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Today’s post is a followup from the one several days ago about Hannah’s discovery of the prevalence of #1 in her life.  Warning: it’s longer than most of our posts.

Mention was made in the earlier post of a man who is making a documentary on synchronicity. When Hannah wrote him about her numerological synchros, he surprised Hannah by saying that her numbers were meaningless.

However, he wasn’t saying that her pursuit was worthless. His intent was to invoke the idea that finding meaning in coincidences is subjective and the truth ultimately unknowable. His perspective is interesting in that he seems to combine some of the ideas of skeptics, who see synchronicity as a useless attempt to create cause and effect out of coincidence, with his own beliefs that a divine element might be at play.

Here are his comments.

Hi Hannah,

Firstly, apologies for the delay.  I’ve been inundated with work and
leaving email for a time when I can catch a breather, and today is
that day so here we go!

Secondly, thank you very much for sharing your incredible story.

As for knowing someone who might help you along your path,
unfortunately I probably don’t have a person to point you towards who
can help make sense of this, and perhaps help with an answer about
what the “1” really means and why it is prevalent in your life story.

But I think – at least in my own life – trying to make sense of
synchronicity is the wrong way to go about approaching them.  I think
we have a tendency towards trying to understand the world around us in
an analytical, left-brained sort of way that leads us to down perilous
roads towards conclusions like “this says this, therefore is means
this.”

Jung and his theory on archetypes  would likely disagree with me, but my own guess at your situation is that “1” itself doesn’t mean anything.  I very much doubt there is a big
answer at the end of the tunnel about why exactly “1” underlies themes in your life.

Before I go deeper I should explain that I don’t think anything I am
saying is right, either.  I don’t think there is a right answer for how
to deal with or understand synchronicity.  Every avenue I have pursued
to try and understand them better has lead me towards eventually
having to put my hands up and say to myself “ok that was totally
wrong, actually I have no idea.”

So it might be that the 1 synchronicities for you do have a big reason
behind them.  But my own hunch is that synchronicity is something more
like the carrot on the donkey, rather than the cryptic clue that
tantalizes to unlock a Great Truth if only it can be solved.

Ultimately I think, if synchronicity is leading us somewhere, is it
leading us into a deeper relationship with the Mystery, and out of the
mundanity that we often find ourselves stuck in in our lives.

However this ‘carrot on the Donkey’ concept is just another avenue and
framework for understanding synchronicity that I am pursuing, and
ultimately I think it very likely that I will soon again have to throw
up my hands in defeat when I learn that synchronicity is not a This or
a That, and it doesn’t have this defined purpose of doing This or
That.  Because it seems to do a lot of things; not a single one of
them predictable.

But in terms of effects, most reliably synchronicity acts to bust open
your mind; to show you that what lies outside your perception of ‘The
True Nature of Reality’ is a world of mystery that you will never
understand, so rather than trying, instead try to play with
synchronicity, with whatever divine intelligence is woven through the
fabric of reality, and see what happens.

Sorry I can’t be of more help than that, but I think really words
begin to fail when we get anywhere close to tuning into the mystery of
synchronicity.

My only advise would be to play with and explore every idea and
feeling that your synchronicity invokes, because it seems there is no
right answer.  If you feel like Neo one day, play with that, try and
explore it.  If hearing about the Neo connection made you want to
watch the Matrix, do that and see what you got from it.  Maybe the
Korean connection made you want to go to a Korean Supermarket, maybe
it made you want to learn Korean, or see your Korean friend, or watch
a Korean movie.  Whatever you felt an intuition towards in association
with a synchronicity seems to be where the next cookie crumb along the
trail lies… but again, ultimately this is a guess at the mysterious
workings of the Universe and is only partly true, if at all.

Good luck ‘figuring it out’, in any case.
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As a follow up, I asked ace numerologist Connie Cannon for her take on Hanna’s numbers. (I didn’t show her the filmmaker’s response.) So it was somewhat startling that, similar to the filmmaker, the first thing is said was that numbers themselves were meaningless. But she goes on to explain. Here’s her response, in part:

Re Hannah, I’ve mentioned several times during discussions of numbers that numbers, in and of themselves, have no meaning. They are inert. It is only when a frequency number is used to REPRESENT a person, place, thing, or whatever, that it becomes animate and thereby exerts meanings and influences. I’ve also mentioned that each individual on the planet, whether they care to learn about it or not, has one or more “Operative Number Frequencies” which appear throughout that individual’s lifetime in virtually every aspect of the life, beginning with the birth name and birth date.

The (Operative Number Frequencies) is NOT information that is available in any of the more than sixty texts by almost as many authors that I own and have studied. It is information that has derived through the decades in my own personal extensive, intensive study and research on this subject, not only in the English language but in ancient Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, etc.

Hannah has found her Operative Frequency and has followed through on researching it. Her situation is not unusual. It is, contrarily, the norm in number frequencies where the Operative Number Frequency comes into play. Apparently the Soul, prior to coming into an invarnation, determines the experiences it needs to have, and with Helpers, designs a plan that includes the frequency most suitable for those experiences to occur.

It isn’t precisely “predestination”, because although the experiences are in the design, there are generally several paths, or choices, or decisions, that the individual can choose as he or she travels through the life. However, NO MATTER WHICH PATH OR CHOICE IS MADE THE OPERATIVE FREQUENCY IS THERE. We don’t escape it, and no choice is either negative or positive, simply different in its expression.

So I would say to Hannah to continue her study of her #1 frequency in all its aspects, and she will learn the lessons and experiences that her Soul has penciled into her pre-incarnation program. She has “downloaded” that frequency consistently, which indicates she wants to learn as much as she can. Just as Astrological influences represent certain characteristics, so too do the number frequencies, and especiaslly the Operative Frequency(ies).

Ever since I put up a contact form on our blog late last year, we’ve been getting a lot of emails: Omarr readers, asking where the 2015 books are; synchro stories from a diverse group; and well, odd complaints. Here’s one of them:

Hello dear friends, there are actually nine keys in your surreal image that you googled for your synchronicities website. 3 keys are half hidden by the outstretched hands. I know I sound like a terrible stickler, but 9 keys are 9 keys, not 7. I do believe in synchronicity, but I also think we need to be careful not to shoehorn in connections when they aren’t there. Even a good thing can be overdone!! Kindest regards, Bea

 Rob and I puzzled over this one. We couldn’t recall any image that had nine keys on it. I checked the cover of the British edition of the book: one key. So I wrote Bea and asked her what she was referring to. Never heard back.

Then, today, this email from Philip Watling:

FAS is a real syndrome. The brain is very complex and it can change in many ways for a variety of reasons: hemorrhage, brain trauma, migraine, stroke etc. I had a massive head injury after being hit by a car in 1994 and my voice changed. Was it that my brain neurons altered or… No, don’t be silly, I am now able to converse with someone from my previous life! Sorry, but what an idiotic thing to say! For more information please read my book on – we deleted the link because it may be spam.

We think FAS relates to foreign accent syndrome, a post we wrote on May 6, 2012. Rob emailed Philip and asked him what he was talking about. We haven’t gotten a response.

I have no idea who Bea and Philip are or why they took the time to write us through the contact form and why neither of them responded. Maybe some people out there have an abundance of free time. They have so much free time they can afford to troll blogs and websites and leave these cryptic reminders that we live in a whole new world:

Instantaneous communication. Books delivered to our devices in the space of a single breath, and usually for a fraction of what they cost in a bookstore. Netflix. Movies on demand. Or this, an immediate story about today’s holiday that celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King.

I’m an information junkie and welcome all of it. But honestly, some days when I sit down to eat breakfast, when my iphone and iPad are in front of me, ready to deliver whatever is happening beyond my home, neighborhood, state, country, I’m tempted to just turn it all off. I feel this insatiable urge to to pull back, to just enjoy my coffee and my grapefruit and to allow my day to unfold without any news at all. Some days, I’m tempted to just be.

This story also comes from Hannah, whose synchros we’ve posted before. I found this one intriguing, since a lot of my fiction involves ghosts. Also, the story spans several years, which synchros sometimes do.

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When I was 16, I ran away from home for a week or so to be with my boyfriend. He lived in a van in the middle of nowhere with only a handful of other vans parked there. It was along a very old track so you wouldn’t really want to drive up there.

One night I woke up desperate to pee and obviously I would have had to go outside. I was never scared of the dark but something made me not want to go out so I got back in bed desperate for the toilet but just waited. It must have been one or two in the morning. As I lay there, I started to hear children playing outside – more than three kids. It was loud but creepy because I could hear them running past the van. It sounded like a ghostly giggling in the wind. Yet, no children lived nearby and I knew it couldn’t be sound travelling from the school because it was the middle of the night. The next morning I so wanted to say something but thought my boyfriend would think I was mad. I said nothing.

My boyfriend broke up with me not long after and I was devastated. One day I walked to the track to try and see him. Luckily he wasn’t there, but Rosie, who lived at the beginning of the track, asked me in for coffee and a chat.

“I’m absolutely knackered,” Rosie said. “Them bloody kids kept me awake again last night.”

I asked what she meant; I said there weren’t any kids up here. But she said it was haunted and they were keeping her awake all the time. I told her I was so glad she’d said that since I’d heard them one night. I think she was pleased that she wasn’t the only one who’d heard them.

A year or so later I bumped into my friend Emma. She’d been living in the van next to where I was when I’d been there. I asked her if she ever heard them and she said yes, many times sometimes even during the day. Since then several other people have confirmed they also heard them.

Years later, when I was a taxi driver, I was asked to be an escort on the school run with another driver, Jon. We happened to be driving at what is the main road now below the old track. You can look up and see the tops of the vans up the fields. I mentioned that there are still vans there and he said, “My aunties died up there years ago.” He thought they’d died from TB from the milk that came from a nearby farm. “They were young. Their names were Lilian and Doris.”

This struck me for a couple of reason. My dad always called me Lil and Emma’s boyfriend, who had died only he previous year, had called her Doris.

The next day when I picked up the school dinners, I told the whole story to Janet, the cook. She wanted to know who had told me about their aunts dying and I replied that it was Johnny Preddy, the other driver.

“Don’t listen to him,” she said. “He’s an old storyteller.” Then she told me I was related to him, so the aunts he’d mentioned had been my aunts as well. I’d never heard of them. It’s true he’s a storyteller but the connection seemed like such a nice idea it seemed like such a nice idea that I had worked out who the ghost children were.

The next day when I picked up the dinners, Janet told me she owed me an apology. She said that Lilian and Doris were her aunties and she hadn’t known they existed until her mum did the family tree. Apparently they had lost their house and had a hovel near where the track is now and that they died from tainted milk. She even showed me a photo and told me where they were buried. I went to visit their grave; they died when they were 12 and 21.

Were they the ghosts at the track?

Emma and I have visited the track a few times to see if we can hear them….nothing. We bumped into someone who lives there and he hadn’t heard them either so I guess they are gone. Apparently that was their favorite place to play.

Animals that cross our paths usually have something to tell us and synchronicity is often involved.

Tonight during dinner Rob related an experience that had happened earlier today when he went biking with a retired fireman and his son, Eric, who had just started using the clips on the bike pedals that hooked on to his biking shoes. He was worried about what he would do if he had to stop suddenly. These hooks keep your shoes on the pedals even if you fall. It’s not exactly my idea of fun – I dislike being trapped under any circumstances – but hey, whatever moves your blood. So as they were biking, Rob thought that if a tortoise crossed their path, he would be the first one to see it.

I wasn’t sure if that meant he would see it because he was staring at the ground as he biked or if it was because he was first in line. I asked him about it and Rob said it was just one of those random thoughts that flitted through his head as they biked. But not too long afterward, a tortoise crossed the bike path and Eric, who was in the lead, was able to stop without falling off his bike. Rob subsequently told Eric that the tortoise was his teacher, showing him to how to stop quickly without falling oss his bike.

“So it was telepathic,” I said.

“Or precognitive,” Rob said.

I immediately went looking for the esoteric meaning of tortoise and the gestation period for its eggs (timing).

The gestation period is 60-90 days – i.e., two to three months. Tortoises carry their homes with them. In some cultures, they are considered to be harbingers of good luck. So, okay, I’m thinking that in two to three months, Rob will experience good luck in some area of his life.

This evening, I was closing the door to our garage – which has developed a few problems lately – and saw a large rat scampering away from the noisy garage door to a deeper part of the garage. Some people are disturbed by cockroaches, but I’m freaked out by snakes and rats. I quickly shut the utility room to the garage, and told Rob we had a rat in the garage.

He insisted I must have seen a possum, but my brain translated it as rat. The possums in our neighborhood usually don’t enter enclosed spaces; they stick to fences, trees, the yard. I left the garage door open slightly so it could leave, thank you very much. After a bit of research on the Internet, I found out that the gestation period for rats is between 21-23 days, about three weeks.

I usually seek out the gestation period first because it provides timing. So here we had the tortoise – two to three months gestation – and the rat, which provided a time frame of about three weeks. But what else could these critters tell us?

I pulled out the book my friend Millie Gemondo and I had written, Animal Totems. Tortoises or turtles, we wrote, are indicative of long life, and to numerous fortunate opportunities that are headed your way. A rat may be symbolic of blocking of holes in your life where corruption can enter. I really didn’t like that interp, and went looking for something else. This is the same thing I do when I draw cards for myself. Or throw an I Ching and don’t like what I get. I figure the future is in flux and still malleable, so I reach for another possibility. And find something I like:

“If Rat has scurried across your path you are being asked to assert yourself in new areas that you have not yet explored. Perhaps it’s time to take up those new hobbies, challenge yourself by learning something new or simply taking the uncertain first steps towards your dreams. Rat is letting you know it’s time for “new beginnings” and change.

Alternatively you are being asked to evaluate the clutter around you. Is it time to purge old baggage and feelings that no longer serve you? Time for a spring cleaning. Sell or giveaway all the physical things that are just filling up the space around you. In doing this you will often symbolically begin to clear old emotional issues and cluttered thinking. Allow yourself to feel as you purge. This cleansing act will make space for the new things to come.

This interp makes sense to me. My purge, I think, will begin in my office!

Let’s say you’re trying to solve a problem and suddenly the answer comes to you while you’re doing something totally unrelated…and you’re not even thinking about the problem. No cause and effect. That’s synchronicity, and such synchros lie at the heart of the creative process…and creativity lies at the heart of synchronicity.

It’s the space between.

“The space between…is the space hat lies between the observer and the observed; it is the space of the creative act that brings a poem or painting to life.” – F. David Peat, Pathways of Change

In our book, The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we called Secret 4 The Creative. “Most of us have a creative talent or interest that we would like to nurture and develop. But we find all sorts of reasons to procrastinate…If you fail to nurture your creativity, you’ll close yourself off to synchronicities that could lead you to the right opportunities and people at the right time.”

But watch out. When you open up to creativity, you never know what you might do. Take the case of Archimedes.

The king of Syracuse, in ancient Greece, wanted to find out if a certain crown was made of real gold, and who but his favorite scientist, Archimedes, could determine this without mutilating the crown? It’s said that Archimedes suddenly hit upon the idea for an answer when he set foot in a full bathtub and the tub overflowed.

He was so exalted that he ran naked in the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka! Eureka! I found it! I found it!” The solution Archimedes discovered started a new branch of hydrostatics.

Thank you, Amit Goswami, author the Quantum Creativity, for that example…the naked truth!

Ever since I put up a contact form on our blog, we’ve been getting a lot of email. I just wish this widget had existed when we stated the blog nearly 6 years ago. Today, we received an interesting email from a woman named Hannah Liddle, from the UK:

Hi, I have been reading your book ‘The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and would really like to be able to share some stories with you as I am quite stuck with this stuff but would really like to use it in a positive way. I experience many types of synchronicity but there are some that intrigue me more than others as I have never come across any one else experiencing the same sort of thing. I feel a bit beaten down with it today as I was given an email address of someone currently making a film on the subject and it was though synchronicity i got the email. I was so excited until today when he basically got back to me and told me that what I am experiencing is meaningless. This has really upset me. I don’t know what I was expecting but it certainly was not that. Anyway as I said, I would love to tell you my stories if you are interested. Kind regards Hannah.

Naturally we were interested. Here’s her fascinating number synchro.

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Ok so this started when I was 28 years old and spending a lot of time in Glastonbury and I found out about numerology. One day I was wasting time so I decided to add up my name:

Hannah = 28 = 10 = 1

I then decided to try my middle name:  Marie = 28 = 10 = 1

Then tried my surname:  Liddle = 28 = 10 = 1

Obviously I see a pattern so I tried my date of birth (my birthday is on the Autumn equinox which is significant later)

22/09/1977 = 55 = 10 = 1

My mother kept records from when I was born, my birth time: 10am = 1

I grew up all my life living at house number 1

I also know that i was going to be called Adam if I was a boy, Adam being the so-called 1st man in Christianity. Adam = 10 = 1 (This is the same in both methods of numerology)

I later found out about the Chaldean method of numerology so I was intrigued by then:

Hannah = 22

Marie = 4

Liddle = 2

Added together 22 + 4 + 2 = 28 = 10 = 1

The time of year I was born in Judaism is called Rosh Hashanah (note it has my name in it) This literally means 1st of year or head of year.

Hana in Albania means Moon and e Hane refers to Monday the 1st day of the week.

I was later chatting to a guy in Turkey and when he asked my name he said that means one. I asked what he meant, he said its like Neo in the matrix and has to do with a Korean martial art.  Later I found out he meant Han-mu-do.

The Han philosophy for Han-mu-do means: One or United, Head or Leader, Bright or Optimism and Higher learning.

I later was telling my friend all of this and she had been teaching English in Korea and she said the way you say one is Hana.

The name date for Hannah is 26th July (its St Anne or St Hannah, Jesus’ Grandmother). The 26th July is the 1st day of the Mayan calendar.

In the Coptic Egyptian calendar the month I was born -September – is 1st of Thoth. It also is the beginning of their calendar.

I was quite depressed when all this started and I was looking at it negatively because I thought it was confirming that I really am all alone. Then I looked at the word alone and noticed that really it says all-one so then I started to see it in a positive way and I started to read more about how everything and everyone is connected.

It has helped me learn more than school ever did. Everywhere I go in the world people know my name because it is very old and through it all this came about.

I will be so pleased to hear what you think.

+++

Our next post will include the filmmaker’s response, and an analysis by an expert numerologist. One…one…one…one….

In this name synchro, there seemed to be some sort of telepathic component to it. See what you think:

On Christmas morning, we were outside with Nika and Noah and our neighbor, Annette, also came out with her kids and dog. While our dogs, Nika and Noah, ran around the front yard chasing her German short-haired pointer, she and I gabbed for a while about what we’d gotten for Christmas. Her cat, Copper, was in our tree, watching the dogs from a safe spot:

“I have a great synchro for you, Trish.”

“Let’s hear it.”

Annette is an identical twin and she and her sister have told us some great synchros that we’ve posted about their telepathic connection. But this one, as it turned out, wasn’t a twin synchro.

On Christmas Eve, she said, a male friend and his girlfriend stopped by her house and were all excited about the new dog they’re getting later this week. It’s a black and white French bulldog, like the pooch in the picture at the top of the post. The friends showed her some photos they had of the dog.

“This dog was adorable,” Annette said. “And as I was looking at the pictures, I commented that her name should be Bella. The guy glanced at me. ‘What’d you just say, Annette?’ So I repeated that the dog looked like a Bella.” She paused, laughing. “So the guy says, ‘That’s what we named her!’”

Telepathic? That was how it struck me and when I told Rob and Megan, they agreed.

Curiously, Annette did something similar when we first brought our golden retriever home in November 2009, but in reverse. At the time, his name was Presley and when Annette initially met him, she said, “He’s not a Presley. He’s a Noah. That’s his soul name.”

And the name felt right for him and that’s who he came.

After Men’s Health Magazine published the article on Coincidence, which we reviewed, they asked readers on their Facebook page to post their best coincidences. Here are a few:

Wayne Hood I worked for Office Movers in 2001. We were hired by The Pentagon to clear out an entire wing for remodeling and installing new office furniture and supplies. Tuesday morning, September 11, we were called off of work around 6:30 a.m for the day. I thought “sweet, day off!” The wing that the plane hit is the one we were working in…

Mike McCarthy In October 2012 I was walking in Boston with my girlfriend. She was stopped by a homeless man looking for change and we felt compelled to give him some cash – she gave a dollar and I gave two. As we walked away he said ‘hey, I’ll get you back’ and we shrugged it off. Later that night I got in a car accident. My Mustang lost traction on a rainy highway and I went off into the woods. Big rocks everywhere and I slid into a soft shrub. Completely unharmed after ‘exiting’ the highway at about 50 mph, I walked a little dazed up the embankment and back up to the breakdown lane. Between exits by a mile in either way, there laying in the breakdown lane were three soggy dollar bills. To this day I believe that homeless man was my guardian angel.

Larry Johnson Lost the cross from my chain during a brain scan (I was heavily sedated). 11 days later during a follow up scan in the same room (lucid this time) one of the techs mentions to another that they found a cross on the floor. Neither tech was talking to me. Neither was in the room the first time. I got my cross back.

Steve Gunther Two friends came to my party in Minneapolis. They had never met but we discovered they had lived in the same house in Skaneateles, NY. One sold it to an Indian couple and the other bought it from the Indian couple.

Robert L. Sanchez I’ve been a Boy Scout leader for many years. When I signed up for their advanced leader training a couple of years ago, the training required a complete physical to participate. Even though my father died from it, an an older brother already had it, I had gotten careless about going in and having a PSA test for prostate cancer. My yearly tests had been negative for many years, and I slacked off. The physical for the leader training came out positive though, and it was determined that I had stage 2 prostate cancer. I went to the training, and 3 weeke later, I had a radical prostatectomy. It’s been 3 years now, and (so far) I’m cancer free. Turns out that the leader of the training class had the same thing, and found it the same way. Getting our physicals for Boy Scout advanced leader training quite possibly saved our lives.

There was one more that I didn’t include because it was kind of complicated about a woman who changed doctors and combined multiple health issues. But I noticed that the writer’s name was Katy Purr, and that she wrote that she had a gyno issue (colloquially, one might say in a men’s magazine forum that she had a ‘pussy’ problem), and, yeah, she had a cat scan. Okay, sorry about that one.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, we drove north to Jupiter, where there’s a dog beach – and that means NO LEASHES, RUN FREE, DIVE INTO THE SURF.

As we approached a vacant spot on the beach, we all noticed a strange blue structure about thirty feet away.

“What’s that?” Megan asked.

“It looks like a boat,” Rob said.

It looked, I thought, like a disaster. Beach patrol emplyees were clustered around it and the curious, like us, were moving in closer, snapping photos of it. This boat, which felt like it was made of foam, Rob said, had probably dared the rough seas between Cuba and the U.S. with thirty plus people on board.

“What kind of foam?” I asked. “Styrofoam?”

“Not styrofoam. More like foam you might find in a mattress,” Rob said.

I could see this, desperate refugees slicing open their mattresses to extract the stuff inside so that the boat could be created. For years, any fleeing Cuban who reaches the shores of the U.S. has been allowed to stay. Now that quasi-diplomatic ties are being restored, this automatic refugee carte blanche might be rescinded and Cubans are arriving in Florida in droves.

From a January 2015 article in the Washington Post:

Many of those Cubans flew straight into the Miami airport, having boarded flights in Madrid; Nassau, Bahamas; or elsewhere with passports from Spain and other third countries. Upon reaching U.S. Customs, they pull out their Cuban documents and request asylum, or ask to stay under the protections offered by the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which offers permanent residency to Cubans one year after arrival in the United States.

Now, please, take a close look at this “boat.” The rudder is rusted. If you turn it over, the lack of space would be shocking. And really, foam from a mattress? To cross 90 miles of rough seas, some of it in the dark? As one beach patrol employee said, “No one survived this.”

The U.S., as politicians are quick to point out, is a country of refugees. But to the Republicans, these refugees are only cool if they come from Europe or Cuba, and not from any Muslim or predominantly black country like Haiti. And according to Donald Trump, immigrants from Mexico are definitely not welcome and when he becomes prez, a thousand-mile wall is going to make it really difficult for anyone from Mexico to get into the U.S. And nefer mind what he recently said about banning all Muslims.

There’s a common belief that Cuban refugees are predominately conservative because they fled a Communist/Socialist government and that only the children of Cuban refugees are moderately more liberal than their parents. I’m happy to report this isn’t uniformly true. Marina, who was once an emergency room doctor in Cuba, is now living in the U.S., bagging groceries at Publix, and she has a lot to say about American politics.

Marina is in her mid-fifties. Her sister and mother and other members of her family are still living in Cuba. She gets her news from the Spanish TV station, Telemundo, and is proud to tell me that she and her husband believe that Republicans work against their best interests by trying to keep the embargo in place – which makes it more difficult and expensive for her to visit her relatives. Why, she asks, should she have to pay $400 or more for a round trip airfare ticket to her former home, just 90 miles off the Florida coast?

And Marina isn’t alone. Many of her Cuban friends in the same age bracket feel as she does. Marina won a lottery to cone to the U.S., and her husband followed several years later. As she and I walk out to my car, both of us pushing my grocery cart along in front of us, I am reminded of a quote by Che Guevarra: “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

Idealism without action is an empty call.

That abandoned refugee boat still haunts me. Those refugees died trying to get here.

Wow, is there any doubt this youbng woman won the audition or whatever this was?