Mercury Retrograde

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Mercury is the planet closest to the sun. In mythology, it’s associated with Hermes, the winged messenger of the gods, of commerce, trade, and travel. In astrology, Mercury rules the signs of Gemini and Virgo, and governs communication, travel, education. It can be quite the trickster at times, particularly when it’s moving retrograde, which happens three times a year.

 From our vantage point on earth, retrograde motion is when a planet appears to be moving backward. In practical terms, this is when your travel plans go south, your internet connection fails, your computer crashes, your appliances go haywire, the battery in your car takes a permanent siesta, your relationships encounter snafus, you lose your wallet, get stranded in the Dallas airport, or run into your ex in the grocery store. It’s when things in your life seem to move two steps backward for every step forward.

It’s a good time to follow the three Rs: review, revise, rethink. Make your travel plans on either side of the retro dates – 8/20 to 9/12. Don’t launch projects, businesses, or submit anything new during a Mercury retro. If you have to travel, you had better view the journey as an adventure because you may encounter abrupt, inexplicable changes in your itinerary. Avoid purchasing large ticket items – unless you don’t mind returning them once Mercury turns direct again.

For some reason, I got it into my head that Mercury was going retro on August 23. But when I looked at my ephemeris Sunday, I realized it had gone retro in Virgo on the 20th,  that it had started slowing down – going stationary – on the 19th, the day of Megan’s car mishap. No one was hurt, but the mishap was costly. Mercury is retro in Virgo – and Megan’s sun and moon are in that sign.

Now we’ve experiencing communication mishaps. Our dog chewed through an internet cables twice, severing Rob’s connection to the internet. He, too, has a Virgo moon. We bought a range expander, which is supposed to extend the WiFi signal in your home and is supposed to be easy to install – plug it into the wall socket, get two blue lights for confirmation, and you’re in business. Ha. It doesn’t work with ATT’s uverse equipment. Back to Best Buy tomorrow to return the gizmo.

I’m revising my novel, right in line for a Mercury-ruled sign like Gemini. My gmail is acting up, the dishwasher sounds like it’s on its last legs. You get the idea here.

Just to give you a broader backdrop, look back to the presidential election in the U.S. in November 2000.Mercury had turned retrograde in Libra on October 18. It turned direct on November 7, 2000, at around 9:20 PM. That was about the time that Tom Brokaw and NBC News announced that Florida had been called too early, that there was some confusion in the ballots, that Gore may not have won the state. For the next 35 days, confusion reigned about who had actually won the presidency and the supreme court ultimately called it for George Bush.

Mercury turns direct again on September 12. Between now and then, be kind to yourself. Find joy in whatever you do. If it’s true that we create our lives from the inside out, spinning our experiences from the cloth of our deepest beliefs, then take a look at those deeper beliefs when things go awry.

A friend commented that before he knew about Mercury retrogrades, things would go all weird several times a year and he couldn’t figure out why. But when he looked back, he detected a pattern that coincided with these retrograde periods. Some years ago, the agent Rob had at the time refused to submit her clients’ manuscripts during Mercury retrograde.

Sure, part of what you do or don’t experience depends on your belief system.  But hey, there’s plenty of scientific research about the effects of the full moon on tides and weather – and on the number of nut cases that roll into the ER. If the phases of the moon can impact us, why not Mercury retrogrades?

And just for the record: Jung wrote about astrology – but not about Mercury retros.

Posted in astrology, mercury retro | 23 Comments

Tickle, Tickle

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Trish and Rob

              The moon, from Dali’s tarot 

 We received an email from clarity, inviting us to take a look at her blog about some of the synchros she has experienced.  She has some good ones and we selected this one to repost. From Salvatore Dali’s tarot deck, we chose The Moon, symbolic of intuition, emotion, mom, nurturing, our inner worlds.
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A few years ago, my son was ill and I had to take some time off to take care of him. During the days he’d sleep a lot and sometimes be awake to watch some TV – and during the nights he’d wake up a lot and need something to drink or to be comforted and lulled back to sleep. As you can imagine, I didn’t get much sleep myself.

As he felt alone lying in his bed in his room, I placed his mattress on the floor in the living room and let him sleep there, day and night – it made him feel safe. As I had to be near him at night, I chose to sleep on the sofa, right next to him.

Now ..our sofa is a very nice and comfortable piece of furniture to sit in but far from perfect to sleep on. During the two weeks my son was ill, I developed a nasty back pain – or rather, an old back pain I’d had coming and going for years, came back and was worse than ever. In fact, it became so bad I could hardly move during the day and no matter what position I tried to fall asleep in, I was in a terrible pain. I called my doctor to get an appointment but she wasn’t able to fit me in until after a couple of days and I couldn’t go there until my son was well again, anyway, so I had to get through the days on painkillers and manage as well as I could.

Spirits

At the time this happened, I was doing a lot of meditation and reading about spirits and spirit guides. I mainly used the meditation as an effective tool to relax and get some relief from a busy life running my own business, as well as trying to be as good a mother as I could be. As far as the spirits and spirit guides were concerned, I wasn’t convinced as to whether or not these ‘entities’ really existed but still found the subject intriguing.

As the pain killers only took some of the pain, I tried doing some meditation to get some further relief. It helped – a little – but I was still in too much pain to be able to fall asleep. Then I remembered how people claim they can call upon spirits and spirit guides for help in times of need. Well, this was certainly a time of need for me; having to take care of my son and at the same time having to battle a nasty backache – so why not try and call for some spiritual assistance? The way I saw it, I had nothing to lose.

As I didn’t want to disturb my son, I whispered this into the room: “If there are any spirits present here in this room, could you then please do something about my back pain?”. Then I suddenly felt a very brief sensation on the spot where my back hurt, like fingers tickling it, and I am not kidding: my back pain disappeared as if by magic. I was totally amazed ..and whispered a deep felt ‘thank you’ out into the room. But what was even more amazing than the immediate releif was that I haven’t had any problems with my back since then (this happened more than 2 years ago). Maybe, we really are surrounded by spirits who will come to our help in times of need. If so, isn’t it great to know?!

Posted in back pain, health, spirit contact | 11 Comments

Edge of Dreaming

Posted on August 21, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 Photo by Natalie Thomas

We’ve done a number of posts on precognitive dreams, one of the areas that Jung placed under the larger umbrella of synchronicity. Now a Scottish filmmaker has made a documentary on that very topic.

Here’s the synopsis from PBS, which will show the documentary on August 24. Mark your calendars!

Synopsis

Scottish filmmaker Amy Hardie has built a career making science documentaries that reflect her rational temperament. When she dreamed one night that her horse was dying, only to wake the next morning and find the horse dead, she dismissed the incident as a coincidence. Then she dreamed she would die at age 48 — only one year away. When Hardie does get ill, just as the dream predicted, she visits neuroscience experts and eventually a shaman. The Edge of Dreaming is an evocative, intimate chronicle of that year and a fascinating investigation into the human subconscious. (75 minutes)

And the trailer:

Posted in documentary, precognitive dreams | 13 Comments

Love the One You’re With

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Trish and Rob

For the last two days, we’ve been moving Megan back into her college dorm, on Florida’s west coast. It’s a four-hour drive across the state and Megan was about ten miles ahead of us during the last part of the trip. We were on the lookout for synchros. They often happen when we travel.

During the drive, Rob and I were talking about how Megan’s car insurance rates should be lowered in a few weeks, once she turns 21. “When was her last ticket?” Rob asked.

“Probably two years ago,” I replied. “It should be off her record by now.”

A few minutes later, my cell rings. It’s Megan. “Uh, mom, I’m at the exit and I was just in an accident. I was stopped, must’ve taken my foot off the brake, and my car rolled into the van in front of me. I’m okay,” she added quickly. “Everyone’s okay.”

Synchro 1. About a minute after we’d been talking about her insurance rates, we get her call.

She wasn’t  moving more than 2 or 3 miles an hour, but the van had a trailer hitcher  that had gone through the fender of Megan’s car and now, she said, the car “sounded weird.” The driver of the van, a county employee, was obligated to call the police because he was in a county vehicle.

By the time we got to the exit, the cop was there, the van’s driver was standing next to Megan’s car, and Megan, shaken up, was in her car, fiddling with the air conditioner. The “weird sound” happened whenever she turned the AC on.

It was August hot, incredibly humid, not much of a breeze, and the five of us stood around, sweating, guzzling water, as the cop went through the whole process.  Yes, he would have to write her a ticket for careless driving.He felt bad about it, practically apologized for having to do it. The van driver felt that bad that he was obligated to call the cops (or lose his job). We all felt bad, especially Megan, who was just trying to get moved into her dorm for her senior year.

When we finally left the exit, Megan rode with Rob and I drove her car the 7 miles to campus. Without air, I felt like a lobster being broiled alive.I tried the AC a couple of times, but it sounded like a rabid dog on steroids. You simply can’t get by in Florida in the summer without air conditioning. I know practically nothing about cars, but when you drive a vehicle often enough, you get an intuitive sense about it. My sense was that the engine wasn’t damaged, but that the repairs weren’t going to be cheap.

On the way to campus, Megan filed the report with the insurance company and got an appointment the next day with an insurance appraiser. We got her moved into her dorm, then she found out she had several classes at the time of the appraisal, so Rob and I said we’d take her car in.

That evening, with Megan settled into the dorm, Rob and I went into downtown Sarasota and stopped at the place in the photo for a drink. We talked about what the repairs to the car might cost and decided to file an insurance claim. We’ve been paying for the insurance for years and never have filed a claimed. Besides, her insurance rate was going to rise regardless. We were both feeling uneasy about everything.

A band was playing – a local group – Big T and the Tornadoes. The black piano player burned up the keyboard and you could tell he was really enjoying himself. I kept thinking about enjoyment and the law of attraction, and wondered what all of this was really about. Suddenly, the band started playing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Love the One You’re With.

Synchro 2.   This song has particular significance for me. In my novel, Esperanza, which will be released 9/14, one of the characters, Dominica,  always “loves the one she’s with.” It’s her litany, her reason for being. “Rob, that’s Dominica’s song,” I exclaimed.

We both laughed at the irony. Of all the songs in the universe, why this one?  Because regardless of what we attract – good and bad – as a family, we three MacGregors stick together. I suddenly felt everything would work out okay with the car.

Sure enough, it worked out better than either of us expected. The total cost for repairs: $1400. With our deductible, we’re out $500. The entire front fender will be replaced – and it already had plenty of bumps and bruises – and the AC will be repaired. Even though most car rental agencies won’t rent to anyone under 25, Megan will be able to rent a car for the three days or so it will take for the repairs.The car will look like new, the AC will work again.

And, in the end, no one was hurt. That was the best part of it all.

Posted in cars, college, driving, music | 13 Comments

That Pesky Trickster

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Trish and Rob

                         That Trickster, Smeagol

The trickster has his own chapter in our book. Anyone who has ever experienced a trickster synchro knows why this Jungian archetype deserves his own chapter. He plays with us, this archetype, laughs at us, pokes fun at us. Think Smeagol in Lord of the Rings, the Magician in the tarot, Jim Carey in The Mask, the Joker in Batman…You get the idea.

One of our first posts on the trickster was called Tony and the Trickster, when we had maybe 3 readers. Tony was Trish’s dad. It’s such a classic trickster tale that we decided to post again, rewritten.
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Tony was a retired accountant, who absolutely loved numbers. Born in Quincy, Illinois in 1913, he left there some time after high school and accompanied his older brother to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where one of their sisters lived. He didn’t have the money to attend college. The irony here is that when he was in his late 70s, he applied for membership in MENSA, the high I.Q. society, and got in. I think he attended a technical school of some kind in Tulsa. Then the Great Depression hit and whipped away the American economy. He applied for a job as an accountant with Creole (Exxon) and in 1937 landed in some obscure town on the shores of Lake Maracaibo.

Now skip ahead more than 60 years. Tony is in his late 80s. His wife of 56 years died several years earlier. He has Parkinson’s and pretty much lives in a wheelchair, in an assisted living facility in Georgia where my sister is director of nursing. In assisted living facilities, your neighbors change frequently. As my dad remarked on more than one occasion, “We all know that assisted living is the end of the line, the equivalent of mile marker zero.” That’s Key West. “I never know who lives across the hall from me.”

So a couple months after he moved in, the man who had been living across the hall from him passed on and a woman moved in. A few days later, he met her. To his utter and total shock, the woman was a former high school classmate from Quincy,Illinois – from more than 65 or 70 years earlier. When I commented about the incredible  synchronicity, my dad’s reply was: “The universe has a twisted sense of humor. I don’t like her any more now than I did back then.”

Looks like the trickster had brought his life full circle and taught me a thing or two about the nature of its lesson.

Posted in tony, trickster | 10 Comments

Four-Leaf Clovers and Luck

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Just a note: we’re moving Megan back to college during the next 2 days, so we won’t be online as much!
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We all know the tales. Find a four-leaf clover and it means luck is headed your way. But where did this idea originate?

Well, supposedly Eve carried a four-leaf clover with her from Eden. Druids allegedly considered the four-leaf clover to be lucky. The Celts considered the four-leaf clover to be a charm against evil spirits. But for a young man in the UK, the four-leaf clover really was a symbol of good luck. Jim Banzholder alerted us to this story.
It’s a rather odd synchro.

Raymond Curry, 20, was in a bad car accident – his car overturned and rolled through a fence near his home. The hatchback was impaled by two pieces of wood and a third piece impaled Curry, but missed his vital organs. He went through surgery to have the stake and part of his bowel removed. (This surgery in the U.S., by the way, probably would have bankrupted him!) His physicians later found a four-leaf clover stuck to his back under his clothes.

Curry, who had never seen a four-leaf clover before, said, “I know how lucky I am to be alive.”

The four-leaf clover is now mounted on a wall in his bedroom. The original story is here.
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Rob: “How’s he lucky? He was impaled by part of the fence. He lost part of his bowel.”

Me: “Hey, he’s alive.”

Posted in four leaf clovers, luck | 10 Comments

Fixing Freddie

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Move over, Marley! Here’a dog story about a boy, a mom, and a very bad beagle!

Paula Munier, the author, was our editor for 7 Secrets. This is her first memoir, just published today,  and it’s a winner.  The last paragraph in the book reveals how very good Freddie the beagle is:

“The moral of my dog story is this: You can fix your life. All it takes is a dogged determination, a nose for trouble and – when when all else fails – the courage to howl at the moon. Freddie taught me that.”

Posted in Freddie, paula | 14 Comments

Out of the Blue

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Trish and Rob

We write about our synchronicities here and share those that are sent to us, but Ray Schmitt has managed to film synchronicities as they were happening. To do so, he reached into his heart and in his search for answers reveals that synchronicities are deeply intertwined with our emotions – the second secret of synchronicity.

Ray began a two-year spiritual journey with his camera in September 2007 after suddenly losing his wife and film partner Judy Lee. He couldn’t imagine her ‘not being.’ Where did she go? She had to exist in some spiritual or energy form otherwise he would have been more devastated by the loss. He set out to re-examine, or affirm, his belief system.

That’s the premise of his new documentary, Out of the Blue. Using Ken Burn’s film, “The Brooklyn Bridge,” as a metaphor, Ray builds a bridge to the metaphysical world. He travels to Mexico and has numerous synchronistic encounters, including meeting the widows who share their own personal stories.Ray explores whether things can exist in different forms or dimensions, how the universe connects with us and us with the universe, and how inspirational thoughts or messages can seemingly come out of the blue.

Here’s a trailer. And it’s available here.

Posted in documentary, Ray Schmitt | 14 Comments

Clouds and Computing

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Trish and Rob

I’ve run across the phrase cloud computing several times recently. I Googled the phrase, read the various entries, but still didn’t understand what it actually was – until our trip a couple of weeks ago to the Florida Keys.

In addition to the lovely location, our agent’s house is a book lover’s dream. So one afternoon when I realized I was nearly finished with the book I’d brought with me, I started roaming through the books around the house, starting with the stack on the table pictured above.I picked up one called You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, known as the father of virtual reality. I’d never heard of the book, but the first page I turned to discussed cloud computing. Synchro, I thought, and read on.

“Cloud is a term for a vast computing service available over the internet. You never know where a cloud resides physically,” writes Lanier. “Google, Microsoft, IBM, and various government agencies are some of the proprietors of computing clouds.”

So it might be said that one possible cloud is composed of the millions of individuals who contribute to the internet through blogs, websites, forums, a kind of global brain, as Lanier calls it. “According to a new creed, we technologists are turning ourselves, the planet, our species, everything, into computer peripherals attached to great computing clouds. The news is no longer about us but about the big new computational object that is greater than us.”

As I was reading this, it suddenly dawned on me that one of the best examples of a computing cloud is a web bot that claims to use the internet as a giant oracle that can predict future events. The two men who own the technology, Clif High and George Ure, call themselves Time Monks. The technology and algorithms, which are kept secret,  supposedly tap into the collective unconscious through spiders that search the Internet for  300,000 words. The predictions can allegedly predict catastrophes 60-90 days in advance.

I’ve been following George Ure’s site for a couple of years now. Occasionally, he posts free predictions from the web bots, but mostly he’s an economist who rarely sees anything good about the economy and is a diehard urban survivalist. Just before the financial meltdown in 2008, he and Clif were on Coast to Coast, I think it was, and were talking about the web bot predictions for a dire downturn in the economy. It was definitely a hit. They claim to have other hits, but I can’t vouch for them.

So the web bot project uses millions of blogs and websites to make predictions. Quantity, in other words. In his book, Lenair talks about quality versus quantity. “The fragments of human effort that have flooded the internet are perceived by some to form a hive mind or noosphere.” Some of his tech friends – like Larry Page, one of Google’s founders – expects “the internet to come alive at some point.” Other people – like science historian George Dyson – believes it has happened already.

Lenair has some interesting stuff to say about blogs and blogging and how the internet is changing the book and music industries. That alone is worth the read. But his particular take on the “hive mentality” of the web and what it may mean for individual creativity is what really captured me. And thanks to this book, I finally have a clearer understanding of computer clouds and was able to identify the web bot project as one such cloud. I also realized that the government routinely uses their computing clouds to scan blogs and websites. We wrote about our experience with that here. There have been other such incidents, but that’s a post for another day!

Posted in books, computers, Internet | 20 Comments

The Universe Delivers

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Trish and Rob

We’ve posted several of Judi Hertling’s synchronicities. They usually involve her request to the universe for something specific. Her most recent story is here. What’s particularly intriguing about this story is that it shows how Judi harnesses synchronicity and is similar to an activity in 7 Secrets (p226) called Harnessing Synchronicity. 
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In early 2007, my husband and I completed construction of our potential dream home. As anyone who has ever built a house with a spouse and a contractor knows, it doesn’t get much more stressful than that. So when I began journaling about stress, illness, and healing, I was only slightly surprised.

I am a positive person for the most part so this is not a topic I usually write about, however as I hadn’t been feeling up to par for a few weeks, it seemed a natural way for me to release a few negative energies that may have accumulated during the whole construction experience, while at the same time allowing me to explore on paper which areas of my life were out of balance.
 
While there was nothing physical that I could put my finger on, I had a vague sense that something within me was not quite right. I could not shake the feeling that the house, while beautiful, felt wrong to me and that I also felt wrong in a way that I could not explain. As far back as I can remember I have been sensitive to my environment, to people, and to the subtle changes within my body.

I am also guilty of not always acting on those subtleties, or instincts. Not always trusting my intuition.
Winston Churchill said. ‘You create your own universe as you go along.” So this time I listened. And I trusted.

I made an appointment with my physician and went to see him a few days later. He ran the usual tests, found nothing too unusual, and told me to come back in a few weeks if I was still feeling – off.

Trusting that the Universe was trying to tell me something about myself, something important, I made a second appointment and after more tests and examinations he referred me to a specialist who was not usually available to take new patients. The appointment was scheduled for six days later. This in itself was unusual since appointments to see most specialists in Canada can take six weeks or longer so I was grateful that I wouldn’t have to wait that long, and also because it was scheduled for two days after my husband arrived home from working a five week rotation overseas.

On the allotted day we arrived a few minutes early, filled out the necessary paperwork and then I was hustled into the exam room. An hour later I returned to the waiting area, a little shaken. I told my husband that during the exam the specialist had found two ovarian masses, and I needed to have major surgery to determine if they were cancerous or not.  Given that my Mother had passed away of ovarian cancer, this was not good news.

The date for surgery was still to be scheduled, and we were warned that it would be at least a four to six weeks wait since operating rooms were in short supply. I was also informed that I would need someone to be home with me for at least four weeks following surgery. No lifting, no cooking, no cleaning, no driving. We have no family where we live, we were new in the neighborhood, and my husband was due to go back overseas in five weeks.

I needed a synchronicity so big that it would rearrange people and events once again to provide that which I needed. Surgery and recuperation time all before my husband went back overseas. Impossible? Maybe.
My mantra is always the same. “If it is for my highest good and for the highest good of all those concerned.”
The next day I received a telephone call from the surgeon’s office saying that she had received a surprising and very sudden surgical cancellation, and that she would be able to perform my surgery 48 hours later if we could be at the hospital the next day for pre-op tests.

Not only did the Universe provide a way for me to have the much needed surgery, but my husband would be there to take care of me and the household chores as I needed, and as I had asked for.

The surgery was successful and four weeks later, once the pathology report was back, we heard the magic words, “the tumors were benign. No cancer.”

Posted in health, law of attraction, visualization | 11 Comments