Road Trip to Replenish

Posted on January 7, 2022 by Trish and Rob

 

These days, it  takes time to plan a getaway. Whether your travel is by car or air, you need a destination.

And one by one, our destinations for a road trip appeared last May. Mercury was still retrograde when I started planning this road trip, and now that we’re on the other side of it, I realize I would have planned differently. By my probably terrible calculations, the trip covered nearly 1800 miles. We went from: Wellington – Orlando-Marietta Georgia, Blue Ridge Georgia – Asheville, Seven Devils, Charleston SC, Orlando to Wellington. You begin to feel as if you and the car at joined at the hip.

In each of these places, we intended to visit with family and friends we haven’t seen for awhile. In Orlando, there was Megan. Synchronicities fly around when we’re at her place, and this time it involved the updated agent query for her novel, The Dark Silence. We loved it.

In Marietta at my sister’s place, we got together with my youngest nephew and his girlfriend, prototypes of Bradbury’s Illustrated Man ( and woman). They’re moving into a new tattoo salon and the front room is reserved for a tarot reader. I have an open invitation.

In Blue Ridge, Georgia my sister and I went shopping while the guys played Frisbee Golf. We talked about the various synchronicities that had defined our lives. Both of us bought a carved wooden hand. We liked the symbolism, a life open to receiving.

From Blue Ridge we drove to Asheville, North Carolina, where our friend Cassie manages the horses and stables at the Biltmore Hotel. She’s a sister Gemini and lived with us for a couple of equestrian seasons with her two dogs. Like us, she’s entertaining the idea of moving elsewhere if the repugs sweep the senate and house in 2022, paving the way for another term of trump or one of his clones, like Florida’s governor, deathsantis.

After lunch, we stopped by Cassie’s cool place on the Biltmore property, then drove on to the Boone area to visit Hilary and Jeff, writer friends from Florida who moved to NC several years ago. What I love about these two is the ease. We talk about publishing, the triumphs and travails and weirdness of it all. We talk about our kids, their plans and weddings and dreams, and we talk about the books and stories we have yet to write. Synchronicity is woven into all of this.

In Charleston, we checked into the airbnb I’d reserved. Nancy Pickard showed up minutes later and she was barely out of the car when we threw our arms around each other. It had been at least a decade.

We first met in 1985, when she and her then husband spent winters in Fort Lauderdale and she came to the first signing for my first book, In Shadow. We discovered we’d both read Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts and loved tossing the I Ching, and have been friends ever since.

After spending most of her life in Kansas, Nancy moved to Charleston as the result of synchronicity, and loves living there. She showed us around for dinner and breakfast the next morning, we inadvertently found a great dog park on the beach, and the squirrels were in rare form, tantalizing the dogs. Reconnecting with her was wonderful.

At each of these junctures, my appreciation of reconnection deepened. Yes, we are independent beings. But we’re also interconnected and synchronicity often shows us just how that works.

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EMPATHY

Posted on January 7, 2022 by Trish and Rob

 

Empathy is one of those words thrown around in college dorms. In bars. In private moments. It literally means “in feeling,” and is the ability to share another person’s emotions and feelings. The English word is derived from the Greek word empatheia (“physical affection, passion, partiality”) which comes from en (“in, at”) + pathos (“feeling”).

“Empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention and instead adopt a double -minded focus of attention,” writes Simon Baron-Cohen in The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty.

According to Baron-Cohen, single-minded means what it sounds like: we’re thinking only about ourselves and our own thoughts, our own minds. Double-minded attention “means we are keeping in mind someone else’s mind at the very same time.”

The author writes about how when he was seven, his father told him that the Nazis turned Jews into lampshades. Into bars of soap. His father also told him “about a former girlfriends, Ruth Goldblatt, a whose mother had survived a concentration camp. He had been introduced tlo the mother and was shocked to discover that her hands were reversed. Nazi scientists had severed Mfrs. Goldblatt’s hands, switched them around, and sewn them back on again.”

Imagine that. It meant that when she put her hands out, palms facing down, her thumbs were on the outside and her little fingers were on the inside.

These horrific incidents are glaring examples of zero empathy, which Baron-Cohen theorizes may be the origin of cruelty. Nazis saw Jews as objects. The neighbor who keeps his dog on a six-foot leash outside as a hurricane approaches, sees the animal as an object, no different than a clothesline, a car, a nail.

In contrast, you see a stray kitten or dog, thin and limping around in your neighborhood, and you’re compelled to take it in, feed it, maybe even adopt it.

A friend is going through a divorce or has just lost someone close to them. You help however you can.

An empathic person feels what you feel.

And it’s this quality that seems to be missing from American culture as we enter 2023. How do we fix this?

In retrospect, it seems that trump tapped into the dark side of the American psyche. Suddenly, it was okay to be racist, to look at people of other cultures as invaders, enemies to be reckoned with. Suddenly, it was okay to be in a store, any kind of store, and get pissed about something and tell the clerk to fuck off. Suddenly, it was okay to be on a flight and give the flight attendant shit about something and punch her in the mouth.

During the pandemic, there were triggers – mask and vaccine mandates, Covid and all the conspiracy theories.

Trump is the classic individual without empathy. Everything was about him. It still is. For nearly two years now, his litany about a stolen election continues. Recently, he stated the constitution has to be dismantled.

Twice a month, we post an episode of The Mystical Underground on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland. One of the recent episodes was of Trish reading the introduction of our newest book The Shift: Reports from the Mystical Underground. In the intro, we introduce the concept that we – humanity – are in the midst of a paradigm shift. A commenter left this:

At the risk of being labeled here, democracy is at risk when citizens will be fired from their jobs or discharged from the military if they don’t get vaccinated. In the end, more people died that were vaccinated than were not; young males who didn’t really need the vaccination have developed myocarditis. The pandemic was about control and they, the powers that be, want you to know that.

Our reply?

We’d love to see the statistics you have on this. In other words, what are your sources? Newsmax? Truth social? Fox News?

Silence on the other end.

Google it. We did. Here’s one article we found.

The power and control thing he mentions strikes me as really far fetched. If the government is seeking to control its populace, why create a pandemic? Just boost social media!

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INSURRECTION, A YEAR OUT

Posted on January 5, 2022 by Trish and Rob

Insurrection means “a violent uprising against an authority or government.” That’s what we saw on January 6, 2021. It wasn’t a group of rowdy tourists. It wasn’t Antifa or Black Lives Matter or the FBI. It was a whole lot of white supremacists who were snookered into believing trump’s big lie – that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

What I find deeply depressing about all this is how gullible these people are. They have fallen so far down the Q’Anon rabbit hole that they’re blind to what’s in front of them – an attempted coup by trump and his tribe.

I remember a coup in Caracas, when I was about 14. Schools shuttered because a revolution was imminent. In fact, we used to call these days off from school “revolution days.” My mother and I went to the local grocery store to stock up on “revolution supplies,” that was how she described these sprees, and the shelves were already pretty bare. That image of bare shelves has stuck with me all these years. It’s similar to what you see as a hurricane approaches, to what I saw in the spring of 2020 at our local Publix & Whole Foods, and to what I see even now, during the surge of Omicron.

Usually, these revolution days didn’t last long. Presumably the corrupt government of Perez Jimenez came to some agreement with the revolutionaries, whoever they were. Hey, I was 14. Politics was peripheral to my life.

My friends and I enjoyed these revolution days. It meant we could hang out, spend the night at each other’s houses, stay up late and sleep in because school had been cancelled. One night, my friend Lorraine and I – she’s now a diehard trumpie- stayed up really late talking about the book 1984. Another friend and I, Mary Jo, now a diehard democrat, used to speculate about what any of it meant. Why were we born into the families we had? What did we want to do with our lives?

On the night that Perez Jimenez fled the country with $13 million stolen from the Venezuelan treasury, my sister and I watched it with our parents from the balcony of our apartment in the neighborhood of Las Mercedes. I remember our dad was especially agitated. “Everything is about to change,” he said. A year later, he took retirement from Creole – a subsidiary of Standard Oil where he had worked for more than 30 years – and we moved to South Florida.

So when someone tries to convince me that January 6 was just rowdy tourists or an infiltration of FBI agents stirring up trouble with Antifa and Black Lives Matter, I kinda lose my shit. A neighbor believes the election was stolen, that vaccines are part of some wider conspiracy that allows Bill Gates to track you, that may turn you into something somewhere – alien? monster? robot? who knows? He has bet Rob a thousand bucks that he can prove the election was stolen.

Rob responded that his so-called proof had to be verified by CNN or other networks (not Fox News) who were calling for the 2020 election to be overturned because of whatever “proof” the neighbor provided.

Listen up, Mr. Pillow Guy. This neighbor may replace you!

On the 6th,  Trump was supposed to give a press conference at his Palm Beach mansion. That was cancelled. Instead, he’s going to hold a rally in Arizona on January 15 and that’s probably going to be a relentless rehash of his big lie.  I hope no network covers it.

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New Year’s Eve

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Trish and Rob

Belated Happy New Year!

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Fog Theory

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Trish and Rob

On the morning of New Year’s Eve, I met an old friend at Riverbend Park in Jupiter for a bike ride. We used to run 10K’s until our knees gave out and switched to biking. He lives part of the year in Pennsylvania and comes back to Florida in the winter. This was the second time we’d taken a ride since he’d returned.

His name is Rob, like mine, but we call each other Tacayo. A synchronicity behind that name. Back in the late 1980s when Trish and I were leading adventure tours to Latin America, Rob came along as a Scuba diving guide on a trip to San Andres Island. We were in a taxi together heading through the main town when the taxi driver slowed and yelled out, “Tacayo!”  to a guy standing on a corner. Then he said to us that was his friend, Roberto.

I asked why he called him tacayo and he explained that tacayo means namesake–they both were name Roberto. Same with Rob and I. From that day on we called each other Tacayo. The actual Spanish spelling is Tocayo, but for us it has always been Tacayo.

When we meet around the holidays, I usually give Tacayo one of my books that he hasn’t read. So on this occasion I grabbed an extra copy of Beyond the Bermuda Triangle, which I wrote with Bruce Gernon and focuses on his theory of “electronic fog.” I decided to also bring along a bottle of wine, since Rob is very generous with gifts of a smoking product from time to time. So I pulled a bottle off our wine rack and was surprised to see that the red blend was called…Fog Theory. Wow! Never heard of that wine, but very appropriate for the moment. A Bermuda Triangle synchronicity!

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Black Magic or Blind Chance?

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Trish and Rob

 

Rob has been cleaning out folders in office closet and ran across some gems. One of the folders was filled with articles on synchronicity that he’d saved from the 1980s and 90s. The title of this post comes from an article that appeared in Reader’s Digest and was written by Edward Ziegler. He based the article on Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Concidence and Alan Vaughn’s book Incredible Coincidences.

Here’s how it opens:

“You look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary, then encounter the same word in the next few days. You write a letter to an old friend you haven’t heard from in years, and a note from him crosses in the mil. Blind chance ot something else?

“Orthodox science considers that coincidences like these are merely chance happenings.”

Fortunately, the study of synchronicity has come a long way since this article was written. Thanks to technology, we have practically immediate access to information and we can text and zoom and skype with people anywhere on the planet.

One of the mind-blowing synchros in this article was written about in Richard Bach’s book, Nothing by Chance. Bach isn’t just a bestselling author but also a pilot. While barnstorming in the Midwest in 1966 with a rare biplane, a 1929 Detroit-Parks P 2A Speedster. Only 8 of them had been built. In Palmyra, Wisconsin,

Bach loaned the plane to a friend, who upended it as he came in for a landing. As Bach wrote in his book, they were able to fix everything except for one strut.The repair looked hopeless because of the rarity of the needed part.  But  man came up and asked if he could help. Bach’s reply was sarcastic: “Sure. Do you happen to haave an inter-wing strut for a 1929 Detrpoit Speedster, model P-2A?”

The man walked over to his hangar and returned with the part. Bach wrote: “The odds against our breaking the biplane in a little town that happened to be home to a man with the 40-year-old part to repair it; the odds that he would be on the scene when the event happened; the odds that we’d pushed the plane right next to his hangar, within ten feet of the part we needed – the odds were so high that coincidence was a foolish answer.”

As Koestler noted, the great mathematician John von Neumann called the phenomenon “black magic.”

We call these kinds of synchronicities mind-blowers. Like Bach noted, the odds were staggering.

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Synchronicity & those Old Loops

Posted on January 3, 2022 by Trish and Rob

 

the Caracas valley

Landscape with an aerial view of wetlands in Everglades National Park at sunset, Florida, USA

 

Homesick is one of those odd words that means something different to everyone. It usually involves a particular memory and an emotion that accompanies it. When my parents left Venezuela, I was in boarding school in Massachusetts. It was a November, cold and wet, I remember. My dad’s letter about this move arrived by snail mail. I reaslized I wouldn’t be spending Christmas in Caracas but in Florida, the place whee we would be living. It meant I never got a chance to say good-bye.

It also meant I would be spending my last year in high school in a Florida school. It turned out to be one of the worst years of my life. When you enter a senior class as a first-time student, you’re an outlier. I hated that year, I hated Florida. So when I applied to college, I chose spots in the northeast. Far from Florida.

I ended up in Utica, New York.

When Rob and I traveled to Venezuela in 1987, my parents were with us. Megan hadn’t been born yet. It was our first time back in 24 years. The moment I saw the country from the air, an almost crippling homesickness swept over me. Chavez and Maduro were unknown entities back then.

We saw the building in Las Mercedes where we had lived for years in Caracas. We knocked on the door of our old apartment on the second floor and met the woman and her family who lived there then. In Maracaibo, where we’d lived for 5 years and where my sister, Mary, had been born, the four of us traipsed through what had been an oil camp and was now a maze of streets and confused memories.

I remember asking my dad the address of where we’d lived. He got the street, but not the house number. Suddenly, he shouted, “Number 57!”

Here, we also knocked on the door and the couple who came to the door was gracious and curious. When my dad explained that we had lived in this house, they invited us in and we spent an enjoyable afternoon in the wonderful backyard I remembered.

On the way back from a recent trip to Texas with Megan, I happened to look out the window as we were passing over the Everglades. Now, understood, I’ve only been into the Everglades a couple of times. It’s not home. But it’s part of Florida. That same almost crippling homesickness seized me.

Florida! I was nearly home.

The irony hit me. The place I’d once hated was now the place I called home.
Synchronicity has a way of closing lifelong loops, I think, and allowing old wounds to heal.

 

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The Mystical Underground: Gregg Levoy: Callings

Posted on January 2, 2022 by Trish and Rob

A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Gregg Levoy: Callings”:

Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…

Gregg Levoy is the author of CALLINGS: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, and Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion. He is a former journalism professor and has worked at USA Today among other publications, and is a regular blogger for Psychology Today. He is also a lecturer and seminar leader in the business, educational, governmental, faith-based and human-potential arenas, and has keynoted and presented workshops for numerous organizations.

https://gregglevoy.com

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Happy New Year 2022!

Posted on December 31, 2021 by Trish and Rob

My personal hopes for 2022 are mixed up with my hopes for this country.

1)  an end to this pandemic.

The day before our daughter was to come home for Christmas, she tested positive for Covidand couldn’t come home. The first night was bad, she said, with fever and chills, but the next day was better and within 6 days, she was fine and tested negative. She had received 2 Moderna vaccines. She’s also young and generally healthy.

2) that we move through life with more awareness of how our actions impact others

At Walgreen’s, the cashier told me a story that exemplifies this point. At 8 that morning, an unmasked men came into the story, asking if they had PCR tests or home test kits. She told him that PCRs were by appointment only, for drive-thru and yes, they had at home test kits. The man then said, “I know I have Covid. I need a test.”

The cashier, who is always masked, drew back in horror and ordered him out of the store. What kind of clueless idiot who thinks he has Covid comes into a store maskless?

3) That we are as kind to strangers as we are to people in our personal environment.

Most of us have seen or heard about “Karen” incidents and the meltdown in public places over masks or some other thing. There are men who melt down, too, but those videos and instances seem to be more rare. The men and women who lose it like this are probably most frightening when they melt down on commercial flights.

4) That a voting rights bill is voted upon and signed into law. This would end gerrymandering and prevent the states from overturning an election they didn’t like. Otherwise, our democracy is history and we’ll be living a weird version of life in a kind of Gillead from The Handmaid’s Tale.

5)  That more people recognize synchronicity as the guiding force it is.

Our friend Paula learned that her recently engaged daughter, Isabella, and Jacob, her fiance, set a wedding date of February 11, 2023.

That was Paula’s mother’s birthday and Isabella didn’t know that. She’d never met her grandmother, because she died three years before Isabella was born. I felt the synchronicity might have been spirit contact.

One thing this pandemic has brought about for me is more synchronicities and a variety of them. They usually happen when I don’t expect them, and have come about through precogniton, telepathy, in dreams, and when I’m with other people.

6) That we all flourish in the ways that urge us to evolve.

7) I’d like to know if there’s a significance to the date of 2/22/22. I cast charts for that date at 2:22 am and pm. Here’s the AM chart.

 

And the PM chart:

I need to study these. But at a glance, when I look at the respective rising signs – 21 degrees Sagittarius (the arrow, left hand side of the chart) and the 14 degree Cancer rising in the PM chart, it seems that as a collective we have 2 major things to learn. Sagittarius is a nomad, a truth seeker, always looking for the bigger picture. Cancer is nurturing, feminine, intuitive.

The  only planet in both charts at 22 degrees is Neptune in Pisces. In the am chart, Neptune falls  in the 3rd house of communication. In the pm chart, it falls in the 9th house of  spirituality, worldview, publishing, art.  Neptune rules imagination, the oceans, creative ability that comes from deep within. But it also rules deception and confusion.  It’s as if these 2 different house positions for Neptune on this particular day is challenging us to let  our imaginations soar, to go with our guts, our impulses, but to check our facts so that we avoid deception and confusion.

I don’t know if these charts have any validity at all. I don’t even know if numbers like this prompt other astrologers to make observations. But for me, that number 22 has a special significance. In the I Ching, the 22nd hexagram is called Grace. The line that speaks to me reads:

Through contemplation of the forms existing in human society, it becomes possible to shape the world.

 

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FLORIDA BURROWING OWLS

Posted on December 29, 2021 by Trish and Rob

Recently on a synchronicity site, a member asked about owl symbolism. I wrote him about our experiences with burrowing owls- and an Amazonian owl..

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Twice now, a Florida burrowing owl has predicted an event for me. One owl appeared on a fence outside my dad’s room when he was living with us. At first, I thought it was alerting me that he might die. But the owl was missing its left leg and about 12 hours later, I got a call from the Alzheimer’s unit where my mother was that she was being taken to ER. They believed her left hip had been dislocated. Turned out, her left hip had disintegrated. 2 weeks later, she passed.

Another time, several  burrowing owls perched just above our door, on the edge of the roof. That evening, we got a call that a close friend had passed.

Years ago, Rob and I led rips through the Peruvian Amazon for Avianca Airlines. We traveled on an old rubber hauling riverboat that went from some obscure port in Colombia to Iquitos, Peru. The boat was like the Fitzcarraldo – from the movie. At one place where we stopped, an indigenous man had an owls for sale. I trade a couple tubes of lipstick for the owl and it traveled with us on the boat to Iquitos, where the American owner of the boat had a refuge for Amazonian creatures. My entire life changed after that interaction with the owl, whom I fed and got to know during that two-day trip up the Amazon. So they are also harbingers of hope.

Matthew replied:

For me, these two different stories illuminate an attentiveness to the ecology and psychology of nature, respectively. The former captures ‘the signs’ – yet very tangible practical  ones – that non-human nature can signal for us if we attend to them (they are obviously more attuned to earth than we are these days!) whilst the latter captures the more mythic-symbolic-psychic but which equally serves its very real and practical purpose.

These owl stories are so telling and echo my own experiences and those of several of my interviewees. I cannot think of another animal whose association (in this this case, with death/crossings over/liminal life-death space) finds so many cross-cultural commonalities (in many parts of Africa, owls are widely persecuted because of this association but that’s akin to “killing the messenger”) . Of course , it’s not like every owl spells portent or doom – there’s an ecology and psychology to every interaction. Owls are allowed to just “do their thing”. But it’s those unusual and repeated visitations which beckon our attention and deciphering.

 

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