Our daughter, Megan, recently re-created her website that features samples of her art. She definitely has an eye for color! Here are some of my favorites – the elephant, of course, but also this incredible wave:
And this cute pooch on a wine glass:
Here’s the link to her website, a visual feast.
One of the most popular and best-selling poets in America was a Muslim who lived seven centuries ago. The 13th century Sufi theologian and poet, Jalal al-Din Mohammad Rumi, is best known simply as Rumi. His work is read at weddings, performed by artists and musicians and endlessly quoted on Instagram.
Not many people know much about Rumi’s life, a fact that led author Brad Gooch to write Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love in which he gives readers a glimpse of Rumi by studying the poet’s travels and his spiritual formation. Interestingly, as a child, he was visited once by angelic beings and it disturbed him. But his father said they had just come to provide help and guidance.
Gooch told The Huffington Post that, like many others, he was fascinated by the beautiful and sensual imagery in Rumi’s poetry. While researching the book Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, he befriended a group of Sufi Muslims he met in New York City’s Upper West Side. It was there that he became exposed to the religious and spiritual dimension of Rumi’s work.
“I think the romance of the quest for meaning, of the spiritual quest, is what’s so special and seductive about Rumi,” Gooch told HuffPost. “He has displayed how human light and divine light reflect each other and go back and forth in this incredible romance and passion to search for meaning.”
If you go to the Huffington Post article here, you see a list of ten things you probably didn’t know about Rumi.
So this may seem like an interesting, but mundane article about Rumi, and it would’ve been except there is a synchronicity here. I found this article because I’m working with a Saudi writer on a spiritual book and I had sent her a Rumi quote: “Silence is the language of God, all else is a poor translation.” She wrote back: “This is the Rumi wisdom level I want to reach, very simple and straight to the point.”
I realized then that I didn’t really know much about Rumi’s life, so I Googled him and that led to the Huffington Post article. The synchronicity is two-fold: first, I met Brad Gooch many years ago when he joined us on one of the adventure tours to South America that Trish and I used to lead for Avianca Airlines. On this particular trip, we cruised into the Upper Amazon on a converted rubber boat, a journey from Leticia, Colombia to Iquitos, Peru. He came with his friend, Chris Cox, who was Trish’s literary agent. The tours were for freelance travel writers.
That would not be really such a great synchro, just a curious coincidence, except for the fact that, oddly enough, I thought of Brad Gooch this morning when I was waking up. The memory that flashed briefly through my mind was that of seeing Brad at Chris Cox’s memorial service in NYC in 1990. Yes, thirty years ago, so why the hell would that memory come to mind? I guess it was a prelude, a precognition to coming across his book…and inviting him to join us as a guest on our podcast, The Mystical Underground.
Our daughter, Megan, recently had a meet and greet with two cats whom she’s going to take care of in November and the owner. She had three synchronicities with this visit.
First, one of the cats had the same name as her cat – Indy. That’s Megan’s Indy in photo.
Second, the woman had the same first and last name as one of Megan’s friends. The last name was was spelled with a Y instead of an I, but was pronounced the same.
Third, Megan was wearing her Orange Theory shirt and the woman pointed at it and said, “That’s where I’m headed when we finish up here.”
I don’t know that these synchros have any specific meaning, but they caught Megan’s attention. Perhaps it means the cats will be repeat customers!
If you would rather read the November forecast, go here.
Remember that old show Truth or Consequences? I think of that every time I hear a blaring horn that announces what trump has just said as UNTRUE.
“We’re rounding the curve…” he says about the corona virus.
Honk. Not at all.
In the last two days – Oct 19-20, the U.S. has recorded 119,599 cases of the virus. Between 900- 1,000 Americans die daily. We have the highest number of cases in the world and more than 225,000 deaths, more than any other country in the world. No question that trump has failed the country in containing this virus. It’s why he’s attacking Fauci, embraces QAnon and any other right wing extremist group that supports him.
The mishandling of the pandemic and the economic fallout and the way we are now viewed by the rest of the world are trump’s fault. What we have in this president is a guy pretending to be president, a dude who seizes a photo op in front of a church, holding a Bible upside down. A morbidly obese man, recently released from Walter Reed where he underwent experimental treatment for Covid, is perched at the top of a staircase and dramatically removes his mask to show how Superman overcomes Covid. And he’s struggling for breath.
Trump is a sham. The powerless wizard behind the curtain in Oz. But he’s also the personification of the collective American psyche where racism and misogyny flourish. What can we learn from this? From him?
Well, one thing we can learn: VOTE BLUE.
The next time a trump supporter tells you what a great job trump has done, cite some facts.
Today, October 23, the U.S. had the highest number of new cases in a single day. That figure is at the top of the chart, the second number to the right of USA TOTAL. And while it’s true trump didn’t cause the virus, he mismanaged the pandemic (hoax, it’ll be gone by April – you’ve all heard these trump takes on where things are) so terribly that nearly 250,000 Americans are dead.
Even though trump and his family had Covid, he holds maskless super-spreader rallies in Covid hot spots and still insists we’re “turning the corner” on the virus, that he has done a great job. Yeah. I used to joke that the corona virus should be called the trump virus. Seven months into this pandemic, into what experts say is the third wave, it really is the trump virus.
Here’s a strange dream I had during the early hours of Tuesday, Oct. 20,2020. If there are synchronicities related to it, I don’t know what they are at this writing. I can’t figure out this dream. It was just informational, no noticeable images involved, but it was persistent, over and over again all night long and into the early morning.
I kept getting this message: “Queen Elizabeth…Alexander.” That’s all. Over and over again. As I was analyzing what it could mean while it was still happening this morning, it occurred to me that maybe it really wasn’t about the queen at all. But I needed the queen’s name so I could find out who Alexander was.
I (Rob) am not much up on the royals, not my thing. I never read anything about them, and am only vaguely aware that Harry and his American wife bailed on the court. I don’t know where they live or what they’re doing. What I know of them is from passing headlines.
But I was surprised to find that there is an Alexander in the royal family. He’s a first cousin, twice removed from Queen Elizabeth. So he’s the grandson of the queen’s cousin, Alexandra Ogilvy. He apparently graduated this year from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I found one article from 2019 with a pic of him with other royals—the one above. I doubt that I ever saw that article or picture. Alexander is in line for the throne, but way down on the list.
So I have no idea what this dream means, but I wanted to make note of it, and the date, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2020. Does anyone have any insight? I’m at a loss, except again to say that it was persistent and repetitive. It also felt like it was related to something I knew about, but when I woke up I had not idea what that would be. Also, there is nothing I’m involved in related to the royals or anyone named Alexander.
A trailer…
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The other night, MSNBC ran a documentary of Peter Souza, who was the Obama admin photographer for eight years. It was so deeply moving that in parts of it, I cried for what we have lost in this country.
Souza really captured the beauty and humanity of Obama as a human being, a man, husband, father, and as president of the country. The documentary made me hunger for:
Waking up without checking my phone for the latest trump travesty
Living without a knot of anxiety in my gut about this election.
Not having to check on the latest numbers of new Covid cases in the country
The certainty of a president who knows what the hell he/she is doing
Not having to hear about the president every minute 24/7
Civility
Tolerance for our differences
Eloquence and integrity in a president’s words
No manipulation of info from the CDC, Homeland Security, or any other government agency
Normal life
That’s just for starters.
The challenge is that we don’t have a normal anymore. Trump has destroyed it politically, socially, culturally, judicially. And the pandemic has done the rest. Some morning I wake up and think, Did I get to an alternate reality last night? Am I going to look at my cell and see that all our borders are open again? That Covid is contained?
You get the idea here. This country screams for healing. Four more years of trump will kill us. If we’re going to survive as a democracy, a people, a planet, an economy, a world, Biden needs to win in a landslide. A blue tsunami.
P.S. My dad would be 107 today. For decades, he was a Republican. But with the Bush presidency that started in 2o00, my dad started turning. He would find the trump admin abhorrent.
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Marla Frees: American Psychic”:
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Marla Frees, a transformational psychic medium who has appeared on A&E, Bravo, History Channel, SyFy, TV Land, and Gaia TV’s “Beyond Belief” with George Noory. Marla’s memoir, American Psychic: A Spiritual Journey from the Heartland to Hollywood, Heaven and Beyond, is the inspiring story of her journey from small-town girl to successful TV and stage actress and gifted psychic. Her book has been an Amazon bestseller and #1 new release in the ESP and Mental and Spiritual Healing categories.
Marla does group presentations where she works with audience members offering divine insight about any aspect of their lives and messages from deceased loved ones. She also works in private sessions and small groups.
She has also been known to a global audience as the psychic medium expert co-host for Whitley Streiber’s “Dreamland podcast at UnknownCountry.com, where she interviewed scientific, paranormal, and spiritual authors between 2007-2018. Marla lives in Los Angeles.
To prepare for our interview on The Mystical Underground with psychic Marla Frees, I (Rob) read her fascinating memoir, American Psychic. In one of the latter chapters, she talks about undergoing a hypnotic regression with Brian Weiss. She found herself in an in-between life space where a guide was helping her prepare for her current life. She rejected a possible life in Greece saying, “Been there, done that.”
Then she was shown an image of America with beams of light pointing to several locations on the East Coast, then beams arcing over the country to the West Coast. She was told, “You must go back again to pole light.” She had no idea what that meant, but she felt the experience was important. Later, the regression was confirmed in a very strange way.
Marla, who had been an actor in the 1990s, had a guest starring role in the sitcom, Everybody Loves Raymond. While she was waiting for the scene with her part, a woman in her fifties, a stand-in, ran up to her and excitedly told her that she’d dreamed about her. Startled, Marla asked: “Do I know you?”
The woman said, no, but went on to say, “They told me you were sent here to do your work.”
“Who are they?” Marla asked. The woman responded that she didn’t know, but proceeded to draw a map of the U.S. on the back of a page of a script she was holding. On it, she drew lines coming out of the East Coast and more lines coming out the West Coast, then connected them so they looked like airplane routes. Or, the beams of light Marla had seen in her regression.
The woman then said this: “You must go through this physical life and attempt to remember who you are. When you make that connection, you will go through a transformational process to become whole, centered, and connected with your other self. Once you realize this, you can anchor light and information to Earth.”
The woman apologized, but said that she really had that dream. It was a dream that seemed to answer Marla’s question about the meaning of poling light. Marla writes: “Reflecting on the part of the past life regression that showed me ‘poling light,’ I read in the dictionary that ‘pole’ is defined as a stabilizing object for something to attach itself to, or a ‘fixed point of reference’ for light waves of energy at a certain frequency.”
She continues: “It started to make sense that I was holding a frequency level for another form of energy. Was my purpose this time around to act as an anchoring point for Spirit, for information, for the dead? I was being guided into arenas that were so ‘out there’ and beyond my knowledge and experience that I simply had to trust that Spirit had my back.”
After I read that passage, I paused and wondered what my purpose was this time around. To answer that—or attempt to—I took out a dictionary that I occasionally use for stitchomancy (divination via random passages in a book) and asked that question. I opened the dictionary at random and stabbed my finger at a page. When I looked to see what word I’d found, I was surprised. My finger was pointing at “pole.”
Maybe the divination was simply mimicking what I was thinking about – poling light – or possibly I was another one who poles light. Either way, it was quite an incredible synchronicity. Of all the words in the dictionary, I had hit that one!
Our podcast with Marla will go ‘live’ tomorrow, Sunday evening, October 18.
