Occupiers

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Trish and Rob

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9lbbWAgBy7E

 

The images are visceral and powerful.

In Oakland, California, police in full riot gear move in on occupiers with tear gas, projectiles, batons, and critically injure a 24-year-old Iraq vet who may now need brain surgery. The clueless Oakland mayor’s statement about the incidents in Oakland are those of a politician who should resign. She apparently doesn’t have any idea what’s going on in her city. Other cities are also threatening to shut down the occupiers.

But every time someone sees one of these brutal, violent images of cops moving against weaponless occupiers, the movement burgeons, the numbers multiply, and supporters cheer. What we see in the streets of major cities worldwide is that the 99 percent have had it with indentured servitude and have risen up.

Winter has arrived in some of these cities – like Denver, where the weather went from 83 degrees to the low thirties and snow the next day. There’s speculation – hopeful speculation from the right- that the inclement weather will break up these annoying protests. Don’t count on it. These occupiers aren’t like the Tea Party group, standing around in their silly hats adorned with tea bags, many of them brought in by buses by the financiers of the “movement” – the Koch brothers.  These occupiers are the genuine McCoy, the once silent masses who endured illegal wars, rising tuition, bailouts of Wall Street, tax cuts for the super wealthy, foreclosures, bankruptcy, outrageous insurance payments for health care. You name it, they endured it – and then got fed up.

Cold weather doesn’t stop a movement like this. Cops with power issues, clueless politicians, phony policies about permits for pubic parks don’t dismantle this sort of grass roots movement. The tipping point has been reached and it’s probably not going to recede. In some ways, it’s like a wave in quantum physics, the wave of probability. When enough people tap into it, then the wave crashes into physical reality as a particle. Well, here’s your particle. Instead of a few hundred Tea Party folks holdings signs and shouting, you have tens of thousands of the disenfranchised marching through the streets of the world’s largest cities, their dome tents pitched in public parks, on public squares. They are leaderless and they are like a force of nature.

Their demands are multiple and compatible: physicians protesting for true universal heath care, Iraqi vets against the wars, unemployed college graduates drowning in repayment of college loans, middle class people in the midst of foreclosure and bankruptcy, and even the residual hippies who protested against Vietnam in the Sixties. The occupiers represent democracy at its finest,  and when you hear otherwise, it’s probably the pundits at Fox News who are spouting the lies. Or the Ayn Rand  acolytes.

I have to admit that I loved Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The woman had a particular vision that she translated well into fiction. But her premise is flawed. It was always flawed. Rand believed that capitalism could self-regulate. The idea that any economical system can self-regulate is absurd. The temptation for abuse is just too powerful. But Alan Greenspan, a student of Rand’s, really bought into it and there’s something so sad and pathetic about him now when he’s on TV and tries to explain what happened.

So here we are. The occupiers are US. Use your greatest talent or strength to support them. If you’re in an area where you can join them, do so. If you have supplies they might need – blankets, tents, sleeping bags, hope –then given them that.  The paradigm shift is happening and it’s happening where you live, it’s happening because  the 99 percent are demanding it.

 

 

Posted in politics, synchronicity, the 99 percent | 20 Comments

How to Fix Congress

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

A friend sent this and it sure sounds good to me!

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offfers
one of the best quotes about the debt ceiling:

“I could end the deficit in 5 minutes,” he told CNBC. “You just
pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more
than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible
for re-election.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple!
The people demanded it. That was in 1971 – before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven  took one  year or less to become the law of the land – all because of public pressure.

Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to
a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask
each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will
have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed
around.

_*Congressional Reform Act of 2011*_

1. No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they’re out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social
Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the
Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into
the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the
American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all
Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.
Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and
participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the
American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this
contract with Congressmen/women.

Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their
term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will
only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive
the message.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!

Posted in politics, synchronicity | 12 Comments

UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials go on the Record

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Trish and Rob

During one of my recent excursions to Barnes and Noble, I found a book I first heard about when it was in hardback. It’s now out in trade – less expensive – and wow, it’s a winner. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials go on the Record by Leslie Kean  is exactly what the title promises.

I usually do my reading on the treadmill at the gym. But the past day or so, I’ve had a cold and have settled on the couch in our family room with this book and I can’t stop reading it. Kean is an investigative journalist  who first published something on UFOs in 2000, in the Boston Globe.  Her article was based on a report now known as the COMETA Report, a study by  former “high ranking French officials documenting the existence of unidentified flying objects and exploring their potential on national security.”

In the introduction, Kean talks about her reluctance to become involved in this area because journalists – and the mainstream media – tend to ridicule it.  But after reading the COMETA Report, she was hooked.

Anyone who knows anything about the UFO field will recognize the big stories in these pages: the wave of sightings over Belgium in the early 1990s, the Phoenix lights in 1997, the Hudson River Valley sightings, the O’Hare Airport sighting in 2006, the incident at Rendlesham Forest, UFOs in Brazil, France… But what makes this book unique is that Kean not only compiles this information in a suspenseful way, but has included chapters written by pilots, military personnel, and other government officials who experienced these sightings.

During the Phoenix lights flap on March 13, 1997, hundreds – maybe thousands – of ordinary Americans saw “a massive craft, a solid object, not merely lights; and it often appeared to be very low in the sky, blocking out the stars behind it.” The 9-11 calls poured in. People were panicked. But it wasn’t until USA Today ran a story on the Phoenix Lights that the national media really spotlighted the incident.

So on June 19, Arizona’s Republican governor, Fife Symington, held a press conference and promised to reveal the source behind the Phoenix lights. His very tall chief of staff, handcuffed and wearing an alien costume, was escorted to the podium. The governor joked, “this just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious.”

And so, the Phoenix lights flap faded into oblivion until a decade later, when this same governor, now out of office, admitted that he had seen the craft. He referred to it as a “craft  of unknown origin.” He heard about it first on TV, then “jumped into his car…and drove to a park near Squaw Park outside if Phoenix. “It was dramatic. And I couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.”

Symington is now an outspoken advocate for disclosure.

There are so many compelling first-hand testimonies in this book that it reads like the best sort of suspense novel. You get a real sense that people on the front lines – air traffic controllers, for instance . They simply don’t know what to do, how to react,  when they get a report from a pilot that they’re being followed by an unknown craft.  One of the most intriguing chapters is on the incursion at O’Hare Airport on November 7, 2006, when mechanics, pilots, and managers “looked up from their ground positions at the terminal and saw the strange object hovering just under a cloud bank, which began at 1,900 feet above the ground…Based on the collection of eyewitness testimony, the UFO is estimated to have ranged in size from about 22 to 88 feet in diameter, and was suspended at approximately 1,500 feet above Gate C17 at the United terminal.”

Now, really, you would think that the government, the FAA, Homeland Security, someone somewhere, would have a comment about this incident. But the FAA tried to ignore the safety implications. One FAA person wrote the whole thing off as “weather phenomenon.”  You know, that goes into the same category as Japanese lanterns and weather balloons.

As Kean points out, why not be forthright about what these phenomena are? Why not have an agency or commission that actually investigates and reports? In an era when everyone has a cell phone with camera and video capacity, when  You Tube brings you the latest on events on the other side of the world, when information travels at the speed of light,  it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to buy into the “official” explanation.

As Kean concludes: “”…there is too much at  stake to continue stonewalling… the phenomenon itself has placed us in a precarious situation that we have not chosen, and that we can do nothing about. We must strive to learn what we can, for its in our deepest nature and best interest to do so- to simply want to find out.”

As she points out, we don’t need the release of just more documents from the government. We need experts who study these sightings, who attempt to understand what these crafts are, where they come from, what they want. And we need these experts – and the government – be be honest and forthright with the pubic about their findings.

Kean has done all of us a service. Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer or somewhere in between, you come away from this book with questions about the nature of reality, about your own belief system, and about the silliness and trivia your government is feeding you. That alone is worth the price of the book.

 

 

Posted in synchronicity, UFO | 15 Comments

Cone of Uncertainty

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Trish and Rob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Posted in synchronicity | 23 Comments

New Moon

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

On October 26, there’s a new moon in Scorpio, the most emotionally intense and psychic sign in the zodiac.  New moons, just to refresh, are about new beginnings, new opportunities, new chapters, new, new new.  This moon favors research, investigations, psychic development, digging deeply for answers.

This moon occurs at 3 degrees of Scorpio, so those of you born in the early days of water and earth signs – Scorpio, Pisces, Cancer, Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn – will be especially pleased. Those of you with moons or rising signs in water or earth signs will like this new moon, too. The rest of us – air and fire signs – also have Scorpio somewhere in our charts and those areas will be the ones that experience a rebirth.    For a free natal chart, click here.

Scorpio is the most enigmatic and mysterious of signs. It always seeks the absolute bottom line. So look at your natal chart and find the place where you see the glyph featured here:

In  that house is where the new opportunities will surface. If Scorpio is on the cusp of one of the four critical houses – i.e., your rising sign, or the cusp of your 4th, 7th or 10th houses – then pay very close attention to this new moon. Your personal life, domestic situation, partnerships and career will be impacted in a major way. The new opportunities that surface are likely to start deep within, that’s the nature of Scorpio, the internal rumblings that tell you this is good or I don’t need this anymore .  The sign is exceptionally intuitive and secretive, so be sure you’re paying close attention to you on the 26th.

On the 28th,  Jupiter (expansion) and Pluto(permanent transformation) get together in a beneficial way and suddenly, you get it. Regardless of where you live or what sign you are, this day is one of the luckiest this year. Some predictions have stated the world will end on the 28th. But ever  since Jose Arguelles wrote The Mayan Factor, doomsayers have played around with his end date of 12/21/12 for the Mayan calendar and come up with various dates that have come and gone without the world ending. But if you choose to hunker down in a bunker on this date, that’s your choice. But you may emerge the next day with egg on your face, okay?

 

Posted in astrology, synchronicity | 14 Comments

Bravo!

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Here in the village of Wellington, Florida, it’s not hard to encounter members of the elite 1% – those who control 40% of the nation’s wealth. They’ve been occupying this former Everglades ‘swamp land’ in growing numbers since the 1980s. That’s especially true in the ‘season,’ which has just begun. The attraction is the reputation of the village as the world’s winter headquarters for the equestrian world – jumping, dressage and polo.

This year Bill Gates and family will winter here. They recently rented a house for $600,000. (Psst, Bill, we would’ve happily sold our house to you for that price.) Other in the 1% league who winter here include Bruce Springsteen,  Madonna, and Tommy Lee Jones, who owns a polo team.

So considering that intro, it was interesting to read today about someone from the other 99% in Wellington, who hasn’t had such a luxurious lifestyle. Yamil Bravo has been out of work for six months and is several months behind on his mortgage. Notes Bravo’s wife, Evelyn: “Every day we lived in fear of what tomorrow was going to be….Now it’s like we can plan a future. There’s a second chance.”

That’s because Bravo bought a quick pick lottery ticket at a convenience story and won the Florida Lottery Mega Money drawing – a prize of $1 million. Bravo isn’t even close to the 1% league, but he’s been given a second chance in life, he said, and now he can sleep at night. He added: “This gets things going in the right direction.”

Yep, sure does. Bravo! A little synchro there.

Posted in lottery, synchronicity | 10 Comments

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Posted on October 23, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

 

The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution is straightforward:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This last part is what Republicans politicians are having a problem with when it comes to the Occupiers. They did not have this same reaction to the Tea Partiers, of course, because they were funded by the Koch brothers and were espousing, well, Republican tenets. Here’s a roundup of their thoughts. A few highlights:

Mitt Romney, speaking to a small crowd in a Florida retirement community on October 4, said: “I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare.”

Herman Cain: I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! — October 5, 2011 remarks to the press.

Rick Perry: Liberals are now pointing the finger of blame at successful employers under the guise of fairness, but when they utter phrases like ‘fair share’ you just know, heh, they’re once again playing fast and furious with the truth.

And the truth is you can’t reve up the engine of economic growth by heaping higher taxes on job creators, you can’t spread success by punishing it… ” — October 7, 2011 remarks at conservative Value Voters Summit

Eric Cantor, House Republican Leader
If you read the newspapers today, I, for one, am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country. And believe it or not, some in this town, have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans….” — October 7, 2011 remarks at conservative Value Voters Summit

Mayor Bloomberg is now promising a crackdown on the occupiers.

Author Naomi Wolf, an author and political activist who also blogs for Huffinton Post, was arrested recently in the Occupy Wall Street protests when she refused to get off of a public sidewalk. If you’ve never read Wolf’s book, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, treat yourself to it.  The book looks at the rise of Fascism in history and outlines the ten necessary steps for a fascist government to destroy the democratic foundations of a democracy and analyzes the emergence of these characteristics since the attacks of 9-11:

  1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
  2. Create secret prisons  where torture takes place.
  3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force  not answerable to citizens.
  4. Set up an internal surveillance  system.
  5. Harass citizens’ groups.
  6. Engage in arbitrary detention  and release.
  7. target key individuals
  8. Control the press.
  9. Treat all political dissidents as traitors.
  10. Suspend the rule of law.

#1: terrorists. Used to be communists.

#2: Guantanamo is still open for biz

#3: We have a number of those, don’t we? Halliburton is still in business, under a new name

#4: Fill in the blank with your favorite acronym for the gov’t spy agencies

#5: Fill in the blank here, too.

#6: Listen to Naomi Wolf’s conversation with Olbermann at the end of this post

#7: Pick a prominent individual who speaks out against what’s happening in this country. Oh, say, Michael Moore. He now has a 24/7 security detail because of threats to himself and his family.

#8: Fox News, anyone?

#9: “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” – George W. Bush

#10: Well, Google it.

There’s obviously no synchro in this post. But there’s something more important. Our first amendment rights are being usurped, little by little, in insidious ways. It’s not just the Occupiers who underscore the first amendment; it’s occurring in our personal lives. Math addict sent me an email about an incident that happened to her young granddaughter when she wore a Wicca symbol to school.I hope she’ll comment on it.

Democracy has always been an experiment. For the most part, the experiment has been successful. But the country is now so divisive that it’s not enough to cast your vote, to sign petitions. Now is the time to speak out, stand up, and do whatever you can to make sure that the 99 percent are not silenced.

Now take a look at Wolf’s conversation with Keith Olbermann on October 21, about her arrest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCuax-3DeBc

 

 

 

Posted in occupy wall street, politicians, politics, synchronicity | 16 Comments

An unlikely encounter

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Trish and Rob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Posted in synchronicity | 7 Comments

333, oh, & 9-9-9

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Recently I’ve been working on a new book proposal, spending a lot of time polishing the 55 pages. I’m looking for a new agent and want the proposal to shine.  I knew I was close when I had a dream in which I was walking down a road with Trish and Megan and we noticed an eagle circling high overhead.

Suddenly, the eagle swooped down from the sky and landed right in front of me. Megan started taking pictures as the eagle lunged forward and pulled a glove off my hand. (Up to that point I wasn’t aware I was wearing gloves.) Then the eagle’s beak pulled off the other glove, and that was the end of the dream.

The dream was meaningful, about courage strength and renewal. I was ready to ‘pull off the gloves’ and get down to business. The following day I finished the proposal and re-wrote the cover letter in the afternoon.

I’d picked out an agent from a list of members of the Association of Author Representatives, and was hoping she was the right one to represent me. I hit the print button at 3:33 p.m. Then, a few minutes later, when I addressed the envelope for the proposal, I was surprised to see that her address was 333 West End Avenue.

A good number synchronicity, I thought. Oh, it was actually my second number synchro of the day. Earlier, we had gone to Whole Foods after the gym. En route, Trish was talking about a conversation she had at the gym with Bruce Gernon, my co-author of THE FOG, about Herman Cain and his 9-9-9 proposal.

When we arrived, I headed over to the fish market section and surveyed what was available. I noticed something odd. The red snapper fillets were divided in two sections. The front section were selling for $21.99 a pound. But the ones in the back were only $9.99 a pound. So I asked what the difference was between the two snappers. The fish monger (to use a British term) shook his head and said, “There are no snappers for $9.99.”

I told him to take a look at the sign. He did so, then realized he had forgotten a 1. It should’ve read: $19.99 a pound. But he gave me two pieces totalling a pound for the lower price. “You got it half price,” he said.

“9-9-9,” I replied. As I walked off, I wondered if Herman Cain had also made a mistake in his figures.

Posted in number clusters, synchronicity | 12 Comments

Buddy

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Trish and Rob

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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