Happy New Year!

Posted on January 1, 2024 by Trish and Rob

I sort of dreaded this Mercury retrograde – in two signs, Capricorn and Sadge. But today, Jan 1, Mercury turns direct at 10:08 p.m. ET and 7:08 PT, in Sagittarius.

So: snafus for me during the past 3 weeks? Well, we drove to Ga to spend the holiday with my brother in law and my sister’s large family. Between them, 5 kids with families, partners. The reunion was terrific. It has been more than 6 months since Mary’s sudden passing. There  was only one instance where Mary’s oldest and second sons – Ardon and Avery- felt so deeply emotional they came out onto the porch, where I was tossing a ball to Nigel.

The trigger? Ardon’s wife, Kerri, had several toys made for the kids from a couple of Mary’s articles of clothing. There’s something visceral about this, something that grabs your heart and squeezes until you cry. For me, that moment came when Megan handed me a gift – a painting she had done of Mary and I. Everyone in that room got such a painting, all done from photos Meg had asked for.

Neal took one look at his and headed for the bedroom, where he placed the painting on a dresser where he would see it daily. Mine now hangs on our living room wall, above a painting Megan did of me from a photo when I was, hmm, maybe 20. These paintings were why we ended up taking two cars to Marietta. Meg wanted to finish them before she left, so she arrived in  Marietta around two a.m., about three hours after we did.

There were moments when I felt Mary around. It wasn’t as immediate as this summer, with the hummingbird that flew so close to me I  could see the color of its eyes. But the day before we left, Megan and I drove to Ashton’s tattoo shop in Atlanta  and got our hummingbird tattoos. It’s my first, on my right forearm, and it didn’t hurt!

Megan also gave me a hummingbird feeder and I think I’m going to hang it in the mango tree just outside my office window. I’m told I should get nectar for it.

So I’m going into the new year – 2024!!- with the joy a hummingbird represents and the access it provides to the ones I love, living, dead, in between.

Happy New Year to everyone!

 

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The Mystical Underground

Posted on December 31, 2023 by Trish and Rob

 

Enjoy!

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RANDOM ACTS

Posted on December 30, 2023 by Trish and Rob

 

We drove to Marietta, Georgia over the holidays to sped Christmas with my sister’s husband and family. The drive back non the 28th was a nightmare of traffic, with two accidents on I-75 that necessitated taking back roads to get around them. When we finally reached a rest stop, we were out of water, snacks and patience. I made a beeline for the machines and found that most of them were empty.

I found the one machine that still had water and soda and got out my dollar bills. But the machine refused to take them. I kept turning the bills this way and that and smoothing them out to try again. Suddenly, this man comes over, taps a card against the payment window. “Help yourself,” he says.

I thanked him, punched the button for the water, and the bottle tumbled out. I turned to hand him my $3, but he already had disappeared into the crowd. So even in a world that seems more divisive daily, random acts of kindness still happen.

 

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Trish MacGregor: Star Power For Janurary 2024

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Trish and Rob

https://soundcloud.com/themysticalunderground/trish-macgregor-star-power-for-janurary-2024


Join Trish for the January 2024 astrological forecast!

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Happy Holidays from the MacGregors to All of You!

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Trish and Rob

This year, we’ll be spending the holiday with my sister’s family in Marietta, Georgia. On December 6, it will be six months since my sister Mary died suddenly and unexpectedly of strep. None of us want her husband, Neal, to spend Xmas without our rowdy bunch. Mary’s  oldest son, Ardon and his family are coming in from London. Avery and his wife are coming in from Chico, California. Ashton and his fiancee live just south of Marietta and will be there, too. Neal’s daughter, Casey will arrive from wherever her nomadic soul has taken her and his son, Cody and his wife and 3 daughters have arrived already  from Singapore.

That’s a lot of humans in one house so we’re getting a nearby pet friendly airbnb. Nigel and Megan’s pooch, Riley, will join us.

We hope your holidays and new year are spectacular!

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IMMUNITY FOR LIFE?

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Trish and Rob

 

Should anyone who has been a US president be granted immunity for life?
That’s what trump’s attorneys are arguing.

So think about that. Lifelong immunity from prosecution means you can do any damn thing you want without fear of ever being held accountable for it. You can shoot someone on 5th Avenue, trigger an insurrection, try to convince your VP not to certify election result, make a frantic call to the Georgia Secretary of State and instruct him to hold a new election or find those 11,600 votes he needs to win your state.

In watching trump’s legal nightmares unfold, in a judicial system that’s supposed to be equal for everyone, I’m shocked by the preferential treatment he gets. Any other person would have been jailed at the first violation of the gag order.

Just how is all this going to play out, anyway? Unprecedented territory: that’s what the news says constantly. But they’re right. Nixon brought us to that place. From Wikipedia:

Proclamation 4311 was a presidential proclamation issued by President of the United States Gerald Ford on September 8, 1974, granting a full and unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon, his predecessor, for any crimes that he might have committed against the United States as president. In particular, the pardon covered Nixon’s actions during the Watergate scandal. In a televised broadcast to the nation, Ford, who had succeeded to the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation, explained that he felt the pardon was in the best interests of the country and that the Nixon family’s situation was “a tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”

I remember that day, remember watching it on TV, Nixon doing his silly salute and then disappearing into a plane.

The difference here is that trump hopes that by playing the victim being persecuted by “the radical left” he’s doing it so that we, the voting public out here, won’t have to. Odd, coming from a man known mostly for his orange hair and his narcissism and oh, drink some bleach, it will take care of Covid.

As Trump’s dictatorial rhetoric becomes more frequent and vile, I get texts and emails from friends who are freaked out and depressed about this. The men who wrote the constitution, those founding fathers, never anticipated someone like trump. And that left huge holes in the laws that govern this democracy. That’s the kind of territory we’re in. Democracy is on the line.

I’ve never understood Americans who support this bozo, especially now. Do they all have daddy issues? Do they all need a father figure who dictates what they can do, say, how they can live? One woman with whom I grew up in Venezuela chastised me for criticizing trump. So I asked her, Do you prefer to live under a Trump dictatorship?

Yes, she replied, and we haven’t spoken since.

What am I missing here about the human psyche?

Maybe trump’s greatest gift is his ability to brainwash the populace by using the rhetoric dictators have used with great success. Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet, Chavez… I’ll save you from the deep state by letting them come after me instead of coming after you…

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BEOWULF

Posted on December 19, 2023 by Trish and Rob

 

I’ve written about Beowulf before. Some years ago, my sister Mary took him in with his two feral brothers. For years, Beo and his bros lived in Mary and Neal’s massive cellar (in Georgia,) where there are windows and eaves and furniture. They were terrified of people. But in 2020, when I visited her during during Covid, she asked me to adopt one of these guys. So down into the cellar I went.

The cats were hidden. I found a container of treats and shook them. “Hey, guys, who wants to move to Florida?”

A gorgeous black and white cat peered out at me from behind a couch. I crouched and shook some treats into my hand and set them on the floor. The cat looked interested but wary. Yet, he strutted out and butted his head against my knee as if to ask, Hey, you a friend?

I stroked him, then he went over to the treats and gobbled them up. When he was finished, he returned to me for another head butt, then off he went into the secrets of the cellar. I snapped a photo of him and texted it to Mary, who had remained upstairs.

I want him.
That’s Beowulf!

She joined me in the cellar and he came out to greet her and she nodded. “I’ll drive him to Orlando in a couple weeks. Can you meet me there?”

So that’s what we did. And I called him Beo, for short.

He hated the carrier and complained about it for three hours during my drive back to S Florida the next day. As soon as I brought him into the house and released him, he took off and spent the next 10 days under a bed. Once he saw open doors and windows and realized he had the freedom to go out into the backyard, it was his favorite place to be. Eventually he got braver and ventured to the front yard, the driveway.

Now, nearly four years later, he’s still the most vocal cat I’ve ever had. When he has been in the house too long, he lets you know it and moves from room to room, complaining. If the weather is too hot or too cold or too wet, I keep him in. Or try to. But he’s a crafty guy and will dart through an open door before you even notice the breeze caused by his passage.

No cats or dogs roam this neighborhood at night. There’s no traffic. I don’t think he goes far. I suspect he sits in our front yard or our neighbor’s backyard, curled up somewhere in his freedom, and watches the light of the moon and stars. I may get him a GPS just to find out for sure.

His name is interesting and I don’t know why Mary named him Beowulf. I never thought to ask. Here’s what wikipedia says:

Beowulf is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature.

It’s believed the poem was written in the 8th century.

 

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Mark Ireland: Persistence Of The Soul

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Trish and Rob

Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…

Mark Ireland is the cofounder of Helping Parents Heal, an organization with more than 24,000 members that assists bereaved parents worldwide. He has participated in mediumship research studies conducted by the University of Arizona and the University of
Virginia and he currently operates a Medium Certification program. His first book was called Soul Shift, and his new book is Persistence of the Soul. Mark lives in Camas, Washington.

https://www.markirelandauthor.com

And here’s the You Tube link:

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MERC RETRO SNAFUS & GIFTS

Posted on December 16, 2023 by Trish and Rob

 

So far, just 3 days into this retrograde, it’s been pretty typical: computer glitches, billing weirdness with Sirius radio,  miscommunication. But there have also been some interesting  things – finding lost objects, for instance.

I had a box of ornaments that contained a bunch I inherited from my first editor, Chris Cox, at Ballantine  Books.  I found them wrapped in colorful pieces of Christmas paper, so they wouldn’t get broken, and had looked in this box a dozen times and hadn’t seen them.

Chris was a terrific person and editor. We became good friends and he and my agent, Diane Cleaver, both of them  also writers, went on one of the Amazon cruises that Rob and I had led for Avianca Airlines back in the late 1980s. I don’t have photos of that trip. But that video gives you a sense of what the Amazon was  like even back when we led these tours for travel writes.

Chris died of AIDS in 1990. His partner, Bill, had died the year before and I still recall that conversation with Chris when he told me Bill had AIDS.

“He’s going blind, Trish. His parents are coming to pick him up and take him back to Minnesota.”

His voice was choked, he started to weep. I didn’t know what to say, what to do. Bill was a senior curator at the New Museum of Art in NYC at the time, a big deal in the art world. I offered whatever solace I could, then we got interrupted and Chris said he’d call back. He eventually did, one Monday after he’d returned from Minneapolis where he flew nearly every weekend to be with Bill. “I want to be with him when he dies.”

And if memory serves, Chris was with him and died not long afterward. Editor Cheryl Woodruff, another Ballantine editor and friend of Chris’s, asked me to speak at his memorial service. We flew to NY. Megan was barely a year old  and while I spoke at that service, he and Meg were at the back, near the doors, and when she started crying, Rob stepped outside with her.

I used this wooden sculpture of the traveler when I spoke about Chris. I bought it on that Amazon trip and it’s how I saw him, a nomad who traveled through many strange worlds as a senior editor at Ballantine. After his death, Cheryl mailed the ornaments to me. So every Christmas as I’m decorating our tree, I think of him. And thank him for being my first editor and my friend.

So this is what Mercury retro often does: you find lost stuff and it triggers memories from the past.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Chris:

Christopher Cox was born in Gadsden, Alabama. At 16, he worked for conservative Senator John Sparkman as a page, but would later found a local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Alabama.[1]

In the 1970s, he moved to Manhattan and pursued a career with the SoHo Weekly News as both a writer and photographer. Cox, who was gay,[2] is perhaps best known for his collaboration within The Violet Quill.[3] He later went on to become senior editor of Ballantine Books.[4] He appeared in William Shakespeare‘s Two Gentlemen of Verona, and later directed several plays at the Jean Cocteau Theater, New York City.[1][4]

He died of an AIDS-related infection in 1990.[4] His partner, William Olander, had died of the same disease in 1989.[5]

 

 

 

 

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Nala & Beo

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Trish and Rob

Our two cats, Beowulf and Nala, have such different histories it intrigues me that they are good buddies.

Nala was originally from the Palm Beach County Animal Care & Control and was fostered by our neighbor, Annette, when she was just a kitten. I met her when she could barely crawl. I’d never had a black cat before and fell in love with her. So on Christmas Day 2018, Rob &n Megan brought her to our house and gave her to me as a present.

During Covid, my sister, Mary, asked me to adopt one of the 3 cats whom she had rescued when they were feral some years before. At the time, they lived in her huge cellar in Marietta. So during a trip to visit her, I went down into this spacious cellar and shook a container of treats. The only one of the three who emerged to see who I was and what I wanted was a beautiful black and white cat, Beowulf. He head bumped my leg, I put a handful of cat treats in one of the bowls, and he munched, then looked up at me with these gorgeous topaz eyes and meowed.

When I went back upstairs, I told Mary I wanted to adopt Beo. Several months later, she drove to Orlando with Beo to make the transfer. We stayed a night at Meg’s, then the next day into a carrier Beo went again and we made the three hour drive home. He meowed the entire way. When I released him in the house, he made a beeline for the bedroom, ducked under the bed, and stayed there for 10 days.

When he came out, Nala greeted him and they darted off together into the family room – and through the open door. Ever since, the two of them dart outside in the morning and sometimes Beo chooses to stay outside overnight, relishing his newfound freedom. He doesn’t go far – out backyard, our neighbors’ backyard, the driveway. But it’s the stars, the moon, the smell of freedom that lures him.

He’s the more vocal of the two cats, Nala is the more loving. He likes Nigel, often head bumps with him and any other dog that comes into the house, instantly announcing, “Ok, dude, you’re here, you don’t have to chase me. Besides, I can climb trees.”
But Nala is the more loving, sidling up to Nigel for a lick, a nudge, a love pat. When she sleeps on our bed at night, she relishes being stroked, petted. Beo, on the other hand, endures a pet or two then nips at my hand.

I don’t think there’s any synchronicity here other than the fact that writing about this helps me clarify it in my own head. These relationships among animals of different species fascinate me.

In the early 2000s, we had Kali, a dusky conure, 2 different cats, and a different Golden, Jessie. Rob taught Kali to ride on Jessie’s back, pluck a treat from the counter and drop it into Jessie’s mouth. The cats  watched in awe. This gang all got along. A dog, bird, cats. They were friends.

Can we humans ever manage to overlook our glaring differences and become friends like our pets do?

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