Love this cat!
Halloween: it’s known as the day when the veil between worlds of the living and the dead is the thinnest. In pagan times, it was the eve of Samhain—pronounced sow’-en or sow’-ween.—the end of the Celtic year, the beginning of winter and the day when the dead were said to rise from the grave and walk the earth. Like many pagan holidays, it was Christianized in the Middle Ages as a Catholic vigil observed on the eve of All Saints Day, November 1—All Hallows Eve.
Regardless of its origin, it was a day when homages for the dead were observed, and eventually it became linked with spooks, ghosts, all things that go bump in the night.
Our neighbors on one side have two elementary school-aged kids, and they are big on holiday decorations, usually putting up an extensive Halloween display by the first week of October. This year they waited until Oct. 10 – late for them. Last year they had a skeleton laid out on the lawn among the plastic headstones, cobwebs, bats and assorted spooky paraphernalia. On a couple of occasions, Noah would sneak over there and grab a plastic femur or some other bone and run off with it, wagging his tail. I have not seen that skeleton this year.
The neighbors on the other side don’t celebrate Halloween, keep their outside lights turned off, and don’t answer the door to any trick and treaters. Being from Haiti, they know a thing or two about the dark side and don’t want to encourage. Wisner, the man of the house, has told me stories of voodoo curses and zombies and he wasn’t kidding. Why Americans celebrate and play with the dark side is beyond him.
As for us, no decorations, but we carve a pumpkin and provide goodies for the costumed little ones that come by. Also, a little synchro, a day or two before the neighbors started assembling their holiday decor, I noticed something laying in front of our front door – something that Noah was very interested in. I took a closer look – a dead bat. Probably caught by one of the cats. I showed it to our Halloween-happy neighbors and the mother and kids all backed away in horror. I had the real thing – no plastic bats for us!
Happy Halloween to everyone!
Megan and Rob with a black swan
A black swan is an event or occurrence that deviates from what is normally expected of a situation, surprises the observer, has a major impact, and is difficult to predict. And Hurricane Sandy is the election season’s black swan. Here’s why:
Hurricane Sandy has broken all sorts of records. It’s barometric pressure is now 940 millibars, the strongest to ever hit the North Atlantic. By comparison, the pressure of Hurricane Wilma, the strongest pressure on record, was between 882-888. Hurricane Andrew, which devastated Miami-Dade County in 1992, had an internal pressure of 922. It created a storm surge of nearly 17 feet and caused $27 billion of damage.
Sandy brought high storm surges to New Jersey and New York City, coinciding with a full moon and high tide. It has merged with a nor’easter to become a huge, hybrid storm impacting 60 million people in seven states. Millions will lose power. And it’s all happening 7-8 days before the presidential election. Millions of people will lose electrical power and some places may not have power for weeks, which is surely going to impact the presidential election on November 6.
Most meteorologists agree this storm is a result of global warming, an issue neither presidential candidate has addressed during this campaign. “The irony is that the two presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, and now they are seeing the climate speak to them,” said Mike Tidwell, director of Maryland’s Chesapeake Climate Action Network. “That’s really what’s happening here. The climate is now speaking to them — and to everyone else.”
Ironic? We call this synchronicity.
An unprecedented natural disaster, this black swan that’s shutting down the northeast, is rapidly clarifying the stark differences between Romney and Obama.
Romney has stated that FEMA –the Federal Emergency Management Administration that moves in after any disaster with food and supplies and rescue missions – should be relegated to the states or, better yet, privatized. Can you imagine? Privatized. That means that companies like Halliburton, who are contracted and paid by the U.S. government, who work for profit, move in.
When asked in June during a GOP debate if he would favor cutting off federal disaster relief, he said:
“We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.”
Federal disaster relief is immoral? Huh? Romney is already distancing him from that comment. He suddenly thinks that FEMA is not so bad.
Obama, on the other hand, thinks that federal disaster relief is a moral duty. When asked what effect he thought Hurricane Sandy would have on the election he replied, “I’m not worried about the effect on the election. I’m worried about the effect on families, on our first responders, on our economy and on transportation.” He understands that only the federal government has the resources to cope with widespread devastation in the wake of natural disasters. No one should have to pay to be rescued from a rooftop.
Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the USA National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the world’s foremost experts on changes to global energy and water cycles, called Hurricane Sandy the “new normal.”
“Climate change is changing the weather,” Trenberth said. “The past few years have been marked by unusually severe extreme weather characteristic of climate change. The oceans are warmer and the atmosphere above the oceans is warmer and wetter. This new normal changes the environment for all storms and makes them more intense…”
How many more national disasters will it take before climate change becomes part of the national discourse? How many more black swans? How many more in-your-face synchros will it take?
Eight days to the U.S. election and there is no doubt that the race for president between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is tight. Neither candidate is a shoe-in. That’s what the polls show us. No doubt it will remain that way to election day. That said, there has been considerable shifting in the polls back and forth that seems to relate directly to the collective unconscious. Things happen and the mood shifts. But are millions of people actu
ally changing their votes back and forth between candidates as events unfold? I don’t think so, and I’ll explain why. But first let’s look at events that have caused a shift in polling in the past few weeks.
There was the convention bump that worked in Oba
ma’s favor resulting in a period of a couple of weeks where he was leading in ‘swing states’ – the ones that will determine the outcome because they could go either way – by as much as 8-10 points after being neck and neck in the polls. Republicans were scrambling, in near panic-mode. Some quietly even conceded it was over when their problems were compounded by outrageous statements about rape by members of their party on the far right whose beliefs are automatically tied to the top of the ticket.
Then the first debate changed everything as Obama appeared listless, uninterested, even unwilling to take on Romney. Did he really want a second term? Within days, the polls shifted in Romney favor. Republicans who had doubted the veracity of the polls when their candidate was sinking into the sunset now touted the new results of the same polling organizations.
In a sense, the Republicans who were disputing the earlier polls were right when they said they didn’t see voters changing their minds. Likewise, Democrats now could make the same argument. When the same people are polled before and after these influential, poll-changing events occur, my guess is that there is typically little or no shift between candidates. There are not enough undecided voters to sway the polls, and when undecided voters make a decision, they’re as likely as the next voter to stick with it.
Yet, interviews derived from random dialing of telephone numbers reveal some remarkable shifts as mentioned above. The random process of course results in different people being interviewed each time., and they probably haven’t changed their minds about the candidates. Yet, the shift of points are fairly consistent among the various polling organizations.
In essence, polling is a form of divination – like attracts like. Something has changed in the collective unconscious and the polling process picks up on it. In that sense, polling is not really much different from the astrology, Tarot cards, numerology, or the I Ching. Rather than providing a reading for the near future for an individual, the ‘poll readings’ provide it for the entire country.
No doubt the scientific-minded polling experts would be puzzled by such a perspective on what they do. But I think there’s something to it, that polling shifts are more about the state of the collective unconscious rather than individuals changing votes.
Maybe in the future as intuitive technology expands in the realm of science – if it ever does – we’ll reach a point where it won’t be necessary to stand to line to vote. It will be recognized and accepted that real democracy happens at the level of the collective unconscious.
Meanwhile, polling and voting will merge a week from tomorrow in the U.S. when we ‘go to the polls,’ as they say, finding out way to the ‘the polling booths.’

Frankenstorm, that’s what they’re calling it.
On Twitter, someone referred to it as a “Stephen King” kind of storm.
Hurricane Sandy is a trickster. As it left the Caribbean and was predicted to make a close swing toward Florida, the National Hurricane Center put most of the east coast of Florida under tropical storm warnings. In the tri-county area that includes Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach County, school for Friday, October 26, was promptly cancelled. We were warned that we would experience 1-3 inches of rain, high winds just under 75 MPH, and that we should take the usual storm precautions.
I didn’t trust the prediction. Isaac, back in August, wasn’t supposed to do much of anything to us, yet it dumped 14 inches of rain on South Florida in a period of about 24 hours and caused such widespread flooding we couldn’t get out of our neighborhood for two days. But okay. I listened to the forecast.
Sandy, they said, was going to impact South Florida seven years and one day after 2005 Hurricane Wilma, the last time we got walloped by an actual hurricane. The synchro of the timing and the late October storm bothered me, so I made sure we had plenty of food and water, Rob checked the propane tanks, we had plenty of pet food. Good to go.
Sandy proved to be pretty much of a nonevent for us. We got some rain, some wind, but we have worse summer thunderstorms. Now Sandy is forecast to be a Cat 2 when it slams into New Jersey and affects more than 60 million people who live in the northeast. Some of the descriptions of this storm are frightening:
From Jeff Masters, director of Weather Undergound, a private weather forecast service: “This storm is so dangerous and so unusual because it is coming at the tail end of hurricane season and beginning of winter storm season, “so it’s kind of taking something from both – part hurricane, part nor’easter, all trouble.”
From Louis Ucellini, the environmental prediction chief of NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminsistration – meteorologists: “The total is greater than the sum of the individual parts. That is exactly what’s going on here. This storm as it grows and moves back to the coast on Monday and Tuesday, the circulation of this storm will extend all the way from the Midwest, the Ohio Valley, toward the Carolinas up into New England and southern Canada. It’s really going to be an expansive storm system.”
The writer on a Wall Street Journal blog says it best, I think. You have a combination of unusual weather that could result in the worst storm NY has seen since the hurricane of 1938. NOAA forecast Jim Cisco is the one who tagged it Frankenstorm and he and others have referred to Hurricane Sandy as “unprecedented.”
Now: is this hype?
I went through my first hurricane in 1963 – Cleo – the year my parents moved to the U.S. from Venezuela, and I have been fascinated by them ever since. Over the decades, they seem to have grown in intensity and size, and gradually, they are hitting much farther north. They have figured prominently into several novels I’ve written. At some level, I feel they are sentient beings. Yes, I know how wacko that sounds. But when you watch these suckers form, when you watch how they set their sights on a particular area, when you study them, it’s not a stretch to recognize a kind of consciousness in them that responds to something in us.
If we are as interconnected as quantum physics suggests, as the Hindus believe (Indra’s Net), then there’s a rather puzzling synchronicity happening with this storm. It will begin to move inland on the night when the moon is full (scientific fact the tides are higher under a full moon) and will merge with another weather system about a week before the presidential election, November 6, when Mercury (communication) will turn retrograde.
If NOAA is right, if these meteorologists are correct, then election day across much of the country could be a mess because the massive power outages expected with this storm could persist to election day – and beyond. The media itself will be focused on Sandy – not on the election.
Lots of ifs here. But people are paying attention. One writer friend wrote today that her son is at a wedding in Tampa, and is scheduled to fly back to NY on Sunday, October 28. If his flight is cancelled, could he drive across the state and stay with us?
Gypsy, currently living in Delaware, dropped us a line about what she and her family were doing to prepare. Her description of the scarcity of supplies in grocery stores is interesting. The shelves are practically bare. Bottled water is scarce.
Yes, there’s a certain hype in buying that rides tandem with the hype in the news. That said, I’m a big believer in how the collective is acting. What does the collect consciousness tap into? Are the shelves of bottled water empty? Are the canned goods and flashlights and batteries gone? Are the lines at the gas pumps impossibly long? What do you feel in your gut?
So now we’ll wait and see. Sandy will either be a nonevent or something unprecedented. I don’t think there’s much middle ground here. Either/or, just like our choices in this election. And oh, not exactly a PS: what are planetary empaths feeling about all this?
It’s interesting that even talented kids, like this one, speak out against the education system…and the teaching of Shakespeare, even though he is funded by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
I took out the blue skull, held it in my hand, and gazed at it. I tried to quiet my mind, but kept wondering if it had any power. I had just read a book called Paranormal, by Raymond Moody and in it he has a chapter about the power of crystal gazing. (Was it the gazing or the crystal that had the power?) After a minute, I put it back in the box. Nothing had happened that I could tell.
I turned to my e-mail and opened one from our e-book editor, who asked about cover art for my novel, Crystal Skull. Hm, intereesting, I thought. I’d sent a copy of the out-of-print novel weeks ago and I didn’t know he was ready to move ahead with it.
After answering his query, telling him I would look for photos I noticed that I had a Facebook message from JoAnn Parks, someone I hadn’t heard from for months. JoAnn happens to own Max, a life-sized crystal skull that she inherited from a Tibetan healer in Houston. She worked for him for years, but he had never mentioned the skull to her. JoAnn readily agreed to have her granddaughter take a couple photos of Max and e-mail them to us.
To top off the series of synchros, JoAnn had come to my Facebook page to comment on a photo of a shaved llama (or alpaca), a photo that I’d snatched from David Wilson’s Facebook page. David is the editor who had asked about the Crystal Skull cover!
All that happened within minutes of gazing at the blue skull. So, well, maybe there is some power there.
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Some synchronicities are in your face, so obvious that you would have to be blind and deaf to miss them. But others are apparent only in retrospect and they’re usually more subtle, unfolding over a greater length of time, and it isn’t until you reflect on what’s happening that you see them. Like a game of hide ‘n seek.
On June 11, 2012, Jupiter moved into Gemini (my sign), where it will be until late June 2013. Any time Jupiter transits your sun sign, your life expands in several ways. Even though some doors slam shut, new opportunities surface. This 12-year cycle is one to anticipate.
For a sense of history here, the last time Jupiter was in my sign, we were living in a three-bedroom house that we had outgrown when my dad moved in with us and our daughter, Megan, gave him her bedroom and she slept in the living room. In June 2000 we moved from our three-bedroom home, into a larger house that could accommodate my dad, Megan, and our offices. My mother passed away a few weeks after that move. In August of that year, Rob, Megan and I traveled to Venezuela, where I was born, for a week of windsurfing on Margarita island. Megan entered middle school that fall. Work-wise, we both had contracts. Life was good, but with my mother gone, life was also very different.
In June 2012, our Omarr contract, which we had for nine years, wasn’t renewed. I had felt this was coming and dreaded it. I knew that when I turned in my final manuscript for the Esperanza series in October 2012, that contract would be done, too. In nearly thirty years of writing, this would be the first time we were without a single contract. Scary. It kept me awake nights. The other thing was that on July 16, 2012, Rob and I celebrated our 29th year anniversary.
The 29th year is known as the Saturn return in astrology, a major milestone in life, in relationships, in everything. In life, it’s when major transitions occur – you get married or divorced or start a family; you begin your real career, your real path; you embark on a quest. You get the idea. The second Saturn return happens between the ages of 58-60 and the third, when you hit 90. Each Saturn return is different.
I knew it had to be significant for our marriage, but wasn’t sure how. My parents were married for more than 50 years, but I have no clue what happened to them during the first Saturn return of their marriage. I just felt that the coinciding of Jupiter in my sign and the Saturn return for our marriage would be significant also.
On June 12, 2012, a day after Jupiter entered my sign, we connected with David Wilson at Crossroad Press and suddenly it was going to be possible for us to bring our out of print books back into “print” digitally. There would be no upfront costs to us and this entrepreneurial company not only fills a niche, it redefines it. On August 7, while Rob was visiting his mother in Minnesota, we got a call from Tony Seidl, who had been Rob’s agent at one time. Would we be interested in writing some bookazines?
We’d never heard of bookazines. They’re a cross between books and magazines, focus on one particular topic, are often connected to an event of some kind, have no advertising, and are distributed through airports, grocery stores, drug stores, Barnes and Noble, and other outlets that have magazines. They are owned by Hudson News, who has newstands across the country. The photo above is one of the first that came out this month. The other one is on Abe Lincoln, a tie-in to the Spielberg movie on Lincoln that will be released soon. I felt the contact and opportunity were significant. Tony was a guy from the past (Saturn return), who was proposing something expansive (Jupiter). Sure, we’re interested, we told him. What’re the details?
The details are as intriguing as the bigger picture. The editor for these bookazines is Bob Guccione, son of the man by the same name who started Penthouse – and OMNI Magazine, for whom we wrote shortly after we were married. In those days, OMNI was a slick cutting edge magazine that featured articles about the frontiers of knowledge (the Monroe Institute, for example) and fiction by well known writers.
We wrote for their anti-matter section, on UFOs, the paranormal, and they paid better than any other magazine, anywhere, and they also paid a kill fee if they didn’t publish what you’d written. Through OMNI, we met Betty Hill and Budd Hopkins. For us, professionally, that connection was huge.
So when we learned that Guccione’s son would be the editor for these bookazines, we recognized the synchros- astrologically and otherwise. Today, October 9, as Jupiter forms an exact conjunction with my Gemini sun (16 degrees) and is right in the middle of Rob’s financial area, we got our contracts for our first two bookazines, Sexy Horoscopes and Ghosts and Spirit Guides, with two more to follow next month on UFOs and lost everythings – ships, planes, people, continents.
These bookazines are short – between 14,000-20,000 words (a book/novel runs between 60,000 to 150,000 words, and some are MUCH longer), so we’ll still have time to write our other stuff. And the topics we’ve proposed are about things that interest us. The bookazines are also a visual feast, beautifully laid out, and are filled with information you might not find anywhere else, not in one place.
So, since June, we’ve been fortunate enough to connect with two visionaries – David Wilson at Crossroad and Tony Seidl – who recognized a niche in the market and are filling it. Wherever there are endings, there are also beginnings and new opportunities.
Perhaps this is what the paradigm shift is about – finding new ways of doing things, new ways to connect not only with other people, but with a deeper part of ourselves, and to enjoy these new connections. It seems that everywhere I look, everyone I know, is going through this reconnection in some way. Some people hate it and are locked in a kind of spiral of despair. But other people are adapting, are redefining themselves so that it works for them.
Going with the flow: isn’t that part of what synchronicity is about?
Since I’m working on a tight deadline for book about ghosts and spirits, I was wondering earlier today that if my concentration would attract any of the spirit beings I’m writing about. I figured if something happened today in that respect, it certainly would be a synchronicity.
As the evening wore on, I decided to take a break and watch an episode of the new season of Dexter. No ghosts had appeared in my office, but plenty in my head as I’d written for several hours.
One scene in Dexter made me laugh. A stripper was talking to a cop on the show and told him that she wasn’t going to stay in this business. “I have big plans. I want to start my own business as a dog walker.”
A few minutes after the show ended, Megan – our dog-walking daughter–called, and I told her about the scene. She laughed and then told me a bit of trivia about the show that is a synchro of sorts in the same vein.
Michael C. Hall, the actor who plays Dexter Morgan is now divorced from Jennifer Carpenter, who plays Dexter’s sister. (They met on the set, married, and divorced and continued their fictive roles all the while.) Now Michael Hall has a new girlfriend, Megan said, and “Guess what her name is? Morgan MacGregor!”
Good one, I told her. Then, shortly after hanging up, I noticed a small manicure scissors on the floor of the closet in my office. It was in plain view and I’d never seen it before. It turned out that Trish had lost it a month ago, and had looked all over for it. Oddly enough, she very rarely goes into that closet. So we wondered how it had gotten there.
While talking about it I suddenly smelled a strong scent of lavender and asked Trish if she’d just put it on some scented hand lotion or something smelling of lavender. Nope. Then she smelled it, too, and said, “It’s that book you’re writing. You’re attracting this stuff.”
Hm, maybe so.
Once again my apologies to our friends in other countries. This is a post about American politics, not synchros.
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The last presidential debate took place this evening, October 22. Throughout this debate, I sat in our family room with my jaw permanently dropped. Here’s why:
When we lived in Venezuela, we traveled back to the U.S. every summer, usually to Oklahoma, where my mother’s family lived. For my sister and I, these trips were fun – lots of cousins to play with, lots of mischief we could get into while our parents sat around playing bridge and gabbing and catching up.
During one trip, someone punched out a screen in an upstairs window in my aunt’s house. I’m not sure why this was such a big deal, but all the kids were called into the living room and asked if they were responsible for this event. When I told my dad that my sister and I didn’t have anything to do with this, his expression became quite stern. “Please don’t ever lie to me, Trish. If you and Mary were responsible for this, just say so. Nothing is worse than a liar.”
That phrase has stuck with me for all the decades since. Nothing is worse than a liar. And yet, we have a Republican candidate who lies continually. In tonight’s debate, he reversed some of his previously held positions on the Mideast and actually embraced many of Obama’s foreign policies. It’s as if Romney doesn’t have any idea that our technology records everything. Check our website, he said to Obama. The present’s comeback? That he and his administration check Romney’s website frequently and the math for his economical policies still don’t add up.
Romney mentioned the word peace quite frequently this evening – a peaceful world, a peaceful Mideast, a peaceful Afghanistan. Yet, to achieve this elusive peace we must have the strongest military in the world, we must not be afraid to stand up to Iran – which is four years closer to nuclear weapons – or to China, where untold millions of Romney’s wealth is invested – or to these Syrian despots.
In other words, in Romney’s worldview, we must continue to be the world’s cop, we must continue to nation build – which in the past has meant installing dictators whom we control through massive foreign aid. In the past, this has meant war – more war, endless war. If Romney has his way, we would probably nuke Iran, China, Syria, and any other country that didn’t tow the U.S. line. Not too surprising, considering that the majority of his foreign policy advisors are straight out of W’s administration. I mean, really, one of Romney’s heroes is Dick Cheney. W’s Secretary of State, Condoleza Rice, appears at political functions with him.
Don’t take my word for it. Read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, one of the most brilliant books I’ve ever read on U.S. foreign policy and what drives it.
I was delighted every time Obama called out Romney on one of his lies – about his proposed budget (where are the details?), on his polices (two months ago, you held the opposite position), on his “business” credentials (let GM go bankrupt). The choice seems utterly clear to me. Romney is an extended version of George W Bush – more tax cuts for the wealthy, more war, more world cop scenarios, more disenfranchisement of the sick, the poor, the elderly (you guys are on your own!) and more attempts to control the health care choices for women. Romney and Obama are the faces of the existing paradigms.
Romney is the old paradigm that has dominated American politics for decades (keep lying, they’ll eventually believe your lies) and Obama is the new paradigm – diplomacy, discussion, sanctions instead of nukes.
Romney’s flip-flops make him a caricature – Daffy Duck on steroids. Republican pundits who defend him talk about the way his policies and views are “expanding, evolving.” That’s a fancy way of saying that he lies to look good. When he talks about peace – he means war. When he talks about choices in anything – Medicare, Social Security, women’s health – he means he and his administration will choose for you, that they will impose their high and mighty morals on you. Never mind that they only give a damn about you until you’re born. After that, you’re on your own.
Never mind that he’ll send your son and daughters off to war, even though he never served a day in any war. Never mind that he talks about the people he has met while campaigning – the unemployed teacher in this state, the dying mother in that state. His policies would dismantle the teachers’ union and overturn Obama Care, (based on the health plan Romney created for Massachusetts when he was governor of that state). His policies would return us to the W years, which ended in the worst financial crisis we’ve experienced since the Great Depression. When he talks about the tax burden on “small businesses,” he includes (but doesn’t mention) corporations like General Electric that paid NO taxes last year.
My dad’s words echo in my head: Nothing is worse than a liar.
One of our friends at the gym said it best today. Bill, a 58-year-old musician, stopped by my treadmill to say hi. “So, you watching the prez debate tonight?” I asked him.
Bill and I became friends during the 2008 presidential election season, when I heard him arguing with a McCain supporter. I piped in with my two cents and we decimated every argument this Repub made. After that, he started going to Rob’s yoga classes and whenever we see each other at the gym, our conversations are usually about politics and the shifting landscapes of American and global life.
“Maybe. O’s got it sewn up, Trish. Don’t believe anything they’re saying about the polls.”
Me, ever hopeful: “Yeah? You’ve got insider info?”
Bill just laughed. Bill and I both agreed that these “undecided voters,” just two weeks out from the election, are basically a myth. At this point in the game, if you’re undecided about who you’re going to vote for, then you are basically clueless about what’s at stake in the 2012 election. It’s about a paradigm shift and the choices have never been clearer.
Are you voting for the past – Romney (W, Reagan, Bush senior) – or for the present and the future – Obama?