’t even cover the cost of the new AC unit.

Then a friend told me about public adjusters – freelance insurance people who work on your behalf to obtain a fair claim. Given the repercussions of Irma, it was difficult to find such an adjuster because they were overwhelmed with clients. But  we finally did. In late November, after an intense inspection of our house and roof, he filed a claim on our behalf. His report is incredibly detailed and underscores how insurance companies issue small checks in the hopes of shutting you up. The insurance company had 90 days to respond.

The deadline came and went. Our adjuster allotted more time because of the holidays, but eventually threatened to sue the insurance company if they didn’t respond by May 1 by sending out an adjuster who does what our guy does, but for the insurance folks.  He had until May 15 to respond.

Interesting deadline date, right?

May 15: Uranus entered Taurus. The insurance company missed the deadline. I was ready to quit astrology. The adjuster explained the next step. It sounded complicated and drawn out, a journey through the labyrinth of the insurance world and its laws. Meanwhile, hurricane season would begin on June 1 and we still had a leaky roof. But on May 18, the adjuster emailed me that the insurance company had issued a check that was close to his estimate and explained the process after we got the check. Three days past that May 15 deadline, that transit of Uranus into Taurus, but hey, I was grateful.

The check was sent out by UPS from the law firm to the adjuster – and got lost. To me, this was like Uranus shouting, “MacGregors, here’s your unforeseen surprise – but now I’m going to snatch it away.”

What ensued were letters, emails, scrambles to find the check or reissue it. I targeted June 13, new moon in Gemini, as the day we would hear something. And this time, astrology came through. The adjuster delivered the check personally and said it was the original check, it had been found, and we were going to get our new roof.

When I looked at the date on that check, my faith in astrology was restored: it was dated May 15.

Then, on my birthday, I received a contract for a short story I’d sold to Ellery Queen Magazine.

The signs are looking positive personally.

But on a global scale, are we approaching a dictatorship? Interment camps have begun – for kids.

 

 

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Hello, Nazi Germany

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Trish and Rob

Take a close look at this photo. A young immigrant girl crying for her parents, from whom she was ripped away. Regardless of your political affiliations, if you are unmoved by this photo or some of the audio that has been released of these young children sobbing for their moms and dads, then you lack the very things that makes us human: compassion.

Since April, the trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy toward immigrants crossing the border has resulted in thousands of children – some as young as a few months old – being separated from their parents. There are now 2,300 children (and probably more) who have been put in detention centers (an old Wal-Mart among them), tent cities, and foster homes all over the country. Their chances of being reunited with their parents are nil.

Whenever I hear any of this news, I am sickened. This is how life was in the early days of Nazi Germany. In the event that you find that sentence ridiculous or extreme, I encourage you to read this article in slate.com. It’s harrowing.

From Slate: “In the days since U.S. border protection agents released video of immigrants being kept in cages, and the first detained children began arriving behind the barbed-wire fences of a new government camp at Tornillo, Texas, people across the country have been struggling over how to think about what the Trump administration is doing. Some, horrified by the images and a leaked recording of children plaintively crying for the mothers and fathers from whose arms they’d been torn, have drawn comparisons to concentration camps of the past—particularly the most notorious ones of all, those of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.”

Conservative writers and pundits, of course, balk at the parallels. But from the beginning of trump’s tenure, we’ve been moving toward this moment. It started with the Muslim ban, then Charlottesville, then the glorification of dictators – Putin, Kim Jung un. And now this, using young immigrant children as political weapons because he wants funding for his stupid border wall.

Slate goes on: “When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he made no secret of his intentions to punish those he viewed as enemies, stamp out “undesirables,” and restore an imagined Teutonic greatness of the past. His government built its first concentration camp at Dachau just over a month after he became chancellor, to house political opponents of the new regime. Hitler knew the histories of Spain, Britain, and the United States. He had experienced the strategies of stripping citizenship from and forcibly imprisoning civilian populations during World War I. As he consolidated power, his staff ramped up pre-emptive arrests of anyone it deemed a target or threat, gaining confidence with every step.”

Many of these children are being kept in “cages.” According to Huffington Post, children at at least 3 detention centers report abuse. This whole cruel fiasco is a white Nationalist agenda and it’s beyond me how anyone can support this maniac and excuse such an  inhumane policy, as many so called evangelicals do.   This zero tolerance policy was planned, with the administration already ordering 20,000 more cots for these detainees back in April when the policy was implemented.

What they didn’t plan on was how the media has seized on this and how horrified most Americans are by what’s happening.

This isn’t a cultural war issue, like the Muslim ban or forcing NFL players to stand during the national anthem.Or about bad-mouthing blacks, Latinos, women.  It’s about children. And how ironic that the republican party, who claims to be the party of family values, remains largely mum.

This fiasco is trump’s Hurricane Katrina. And I hope to hell it unravels his presidency.

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Synchronicity & Mangos!

Posted on June 21, 2018 by Trish and Rob

Sometimes, small synchros can be just as startling as their larger siblings. They often deal with ordinary objects and seem to happen so effortlessly that if you aren’t paying attention, the synchro sails right past you.

This one is about mangos. It’s the season again and one of our trees is producing a bumper crop. Every day, we walk through the foliage in the backyard, looking for fallen mangos.   It’s like hunting for Easter eggs when you’re a kid. You spot something brightly colored under the ferns and there’s another fallen mango. The squirrels have gotten to some of them, but the fallen mangos are more intact this year than last.

So on Father’s Day, Rob took a bag of mangos to his yoga class and one of his students gave him a loaf of freshly baked bread. When she saw all the mangos, she wondered if she could make mango bread with them. Rob told her sure and said he’d send her a recipe for mango bread.

About an hour after he got home, our neighbor Annette came over with a loaf of freshly back mango bread she had made. “Happy Father’s Day, Rob. No one in my family likes mangos, so they won’t eat this. But I know you two love them.”

The bread was still warm.

What are the odds of getting two loaves of bread for Father’s Day and one of them is mango bread, the very thing he had talked to his yoga student about an hour earlier?

Both loaves, by the way, are scrumptious!

 

And happy solstice!

 

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The point we have reached in this country

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Trish and Rob

This is an audio that Pro Publica obtained from the inside of a child detention center in Texas. It’s heartbreaking. Children as young as a year are being separated from their parents at the border. This is a trump policy, not a democratic policy, and trump could end it immediately. But he wants funding for his border wall, so he uses these children as a political weapon.

This is the point we’ve reached as a country.  Now some of these kids are going to be placed in tent cities. If you’re a parent, imagine what this feels like. Even if you don’t have kids, think about the parallels between this and Nazi Germany. What’s next? The internment of journalists, of anyone who criticizes trump? Disagrees with him?

As the protagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale said, “How did we get to this point?”

 

 

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AURUM is Golden

Posted on June 18, 2018 by Trish and Rob

In ancient times, scholars from India to Greece and Egypt described not only four elements comprising the physical world—earth, water, fire and air—but they also referred to a mysterious ‘fifth essence’ that was beyond the physical realm and linked us to the spirit world. In various cultures, the fifth essence was called akashi, aether, or the void. In fact, it was thought that all of creation, including humans, consisted of these five elements.

The fifth essence played a role in alchemy, the predecessor to the science of chemistry, that involves the transmutation of base metals into gold.There have been no shortage of confusing, coded formulas for doing so over the centuries, but alchemy also reaches into a realm beyond the everyday world. To succeed with the process requires the alchemist to undergo a spiritual transformation…through the fifth essence. The creation of gold ultimately becomes secondary to the transmutation of the alchemist who discovers the ‘philosopher’s stone’ and the elixer of life.

In my novel, FIFTH ESSENCE, a modern-day alchemist vanishes, as did his predecessor and the predecessor before that one—a renowned French alchemist named Fulcanelli. Meanwhile, a decades-old secret government project seeks the elixer and searches for the missing alchemists. The name of that project is Aurum, a Latin word that means golden.

Recently, I was making one final reading of the novel before it came out in print and near the end Aurum plays a major role. As I finished making minor corrections, I walked out into the kitchen, sat down, and there in front of me was Trish’s most recent issue of Mountain Astrologer. It was open to an article called, THE SOLAR BEACON, and the author to my surprise was named Aurum. Just one word, an apparent pseudonym.

The article included an odd editor’s note that said, in part, that the article was for entertainment and critical thinking. “The author is merely transmitting Neptune’s passage through Pisces by mixing fact with fiction and, as is happening everywhere these days, leaving it to the reader to decide which is which.” The note also included this head-scratcher: “Readers are advised that Aurum (astrologer and entertainer) does not exist.”

My mystery novel (about Aurum rather than by Aurum) is also meant for entertainment, and—I guess—critical thinking if you want to look into the history of alchemy. What I tried not to do was what writers of both alchemical and astrological texts are often notorious for accomplishing. That is, writing in a code that the reader must understand before making sense of what was being written. Hopefully, I’ve succeeded so that you don’t have to be an alchemist to understand what’s going on in my mystery and you can enjoy it without knowing much of anything about alchemy.

Paperback, $12.99, Kindle $4.99, at Amazon.

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