Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Right now, we’re working on our new book, The Synchronicity Highway. I was doing some research on telekinesis – also known as psychokinesis or PK – which is mind-matter interaction, the movement of or effect upon  matter  through nothing more than the power of mind. Hollywood loves this stuff. Think Carrie, The Fury, the X-Men, Matilda, Firestarter…

One of the most famous telekinetics in the 1970s and 1980s was Uri Geller, the Israeli spoon bender. He claims his telekinetic powers came from ETs. Maybe they did. Enhanced paranormal abilities are often reported in the wake of UFO encounters and abductions. But Geller’s problem wasn’t ETs: it’s that his credibility was seriously undermined by professional skeptics like James Randi, who insisted Geller’s alleged telekinetic feats were sleights of hand, just stage magic. Even noted scientists attacked him. Richard Feynman and Martin Gardner claimed Geller was fraudulent in his claims.

At some point during 1974, I happened to see Geller on TV one night, at the height of his popularity. He was bending spoons. It fascinated me, watching this guy’s fingers moving up and down the spoon until the curved end started to droop like a wilted flower.  I thought how I would love to see him do this in person, close up. About ten years later,  I had an opportunity.

Rob and I had been married about a year and happened to be in a South Florida mall, where Geller was  demonstrating his telekinetic abilities. We wandered over to the small group that watched -– maybe two dozen people – and were able to move in close to the platform that elevated him somewhat above the crowd. It was hardly  Madison Square Gardens!  

First he demonstrated the spoon-bending thing and talked about what was happening as he ran his fingers repeatedly over the spoon.  We were close enough to Geller to reach out and touch him, so we had an excellent view of the spoon. As we watched, the upper part of the handle started to bend, so that the spoon curved downward, like something out of a Dali painting. Then Geller asked for keys from the audience. People gladly turned over their keys – but we didn’t. We had just seen what he’d done to the spoon and we didn’t  intend to get stuck at a mall ten to fifteen miles from home!

As sets of keys were handed over to Geller, as he ran his fingers over them, a tight hush settled over the small crowd. Keys were bent at weird and impossible angles and handed back to their owners, who held them up for everyone to see.

Sleight of hand? We aren’t professional debunkers or magicians, but were close enough to see the metal bend, to see what the keys looked like when the owners dangled them from their raised hands for minutes after Geller returned them. The metal was curved, bent, abnormal.

Some years later, in the early 1990s, we were at a writers’ symposium on censorship in Gainesville, Florida. Science fiction writers Jay and Joe Haldeman – brothers – were also there, along with Martin Caidan, an aviation and aeronautical expert and   author of more than 50 books. His 1972 novel, Cyborg, became the basis of the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoff, The Bionic Woman.

 We got to talking to him because of Indiana Jones. Rob had recently finished writing the sixth of his original Indiana Jones novels for Lucas Films, was burned out on the character, and now Caidan was going to continue the series.

After the symposium, Marty invited us back to his place. He was eager to show us the  experiment he’d devised to prove that telekinesis is not only real and possible, but that he himself was telekinetic. The room was on the second floor of his house. At one time, it probably had been a bedroom, but Caidan had redesigned it with a large picture window that looked into an elaborate array of psi wheels. A psi wheel is a pyramid-shaped device that consists of a piece of paper or foil that’s balanced on the tip of a toothpick or needle. The room resembled a field of miniature weather vanes.

He explained that the room was specially sealed against currents of air so that nothing but the power of the mind could cause those psi wheels to turn. As the three of us stood at the window, Caidan went into a trancelike state and focused intently on the psi wheels. For several minutes, nothing happened. Then a couple of the psi wheels began to turn. They weren’t spinning, weren’t going nuts, but were definitely moving without an apparent source or trigger. It looked strangely beautiful and weird, as though we were in the midst of an ongoing psychic opera.

Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach was a friend of Caidan’s and sometimes accompanied him to demonstrations and workshops. In his  June 2004 Fate magazine column, Auerbach wrote, “Martin Caidan was capable of moving things with this mind.”

James Randi offered his rebuttal three months later, saying that in 1994, he had offered to test Caidan’s ability, but that “he frantically avoided my challenge by refusing even the simplest proposed controls.”

What’s interesting about Randi’s comment is his apparent assumption that he is the final authority on whether someone’s psychic abilities are genuine. And since he is a professional skeptic, who makes his living by debunking others, he won’t ever be able to pronounce that anyone is actually psychic because it would make him look bad.  Also, he would have to pay the million bucks he has offered to anyone who can prove they are psychic.

Being a skeptic is easy. It’s far more difficult to approach an apparent impossibility with an open mind and investigate what might actually be going on.

 While doing some research for our new book, The Synchronicity Highway: Exploring Coincidence, the Paranormal, & Alien Contact,  I ran across the transcript of a remote viewing session that Joe McMoneagle did in 1984.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Joe McMoneagle was a psychic spy. He was known as Remote Viewer 001 in the U.S. Army’s Stargate program, which used soldiers with psychic talents to peer across borders and spy on enemies. They also explored diverse topics, including life on Mars 1 million years ago.

Joe has been featured in Newsweek, Time, Reader’s Digest, and on ABC’s Nightline and CBS’s 48 Hours, and on prime-time British and Japanese television. He’s the author of a number of books on remote viewing. He now teaches remote viewing at the Monroe Institute in Virginia, which was started by his father-in-law, author and consciousness researcher Robert Monroe.

I was riveted by what Joe had described in this transcript and asked if we could interview him for the book. One of my questions was about this particular RV session:

We ran across a transcript of an RV session you did in 1984 that was fascinating. You were handed a sealed envelope with a 3X5 index card inside with 3 sentences on it – the target you were supposed to view. You didn’t look at the card and the envelope wasn’t opened until the RV session was finished.  Written on the card was: the planet Mars, time of interest approximately 1 million years B.C.  Your monitor then gave you a set of geographical coordinates. Can you tell us about that viewing? Do you recall how  you felt at the time about what you were seeing? How did your monitor choose those coordinates? And why were there so many of them?

Here’s Joe’s response:

At the time, I was working with Bob Monroe in his lab over extended weekends. This had been set up by the Army in the hopes that it would shorten my cool down periods and extend my abilities to remote view. I was becoming very stressed by the demands within the Stargate Project.

From approximately mid-1982 until September 1^st of 1984 I was the only remote viewer left within the unit, so I was carrying the full load. This was beginning to wear thin. So, Bob was working with me in his lab to try and reduce the stress and increase my ability to respond. During this period of working with Bob, they would occasionally bring down a test target to see how I was doing. It could be a target of importance or simply one utilized to test my abilities.

On this one occasion, I was taking a nap during lunch hour inside the controlled isolation chamber in the lab, when Bob woke me up by announcing that he had a target for me. Lieutenant Atwater had brought him a card with seven sets of coordinates on it, and an envelope which was sealed. Bob told me he had the target envelope in his shirt pocket and that he would read off the coordinates to me one at a time, and I was to describe what I saw at each set. I agreed.

What I remember is that the first coordinate was a huge pyramid, like none I’d ever seen before. I asked him if this was a new discovery, because it seemed this was larger than the one at Giza, Egypt. He said he didn’t know, all he had was the sealed envelope and the coordinates. So, I described it to him. He gave me another coordinate and this one appeared to be some kind of a ruin. And on it went.

I remember at one point looking up at the location and getting a very strange impression of the sun. I told Bob, “The sun, it looks very weird.”

He said; “I’m not interested in the sun, I’m interested in what’s at the coordinate.”

So, onward we went. At the end of the session neither he nor I could figure out what this target was – it was mostly ruins, a few pyramid shapes, and feelings like the whole thing had to do with the preservation of life, the need to pass along a great deal of information.

I began seeing a race of people who were very much like us, but much larger – like, huge larger – over ten feet in height. And these people were fighting to stay alive, were building hibernation chambers inside pyramids, and trying to put aside information for those who might come later, informing them of what went wrong.

In any event, when we finished the remote viewing effort, Skip Atwater asked Bob to open the envelope and tell us what was inside. The card within the envelope said; “MARS ONE MILLION BC.” The coordinates were for specific locations on a certain area of Mars, which included what appeared to be ruins, lots of pyramids of different shapes and designs. I asked Skip where the coordinates had come  from. He said they originated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA).

When I was doing the viewing, I kept getting a really sad feeling – these people were losing their home, and a handful had volunteered to stay behind to try and set up messages for those who might come after them. I got the distinct feeling that the pyramids were being set up to be used as hibernation chambers, and some point at some time in the near future they had some expectation that someone would eventually find them and understand what they did to save their people. It was very moving. I don’t think I expected such a powerful response to the remote viewing.

In any event, when we were finished with the viewing and the discussion of the results, Bob was asked to open the envelope. Inside we discovered the “Mars, one million BC” targeting instruction. It really surprised us both.

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Site of the supposed Dulce underground base.

Part 3 of  The Synchronicity Highway, a work in progress, deals with UFO encounters and synchronicity. So it’s fitting that, as we’re working on the book, we experience synchronicity related to UFOs. This is sort of a couch potato synchro, but still relevant.

We took a break from writing on a recent evening and clicked on our list of recorded TV programs. Ancient Aliens popped up…or so I thought. I clicked it and selected an episode that we had seen years ago related the supposed Dulce, New Mexico underground base and its relationship to aliens. It turns out this was actually UFO Hunters, the History Channel’s earlier UFO program, which we hadn’t watched since it went off the air (or off the cable) about five years ago.

We found the speculative episode interesting, though a bit far out with speculation of genetic engineering taking place, such as creating a man-cow creature, supposedly with the help of aliens. Whew! Okay. But we figure there’s usually some truth to these stories, though the presentation can be way over the top.

Meanwhile, back at the computer, I received a lengthy e-mail from documentary TV producer Katy Walker, who is working on a synchro documentary, as we’ve mentioned. Much of it was about ongoing synchros she has experienced related to owls, but she also touched on her UFO film clip that we put up earlier and, surprisingly, mentioned the Dulce Underground base. Here’s what she said:

“The day we discovered the UFO recording I also came across the UFO Hunters episode (which got the show cancelled) about the Dulce Underground base near an Apache Indian reservation where a worker allegedly saw beings experimenting  with human/alien hybrids. And we fall further down the rabbit hole…”

Oh, yes we do, Katy, because Trish and I had just watched that same episode. How strange. I had never heard that the episode was the reason the UFO Hunters was cancelled, so I looked it up. Indeed, Bill Birnes, the leader of the pack, claims that very thing in a radio/podcast interview with Jim Harold.

Not sure what all that means, except that we’re on the right path with the new book.

 On August 1, Edward Snowden left the transit zone in the Moscow airport and officially entered Russia and left for parts unknown. The administration is ticked off that Putin defied their requests for extradition and apparently ignored their assurance that Snowden wouldn’t be tortured (that’s illegal in the U.S., attorney general Holder told Russian authorities) and would be tried in a civil court, without threat of the death penalty.

All of this is rather ironic in light of the fact that Bradley Manning, who admitted leaking classified documents to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, has been sentenced to 100+ years in prison. If I were Snowden, would I board a plane to return to the U.S.?

Are you kidding?

If I were Snowden, I would keep running, moving, doing whatever I could to stay well ahead of the U.S. We’ve become worldwide bullies.  For some reason, this country seems to believe it has the right and might to spy on whoever they please, when they please, to gather records on our phone calls, emails, what we do on the internet, the doctors and dentists we consult, what we earn, how much we pay in taxes, how we vote, who we marry and…well, you get the picture.

In short, the United States – through its various spy agencies like the NSA – has become Orwell’s 1984. Like many visionaries, Orwell got the big picture correctly, but was off on timing.

Or was he?

The other day at the gym, I was talking to Wild Bill, a guy Rob and I have known, through gyms, for probably ten years. He and I first realized we were on the same page when, in our former gym, he got into an argument with a Republican about Bush. And I, unable to keep my mouth shut, chimed in. Wild Bill, it turned out, is a musician who is also well-informed about politics. When he realized Rob and I are on his page politically, he started attending Rob’s yoga and meditation classes. Periodically, he and I still talk politics.

“Things are so screwed up, Trish.”

“I blame Bush.” Of course, I blame Bush for everything that gone wrong in this country since the 2000 election. It wasn’t just  Bush, though, but his entire team – Cheney, Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, John Yoo, Rice, et al – and not a single one of them has been charged with war crimes or done a day of time. Cheney, in fact, even got a new heart – and it wasn’t the heart of a liberal!

“It goes back to Reagan,” Wild Bill said with a shake of his head. “I started then. We aren’t a democracy. We’re run by corporations and lobbyists.”

Reagan. Sigh. There are two things in Reagan’s favor in my book – he allegedly saw a UFO and his wife, Nancy, was into astrology and tried to use it to protect him. Bottom line, in 2013, we seem to be living in a version of reality that sometimes feels like Blade Runner, one of Harrison Ford’s first movies.

Is there a Rick Deckherd who is going to save us from ourselves? A Hans Solo who will save us from – well, universal threats? An Indiana Jones who will get the bad guys in the end?

Probably not. But whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning and Assange may form some weird archetype triad of the hero – Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in England; Manning recently sentenced to 100 plus years; and Snowden, hiding out somewhere in the country of  Dr. Zwivago. The three of them: what did they do?

They exposed the extent to which the U.S. government spies on its citizens and its allies all in the name of we’re keeping you safe, we’re keeping you secure, we’re allowing you to enjoy your Lattes, to enjoy walking your kids to school, and to appreciate how volunteer citizen watchdogs like George Zimmerman can gun you down if they feels threatened. Not to worry. We have a system of checks and balances in this country, a great judicial system…and yes, the best military on the entire planet. Ha-ha. We are the world cop.

 To Assange, Manning, and Snowden I say, Thank you. These three are the public, collective face of an emerging political paradigm, the one that says, If we are to survive as a planet, a human collective, we must be transparent, honest, forthright.

The synchro, I think, is that Snowden sought refuge in a country not known for its adherence to human rights, to freedom of anything. Yet, its main guy, Putin, refused to cave to pressure from the U.S. to extradite Snowden.

This past May we received an e-mail from a documentary film producer who had heard us on a radio show/podcast, Mysterious Universe. She wanted to interview us for a film her company was making on synchronicity. We made tentative arrangements for an interview in Miami later this year. We also mentioned our latest work, Aliens in the Backyard. That apparently prompted our contact, Katy, to send us an interesting follow up a few days ago. Here’s what she said:

“…So while we were filming our web series in San Francisco in July, we were having all these crazy syncs with owls and as I was filming I noticed this crazy Hopi Indian Mural showing a hybrid human, gray alien and then an owl in the tree. I read them as being the screen memories. Anyway, I walked over to the film crew and around that time we accidentally shot something that looks like a UFO. Check out the clip, would love to know what you think! It’s right at the beginning of the video, doesn’t last long, but given that it occurs in daylight,  and was seen only on the video, it’s intriguing.

And here’s a link to her music video.

 This summer in Florida is rainy, extremely hot, and as humid as a steam bath. The combination of elements tends to bring out some interesting critters and this summer, those critters have been large.

Tonight, I walked into Rob’s office to show him something, didn’t have my glasses on, and said, “Wow, you’ve got two frogs.”

Rob, who had his glasses on, said, “It’s a bat.”

By this time, I had retrieved my glasses and moved closer. “It’s a moth.”

He moved next to me. “Wow, you’re right.”

We couldn’t believe the size of this thing. We’ve never seen a moth this large around here. While it was resting against the windowpane, Rob got out  the tape measure. “A wingspan of seven inches,” he announced.

I stepped outside and snapped a couple of photos, then headed to Google to find out what sort of moth this sucker was and what the esoteric meaning might be.

After a bit of research, I believe it may be a Black Witch Moth, sometimes referred to as a bat moth. In Mexico and the Caribbean, they’re a symbol of death  – la mariposa de la muerte. The Mayans believed that if this moth enters the home of a sick person, the person will die. In other versions of the legend, this occurs only if the moth visits all four corners of the house. (By the way, its favorite haunt and food source is the acacia tree–yesterday’s topic here!)

This moth stayed outside on his window for hours. When Rob went to bed, it was still there, seemingly staring into the room. At this point, I wasn’t liking this esoteric interpretation very much. I continued Googling.

Like most esoteric symbols, this one has permutations. If the Black Witch Moth flies over your head – you lose your hair or you are cursed; in Hawaii, it’s believed to be the soul of a dead person who has dropped by for a final good-bye; and in Texas and the Bahamas, it’s believed that if the moth sticks around for awhile, you’ll win the lottery. However, in Jamaica, under the name duppy bat, the moth is seen as the embodiment of a lost soul or a soul not at rest. In Jamaican English, the word duppy is associated with malevolent spirits returning to inflict harm upon the living and bat refers to anything other than a bird that flies.

So, okay, this moth is on Rob’s office window and I’m reading about these interpretations, looking for some sort of time frame in its life cycle. I couldn’t find much at all for the Black Witch Moth, so I Googled its cousin, the White Witch Moth.  On this site, it looks as if three-to four weeks pass before the caterpillar becomes the transformed creature, the White Moth. So I’ll take that as the time frame.  I’ll also take the interp about winning the lottery!

What’s interesting about this appearance is that we recently had an altercation with our neighbor, a Jamaican man, about dogs. He keeps his underfed German Sheppard on a five-foot leash in his garage or tied up outside- in 90 degree-plus heat.  While our daughter, Megan, was visiting recently, her dog, Nika, raced along the fence in our backyard, barking at our neighbor’s dog, who barked back, of course, whenever he was tied up back there. One morning as our neighbor was jogging up the sidewalk in front of our house, Nika tore out the front door and chased him, barking ferociously. But she’s just hot air. Nika has never bitten anyone.

Yet, our neighbor claimed that Nika had bitten him. He dropped by minutes after the chase and demanded to know if Nika had had her rabies shots. Well, yes, she’s good for the next three years in that department. Then our neighbor – let’s call him Mick – shows us his leg and announces that he’s going to call Animal Care and Control on the dog.

Neither Rob nor I could see anything on his leg – no bite marks, no skin broken, nothing. And Rob slips into that Taurus area known as the Bull’s Rush. He gets pissed. This is so rare that I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen it manifest itself in 30 years.

But when you push his buttons, then clear the deck. He read Mick the riot act about how he treats his dog- it’s illegal in our county to keep a dog on a leash in the heat and that he’d better not call the animal control people because Rob  would report Mick for how he treats his dog. And just for your information, Mick, we also fed your underfed, scrawny orange tabby cat for years, treated its injuries, loved on it when you didn’t do any of the above.

Mick never called animal control.

Skip ahead to late July. Megan and Nika are visiting and one morning, Nika darts out the front door and races the length of Mick’s fence, barking at his dog, who goes nuts.  There’s never any face-to-face confrontation between the dogs. It’s just noise. But Mick’s head pops up over the fence and he starts yelling about our dogs and how he’s going to report us to the police and Rob marches over to the fence, his shouts as loud and abrasive as Mick’s. I quickly get Nika indoors.

Monday morning as Megan and I are packing up her car because she’s going back to Orlando, a cop car pulls into the driveway. Mick has made good on his promise. Really? I walk over to the cop, whom I’ve seen around here from time to time, and he goes through his spiel. Your neighbor…the dogs…some issues…

 “Our daughter’s dog darted out of the house, our dog followed, and they ran along the fence, barking at Mick’s dog, who barked back. How is this an issue?”

He stifles a smile. “I was obligated to investigate and talk to you because he called.”

Later that morning, at Rob’s instigation, he and Mick converse calmly over the fence that separates our properties. They shake hands. The rift is mended- sort of.  We’ll keep our distance and hope that Black Witch Moth means a lottery of some sort so that we can have a couple of acres of land between us and our nearest neighbor.

(Notice in the photo, a ceiling fan is visible to the right and below the moth and dangling from it is a dream catcher. Continue down to the bottom of the pic and you can see a slice of Rob’s head as he peers out.)

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For the fun of it, Rob decided to send the above to a couple of witches (or Wiccans, if they prefer) and see what they thought about the black witch moth. Happily, they both had positive things to say. Here’s from Connie C – mathmagick.

“I’ve seen them here more than once, and have had no negativity occur. I think its favorite food being the Acacia is very relevant, considering your blog post today about the Acacia Tree!

“More about the Acacia: In the Bible, God instructed Moses to build the Tabernacle of the Covenant from the Acacia tree, and also the Ark of the Covenant.

“So, I would consider this “visitation” by the black witch moth to be a highly spiritual, positive symbolic omen for you!”

A few minutes later, she added:

“P.S. I have a sense that the black witch moth and its connection to the magnificent symbolism of the Acacia Tree are important for you in some way relative to Immortaliity. Perhaps the visitation from a loved one who knew you’d be posting the Acacia wanted to drop by and say Hello!”

And from Jane Clifford – who has posted here as turbowitch:

“Very interesting & a bit spooky! My very first thought was  symbolic death/ rebirth, transformation & my first thoughts are usually the best. My second was there maybe a news of death but not I think so close as to be completely devastating . My third, when I read that it can symbolize winning the lottery, was I hope so, because there is a syncro here !

“This  week I learned a technique for healing finances, one that previously has only been available for corporations and they claimed their profits soared Now it has been offered to the public. So first I applied it to my eldest daughter’s finances ( married, 2 kids, struggling on one wage), then I applied it for the other kids, then I ran the technique for YOU & finally for others I know and care about or have healed.”

Interestingly, about the time Jane sent that comment, we received an e-mail from a TV producer who has expressed a strong interest in optioning Trish’s Tango Key books for a TV series. Our fingers are crossed.

 Late May through August  in South Florida mean that the Royal Poinciana trees  explode with blooms. The one in the photo above is inside the dog park where we take Noah – and Nika, when she visits – every afternoon.

For me, there is something utterly magical about these trees. I remember them as the acacia trees of my childhood, bursting in summer with reddish-orange blooms in our backyard in Maracaibo and along the river road in Caracas where we lived.  They trigger memories of my parents younger than I am now, of the Sundays when my parents, my younger sister and I and our dachshund, Cindy, would pile into an old station wagon and later, a VW bug, and drive to the outskirts of the city for a picnic.

There was a spot in an area called Monte Elena where we would stop for our picnic. It was filled with these trees and we usually parked under one of them. The dog would leap out, overjoyed to run around without a leash, and we would grab our cooler and set up our lunch at a picnic table.

I learned to drive the VW on this hilltop above the city, putting along initially in first gear, sometimes  forgetting to depress the foot clutch when I finally shifted into second or third. The road wasn’t paved, there wasn’t another soul around, so my dad apparently felt it was good place for me to practice driving.  Somewhere I have old black and white photos from these years, of the picnic table, my parents, my sister and I, and even of the acacia trees. Those times were invariably happy and magical  and whenever I see an acacia tree now, in full bloom, these early memories are triggered and I am flooded with a sense of well-being.

When we walked into the dog park this afternoon, I saw that the acacia tree at the far end of the park was even fuller and brighter with blooms than it had been yesterday. It lit up that end of the park, and our daughter’s dog, Nika, immediately tore toward it, racing full speed across the openness, just as our dachshund used to do. The memory had come full circle. I just stared after her, my mind racing, calculating the years between now and Monte Elena then. More than 50 years. 

At the time, my mother was probably in her late-forties, my dad not yet 50.  Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s lay many years in their future. Rob was a teenager in Minnesota. Megan wasn’t even on my radar, although I suspect that in the larger scheme of things, she had a life in the sixties, but not with either Rob or me.

I have been re-reading Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, and realize the acacia tree prompts me to ask the question that Jung asked himself countless times “What is your myth- the myth in which you live?” For him, that myth moved into levels so profound that it led him into a confrontation with his unconscious (his words) and into a kind of madness. It was during this period that he wrote and painted what eventually became The Red Book, a stunning collection of writings on alchemy, mythology, dreams, synchronicity, symbolism, the paranormal, and a collection of paintings that are epic in scope.

My personal myth is far simpler. And part of it is intertwined with acacia trees. So when I walk into the dog park every afternoon and see that gorgeous tree,  entire continents of memories burst open. And afterward, I run home and write. It’s not synchronicity, but synchronicity can certainly be triggered when the power of memory and creativity are intertwined.

 When Arizona sculptor and artist Lauren Raines was going through a divorce, she heard about a shamanic practitioner in Crownsville, Maryland, who had studied with Sandra Ingerman and was also an energy healer and herbalist. She was at a point in her life when she was “very open to anything,” and went to him for a soul retrieval.

This shamanic practice helps regain a soul that has become trapped, disconnected, or lost through some sort of trauma. Depending on the circumstances, a divorce can certainly qualify as a trauma.

“He was very business-like,  and without knowing anything about me, put on his drums tape and headset, had me lie down next to him, and we tranced together. At the end of the session he blew soul fragments back into my body, and we talked about what he ‘saw.’ We talked about cutting the cords from my ex-husband and my former community (I had moved away). He concluded the session by telling me: You’ll know it’s all over when you see a magenta flower that looks like a cosmos, and a terra cotta angel.

 Eight months later, Lauren crossed the country with her cat and all her possessions loaded into her van. She was determined to move back to Berkeley, California, and start a new life. She had decided she would sleep in her van if necessary until she found somewhere to live. “I began my adventure as soon as I arrived with a visit to a coffee house I last visited 20 years earlier. Almost immediately I was greeted by a long ago friend, Joji Yokoi, who recognized me, and bought me a cup of coffee, and offered me a place to stay. I didn’t have to spend a single night in my van. When I walked into his living room, there was a huge photograph of a magenta cosmos flower hanging above his fireplace!”

A few months after that, Lauren answered an ad for a roommate. “I walked into a house with an altar – and in the center was a terra cotta angel. Judy Foster was one of the founding members of Reclaiming and a colleague of my heroine, Starhawk, whose writings were the foundation of my MFA thesis more than a decade earlier. Needless to say, just like that, my new life began and I ended up working with the very people I most wanted to work with, never having had to even try! The shaman was right in his prediction.”

The shaman gave Lauren two very specific bits of information about markers that would signal her transition period was finished – the magenta cosmos flower and the terra cotta angel. How was he able to see something so precise, for a woman he had just met?

“Shamans are inspired visionaries who are able to access information through their invisible allies for the benefit of  themselves, their families, and their communities. This process is known as divination, and it is usually accomplished through ceremony and ritual,” wrote Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wesselman in Awakening to the Spirit World.  “Through their relationship with these transpersonal forces, shamans are able to retrieve lost power and restore it to its original owners…”

So through the trance state that the shaman and Lauren entered together, he was able to retrieve power that Lauren had lost and was allowed to see the most probable path her future would take.

 A dining room table isn’t just a piece of furniture; it’s also associated with memories.

The year that Megan was born, Rob and I bought a new dining room table at some cool furniture store in Fort Lauderdale. The table was teak, with beautiful tile inlays. For the next twenty years, that table hosted mostly holiday dinners, some of them large, most of them small. And the rest of the time, we ate at the kitchen table.

Twenty years after we bought the table, it collapsed, almost as though it sensed it hadn’t been loved or used enough  to count. For the last four years, that space has sat vacant in our house. Rob has used it for yoga and meditation classes,  the cats sometimes wandered around in it, apparently wondering what had happened to the table.  

Then a friend told us she had a table she’d bought from her sister that was too large for her kitchen and were we interested?   The table was made of dark wood, had six chairs,  and she was selling it for $150 and her boyfriend could bring it over to our place.

So one afternoon between thunderstorms, the dining room table was delivered. The dark wood that we weren’t sure we liked at first kind of grew on us. Rob and I ate a couple of dinners at the table. It felt good. But it wasn’t truly initiated until this evening, when Megan had a going away party for her friend, Ross Berlin. They met in high school, went to the same college, and now Ross is moving out of state.

We’ve known Ross since he was 15 years old, a verbal, opinionated kid who could talk to you about mythology and politics as though he were a 40-year-old in disguise.  We think of him as Megan’s spiritual brother, the son we didn’t have. When Megan  did her internship at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo, she lived with Ross’s mother. When Ross was sick with some terrible virus, he bunked in our back bedroom and we fed him chicken noodle soup and antibiotics. It has been that kind of friendship.

Now Ross is headed to Oakland, California with his girlfriend, Megan, a dancer of Somalian descent, and will be building houses with Habitat for Humanity while Megan is obtaining her master’s degree from Berkeley in dance. The other couple at the dinner were Leandra, who is training to become a yoga instructor, and her boyfriend Steve, a fixture in Wellington polo who writes for the magazine his family owns – Polo Players.

 The other guest was Ashley, also a high school buddy of Megan’s and Ross’s,  who is now married to an Egyptian Muslim. She just went through her first Ramadan with no liquid or food ingested  between dawn and dusk – and got ill after the first day and said, That’s it. I can’t do this. “Me, neither,” her husband said, and that was that for them.  

At some point in all this discourse, I realized our new dining room table was being initiated in a way I hadn’t expected but welcomed completely. Our daughter had made salmon burgers for her friends, a going away party for Ross, and now our table  suddenly possessed its first memory.

Twenty years from now, Rob and I will be in our eighties, and everyone at this table  tonight will be in their forties. Tempus fugit, as my mother used to say. And as time flies, we build our memories, one moment at a time.

Sometimes I’ll read about or see a you tube account of a UFO sighting that strikes me as bogus. The following account does NOT have that same vibe. In reading through this story on the examiner, I’m impressed with the details, the length of time that passed, and how the witness  saw a whole Star Wars like scenario play out. Here’s the link for the report. The above photo is not one of the pics the man sent to the examiner. I didn’t find his photos that impressive. Then again, his pics were, I believe, taken with a cell phone.