Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Six years ago, I bought Dean Koontz’s book A Big Little Life: a memoir of a joyful dog named Trixie. It was about a Golden Retriever that he and his wife, Gerda, had for nearly twelve years, a dog that transformed their lives. The book caught my eye not only because it was by Koontz, but because of the retriever on the cover with the reddish gold fur.

We’ve had two Golden Retrievers – Jessie, who was with us for nearly 12 years and whom we had to put down in 2007, and Noah, whom we adopted in 2009, after I bought Koontz’s book. I was never able to read the book because the first few pages left me choked up. But those pages prompted me to visit the site of the Golden Retriever Rescue of Palm Beach County. And in November 2009, we adopted Noah. The other dog in the photo below is Nika, our daughter’s dog.

Noah  spent the first nine months of his life crated. His Miami owners intended to use him as a stud because both of his parents, whom they also owned, had such pure bloodlines. But the family went bankrupt and mom, dad, and Noah were surrendered to the rescue organization.

He’s large for a Golden – now over 100 pounds of muscle, back then about eighty pounds, with these massive paws and a head as big as a cat. His first night with us, he helped himself to a raw chicken breast Rob had left on the counter to cook for dinner and gobbled it down before we even realized what had happened. The next day when we returned from the gym, we found our living room filled with feathers from couch pillows Noah had torn apart. We discovered he was terrified of young kids. We enrolled him in dog training lessons and started taking him to the dog park to get him socialized. The dog park made the difference.

Today, he’s the king of the dog park, one of the largest dogs in the park, and his primary interest is chasing Frisbees and balls unless there’s a squirrel nearby, and then all bets are off. He’s still shy around kids, doesn’t like dogs that get in his face as he enters the park, but never bullies puppies or female dogs. He doesn’t tolerate the male dogs who haven’t been neutered, the ones who strut up to him as if challenging him to prove who and what he is. When there’s a fight somewhere in the park, he keeps his distance, unless the dog involved is Nika, or another dog he likes, and then he runs the offender down. Submit, surrender, his stance says, and the dog does.

I mention all this because in the book on precognition that Rob and I recently sold, there’s a chapter on animals as natural precogs. I happened to pick up Koontz’s book from my desk, and paged through it. I figured Koontz had to have a story about Trixie and precognition. This was the author, after all, who had written one of the best thrillers I’d ever read – Watchers, about a genetically altered Golden Retriever. What I found was a spirit communication story that blew me away.

After Trixie’s death, Koontz encountered writers’ block for the first time in his many decades as a writer. He sat in front of his computer day after day, and couldn’t write a word. Few things are more terrifying to a writer than this inability to scribble a single word. Koontz realized “that few human beings give of themselves as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish – consciously or unconsciously- that we were as innocent as they are…”

Trixie died on a Saturday. On the third Saturday after her death, Dean and Gerda walked the acres the dog had walked, as they’d done the previous two Saturdays, during the hour that Trixie had passed on. They visited her favorite spots. “Three weeks to the minute after Trixie died, we were walking the larger lawn, a brilliant golden butterfly swooped down from a pepper tree. This was no butterfly like any we had seen before; nor have we seen it since. Big. Bigger than my hand when I spread my fingers, it was bright gold, not yellow.”

Koontz describes how the butterfly flew around their heads, wings brushing their faces and hair, then flew off. Gerda immediately asked if that was Trixie and Koontz, said, Yeah, it was.

“No landscaper who works here has ever before or since seen such a butterfly, nor have we,” Koontz writes. “It danced about our head at the very minute Trixie had died three weeks earlier. Skeptics will wince, but I will always believe our girl wanted us to now that the intensity of our grief wasn’t appropriate that she was safe and happy.”

Koontz posted this story on his website and received hundreds of responses from others who had lost their beloved dogs and experienced “uncanny events that were quite different from ours but that seemed to be intended to tell them that the spirits of their dogs lived on.”

Now I’m going to read this book from beginning to end.

PS Have been reading it at the gym and am nearly done. As one reviewer said, It’s a love letter from Koontz to his dog. Just beautiful.

In our trips to canyons and Anasazi ruins in the Southwest, I’ve always been curious about the numerous spirals among the petroglyphs on canyon walls. So I was fascinated to come across a detailed explanation of spirals in Partnering with Nature by Catriona MacGregor. I’ve been slowly reading this book (which I wrote about earlier here), usually just a couple of pages in the morning out on the porch with a cup of coffee.

She began by telling a story of watching an osprey with a fish in its talons. Instead of flying directly to its nest, it made ever-expanding circles…spiraling outward. “During this time, the image and meaning of the spiral was integrated into every cell of my body….It seemed that everything I looked at—each blade of grass, each tree branch, and even the trees’ very trunks—rose up from the ground as joyous spirals before my very eyes….It was as if I had seen the wizard behind the curtain—the magic that gracefully weaves itself through all existence.”

Catriona notes that spirals are everywhere, “from luminous spiral galaxies ablaze in dazzling colors to the tiny spirals at the tips of our fingers. The spiral is simultaneously a structure and a movement.” She points out that spirals can be both creative and destructive, as in the movement and shape of a tornado or hurricane. At the same time, the spiral connects us to all life forms on Earth—it’s the blueprint of existence. DNA, which contains the genetic instructions needed to create cells, protein, and RNA, is spiral-shaped.

Catriona suggests that the reason spirals are found in ancient art and at sacred sites around the world is because the shape reflects the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. “The spiral itself is infinite, which links it to the Creator (who is also infinite), and yet the spiral is also found throughout the universe in all ‘limited’ life forms. Thus the spiral, in effect, is capable of going from the physical realm of the material world to the world of spirit, and ultimately the birthplace of all creation. The spiral unites us with all life, with the Creator, and ultimately with our deepest selves.”

Just a day or two before I read Catriona’s pages on spirals, I’d led a meditation at the beginning of my yoga class that focused on the seventh or crown chakra. For each chakra, I focus on a seed sound or bija associated with the chakra, (AUM for the seventh) which we chant.  We also hold a mudra or hand gesture, and visualize a geometric shape right at the chakra. The shape associated with the crown chakra is a spiral, which we visualize circulating endlessly inward right above the head. The crown chakra is ruled by the principle of unity, the interconnection of all things. So meditating on this chakra allows you to connect to a place outside of time and space, a place of wisdom, higher knowledge, bliss.

I wrote an e-mail to Catriona about that synchronicity while we were staying at Trish’s sister’s house in Atlanta. We drove to Orlando that day to stay at our daughter Megan’s house, en route home to West Palm Beach. The next morning, sitting at Megan’s kitchen counter, I read Catriona’s response, which included the spiral image above. I looked up from the image and noticed a ceramic plate on the counter a couple of feet away. It was made by Megan’s roommate. I did a double-take when I looked closely at it.

Here it is below…another spiral!

On December 26, 2004, a 9.1 undersea earthquake erupted in the Indian Ocean. It triggered a massive tsunami that slammed into the coastlines of eleven Indian Ocean countries. Nearly 250,000 people died. Yet, in Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park, the largest wildlife reserve, there wasn’t a single report about dead animals. According to the deputy director of the National Wildlife Department, elephants, wild boar, monkeys, jackals, and deer moved inland to avoid the killer waves.

Khao Lak on Thailand’s western coast was hit particularly hard by the tsunami. But hours before it struck, elephants trumpeted and an hour before the tsunami crashed to shore with waves more than thirty feet high, the elephants became agitated again and took off for higher ground.

Along India’s Cuddalore coast, where thousands of people died, the Indo-Asian News service reported that buffaloes, goats, and dogs were found unharmed.

The indigenous tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which lie near the quake’s epicenter, noticed the unusual behavior of dolphins, birds, and lizards and retreated to higher ground. The tribes survived without a single fatality.

Even though premonitions in animals have been well-documented over the years, mainstream science is slow to accept that it happens and typically offers alternate explanations. That was the case in 2004, when Florida was hit by four hurricanes in rapid succession —Frances, Charlie, Ivan, and Jeanne.

Birds delayed their migration during these tumultuous weeks. When Hurricane Jeanne was still hours away from Gainesville, University of Florida biologist Thomas Emmel noticed that the butterflies in the university’s enclosed rainforest took shelter among rocks and trees. When Hurricane Charlie was within twelve hours of southwest Florida, scientists at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, noted the odd behavior among ten tiger sharks they had tagged. Eight of them fled the estuary for the safety of the open ocean.

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew slammed into Homestead, Florida, and nearly wiped it off the map. In its path was the habitat of crocodiles that live in the cooling canals of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant. Not a single dead crocodile was found in the aftermath of the storm. It’s speculated that they fled into open water or to the bottom of the twenty-foot canals.

“It doesn’t make any difference if it’s a hurricane, a fire, or an earthquake,” said Frank Mazzotti, a wildlife biologist at the University of Florida. “They start moving away from danger before humans pick it up. It’s likely a combination of smell, vibrations, and pressure.”

But suppose it’s simpler than that? Suppose animals are natural precogs?

For hundreds of years, the Chinese and Japanese have used unusual animal behavior as part of their national earthquake warning system. It paid off big time in February 1975, when a 7.3 quake struck Haicheng, China and most of the city’s structures. A week before, residents had noticed abnormal behavior in animals – snakes came out of hibernation and into the snow, dogs acted restless and anxious and howled without apparent reason. Small animals deserted the city. In the first three days in February, the bizarre behavior intensified with cows, horses, and pigs. Based on nothing more than the observations of the erratic behavior of animals, officials evacuated the city and more than 90,000 lives were saved when the quake struck on February 4.

But as British biologist Rupert Sheldrake points out in his book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, the Chinese have also had “some spectacular failures,” like the 1976 Tanghan quake, in which 240,000 people died. Overall, though, Sheldrake believes the Chinese “ have been remarkably successful in predicting earthquakes – in contrast to their Western counterparts, who do not even try.”

If you live in a Western country, can you imagine the officials in your area issuing an evacuation order based on nothing more than the erratic behaviors of the animals? Can you even visualize your CNN or NBC affiliate explaining why such an order was issued? Probably not.

The official stance of the U.S. Geological Survey – USGS – is that there isn’t any reliable technique for predicting quakes, not even strange animal behavior. As stated on USGS website: “Because of their finely tuned senses, animals can often feel the earthquake at its earliest stages before the humans around it can. This feeds the myth that the animal knew the earthquake was coming. But animals also change their behavior for many reasons, and given that an earthquake can shake millions of people, it is likely that a few of their pets will, by chance, be acting strangely before an earthquake.”

James Berkland, a retired USGS geologist in California, however, has a different opinion. According to his research, the number of missing dogs and cats increases significantly two weeks before a quake. The gravitational variations due to lunar cycles create “seismic windows” of greater quake probability. When the number of missing pets also rises, then a quake is likely. As a result, Berkland claims to be able to predict quakes with an accuracy greater than seventy-five percent just by counting the number of ads for lost pets in the daily newspaper, by mass beachings of whales and dolphins, and by correlating these events to lunar-tide cycles.

What about fish? Are they able to sense future quakes, too? In Japanese mythology and folklore, the oarfish is one predictor.

This bizarre-looking creature, though to be the world’s longest bony fish, can measure from twenty to fifty feet in length and lives at depths of several hundred feet. According to the Japanese Times, it’s known in mythology as ryugu no tsukai or messenger from the sea god’s palace. When they come to the beach, it’s an omen of an earthquake.

In March 2010, around the time of the 8.8 quake that struck Chile, Japanese fisherman discovered dozens of oarfish. Not long before the 2011 quake and tsunami in Japan, twenty oarfish stranded themselves on beaches in the area.

Coincidence? Yeah, sure.

According to an article in China Daily, the Chinese also believe that fish can sense future quakes. In July 2015, China Daily reported the seismological bureau in Nanjing has transformed seven animal farms into seismic stations, where the behavior of fish, chickens, and black boars will be monitored for unusual behavior. According to Shen Zhijun, keeper at the Hongshan Forest Zoo in Nanjing, these particular animals are sensitive to infrasound All these animals are sensitive to infrasound but not to other changes in environment or weather.

Cameras to monitor the animal behaviors will be set up across the park, which is home to 200 black boars, 2,000 chickens, and a 36-acre fish pond. Zhou Hongbing, a breeder turned earthquake observer at one of the refurbished animal farms, said that breeders and observers have to brief the bureau in Nanjing twice a day about the animal behaviors. When they observe erratic behaviors, they notify the bureau immediately, through QQ, a Chinese instant messaging software.

“Seismological experts will analyze reported abnormalities to decide whether or not a possible earthquake is imminent,” said Zhou.

Special training at the bureau lists possible abnormal behaviors as chickens flying above trees instead of eating, a large number of fish jumping out of the water, or numerous toads moving home. Zhou Bing, division chief with Nanjing seismological bureau, says that possible animal farms must house more than three species and have a pond that covers dozens of acres, so that the experts have enough samples to do cross checks. Preferred locations should be in quiet neighborhoods away from factories or mines.

The article notes that since the 1970s, 58 kinds of animals have been found that exhibit abnormal behavior before earthquakes. These include wild and domesticated animals such as cats, dogs, pandas, fish, snakes, rats, skunks, ants and bees. Cave animals like rats and snakes, have been found to be more sensitive than those living above the ground, and smaller animals are more sensitive than their larger counterparts.

The Chinese will combine the observation of bizarre animal behaviors with more traditional means of predicting quakes. But, clearly, they are leagues ahead of the West in this area.

A paranormal investigator who supposedly made contact with a ghost girl says she revealed the existence of  rules the dead must follow in dealing with physical beings.

Chris Bores, a paranormal investigator and author of Ghost Hunting 2.0, decided to try out a new technique for contacting the dead at a lighthouse in St. Augustine, Florida that is said to be haunted. By using EMF detectors, Bores and other investigators made contact with the spirit of a young girl named Eliza and were able to interact with her for ninety minutes. During that time, Bores said he learned new information about life after death.

Eliza’s answers to their questions seemed to indicate that there were actual rules to the afterlife regarding matters that spirits needed to keep hidden from the living. Bores made his comments in a radio interview with George Noorey on Coast to Coast.

One of the questions he asked the spirit girl was: “Is being alive the same as being dead?”

“That question brought the conversation to a complete halt – things just stopped. And I couldn’t figure out why.” Worried that he had embarrassed Eliza or scared her away, Bores resumed asking the phantasm what he called fluff questions.

After ten minutes, he decided to ask a deeper question again. “Do you have a body?’ She then went silent again.

Bores was baffled and wondered what these questions had in common. “I started to think maybe she’s not allowed to talk about this stuff.”

Another 10 minutes passed before he lured her back into the room. This time, he asked: “Are there certain things you’re not allowed to tell us?” That’s when the EMF meter spiked.

He pushed ahead with another question. “Okay, are there rules to the afterlife?” The meter spiked again. Then he asked: “Are there certain things we as humans are not supposed to know about?’” The meter spiked for a third time.

Bores told Noorey that one of the other investigators asked: “Will you get in trouble if you talk about these things?’

“And wouldn’t you know it – the meter spiked again! These answers to those questions really blew us away,” Bores said “It really opened the door for deeper discussions…What are these rules that they have to follow? And since there are rules – who’s policing the afterlife? How will they be punished? And it just led me on a search to find the answers to these questions.”

To hear more of the interview with Chis Bores, click here.

I don’t know much about the EMF technique for communicating with spirits, but it sounds like a high tech version of a Ouija board. And possibly, like Ouija boards, you could get misleading answers. In other words, the dead playing games with the living. However, maybe there are such rules related to interacting with the physical world. I’ve actually heard this before in reference to why spirits don’t manifest as physical beings when they want to make contact. Supposedly, it’s possible, but it violates…yes, the rules.

Anyone, have thoughts on the matter on this Halloween, when the veil between worlds is said to be the thinnest?

Okay, so I allowed myself to be tortured this evening and watched the Repub debate with Rob. Every tax plan these people put forth is about trickle down economics – the Milton Friedman  answer to everything. Give the uber wealthy tax breaks and they will create jobs through the trickle down. Naomi Klein made a great case against trickle down economics in her brilliant book, The Shock Doctrine.

 Trickle down economics worked oh so well that the financial market collapsed in 2007-2008 and millions of people lost their homes, their savings, everything.

 The Huffington Post pegged all the Republican tax plans as “basically insane.”

Here’s why:

“Donald Trump’s plan would cost over $10 trillion.

Bobby Jindal’s plan would cost $9 trillion.

Rick Santorum’s would cost $1.1 trillion.

Jeb Bush’s plan? $1.6 trillion.

Marco Rubio? More than $1 trillion over the next decade.

One exception: The Tax Foundation says Rand Paul’s tax plan would save the government $737 billion. But other tax experts are far less sanguine. Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that Paul’s plan would cost $15 trillion. Much of the difference is due to less optimistic assumptions about economic growth. The Tax Foundation assumes that tax cuts benefitting Wall Street and the wealthy will generate very high levels of growth. Citizens for Tax Justice does not.

Total debt held by the public is currently $13.08 trillion.”

None of these candidates likes Medicare, Social Security, food stamps for the poor, Planned Parenthood, and oh, definitely get rid of ObamaCare, which has provided health care for millions since it was implemented. And what would replace ObamaCare?

Ben Carson, the pediatric neurologist: health care savings accounts.

Really? hoh

What middle class family can save enough to pay for an embedded insulin pump for diabetes? For a transplant? Or, for even less drastic health matters, for the birth of a child?

There was one interesting synchronicity highlighted in the debate, though that term wasn’t used. It was a comment by Mike Huckabee, a genial right-wing religious fanatic who doesn’t have a prayer of a chance of getting the nomination, much less the presidency. Huckabee pointed out that earlier in the day a ‘government’ balloon had escaped creating a hazard. The balloon dragged 6,700 feet of cable that snapped power lines in Pennsylvania and cut electricity to thousands of customers. It  finally came to rest near tiny Moreland Township, Pa., after about four hours on the loose.

Huckabee compared it to bloated government spending, an object full of gas destroying everything in its path. Word to that effect. That’s fine, Mike. But you failed to point out what part of the government you were referring to. Let’s spell it out: the bloated U.S. military. The balloon, which traveled for 160 miles before being corralled, is the most dramatic in a series of problems for a deeply troubled $2.7 billion Army effort to mount powerful radars high in the skies. One independent investigation reported last month that the 17-year effort to develop the system had created an unkillable “zombie” program beset by high costs, low reliability and questionable performance.

The point here is that all the Republican candidates with the exception of the Libertarian Rand Paul want to beef up the military, which no consumes more than 40 percent of the budget and is larger than the military of China and three or four other top militarized nations combined. So much for the Republicans concept of small government.

These candidates live in another universe and they have selective memories. They tout their party as “small government,” yet under George W. Bush, the size of the federal government exploded. We suddenly had Homeland Security, the TSA, and a number of sub-agencies that hadn’t existed previous to 9-11.

Chris Christie sounds like a thug, a Mafia wise guy. If you don’t vote for me, I’ll close the bridge to your county. After Hurricane Sandy devastated his state, he was humbly grateful for federal aid – which his compatriot Ted Cruz voted against. Hurricane Sandy also changed his views on climate change. He believes in it now.

Marco Rubio comes across as an ambitious Cuban-American who is against immigration. He’s a climate change denier, even though in his district, there are parts of South Miami Beach that regularly flood during high tide, something that never happened in the past.

Ben Carson: the government over regulates. Well, even in food? If you do away with the USDA, how do we know what we’re eating? Get rid of Medicare and substitute – what? Private vouchers?

Carly Fiorina: also favors getting rid of most government regulations. Yeah, okay, Carly. You would drive the country into the ground just as you did to Hewlett Packard. She chills me. And she would attack every country that even had hostile thoughts about the U.S.

Ted Cruz: get rid of the IRS, get rid of everything in government. We’re about small government. Sure, Ted. Look back to W’s presidency. And, oh yes, Ted led the crusade against Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides health care to millions of women. A small percentage of their care – three percent?- provides abortions. That’s the thing Cruz hates. Defend the unborn until they’re born – then, oh well, you’re on your own.

Rand Paul: Some things he said I actually agreed with – why are we the world cop? Why are we constantly at war with someone? But if I’m not mistaken, I think his fiscal policies are based on the writings of Ayn Rand – a cheerleader’s guide to the glories of capitalism and the evils of any government regulation.  However, he wants to audit the Federal Reserve – a private organization, not a government unit – that regulates interest rates and $ in this country.  Their genesis is shady and his suggestion doesn’t go far enough. Getting rid of the federal reserve would be a good place to start.

Donald Trump: Sigh.

Jeb Bush: He was our disastrous governor for 8 years, W’s younger brother, and he defends W’s invasion of Iraq, defends most of the things that W did. At one point, he was the front runner, the guy everyone expected would be the Repub candidate against Clinton because his super pac had raised $100 million for his campaign. But Jeb is campaigning in the shadow of his brother and his father, Bush Sr. and I don’t think his campaign is going anywhere except into oblivion.

In the early stages of this campaign season, the media said it would be a Bush/Clinton contest. I would be happy if Clinton would just retire. Yes, Clinton is qualified. But she’s a hawk and I don’t trust her.

In a perfect world, the U.S. presidential ticket would be Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, in any combination that works for the two of them. Since Warren isn’t running, that probably won’t happen.  So who will the candidates be?

In the six plus years since we started this blog, we have posted a number of synchros that our friend in Wales, Jane Clifford, has sent us. Jane is a healer. Several years ago, when Rob was facing prostate surgery, she worked with him by phone, energetically.

Some of Jane’s synchros have concerned her own healing as well.

Several of the synchros Jane has sent have been about her long-time friendship with Liz, a novelist. Liz was diagnosed with cancer several months ago and recently passed away. Jane’s synchro is about what happened at Liz’s funeral and within an hour afterward. When I read it, I felt it was a form of spirit communication. See what you think.

On October 10, Jane wrote:

Yesterday was the funeral of my dear friend, Liz. A poem she recently wrote – River of Light- was read out loud at the service. An hour after the funeral, I popped into my local café and saw this leaflet (above image) on the ad board!

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I think that Liz was one of those individuals who passes and immediately realizes what has happened, where she is, and how she can interact quickly with the living!

In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we wrote about an empath and friend, Renie Wiley, who sometimes worked with police on various cases, using her empathic abilities to provide information that the police couldn’t obtain any other way.  One night in later 1984, we accompanied Renie to a police station to observe her working on a missing child case, which we also wrote about in the book. But there were parts of the story that we didn’t include in the book because the section was on empaths and synchros and not on spirit contact. So here’s the full story:

On May 24, 1984, eight-year-old Christy Luna had walked to a store near her home in Green Acres, Florida, to buy some cat food and never returned. The police suspected foul play and Renie confirmed as much when she used Christy’s stuffed toys to tune in on the girl. In the book, we describe this in some detail. As an empath, she felt what Christy felt when her mother’s boyfriend used to beat up on her and reported the girl was deaf in one ear because of the beatings. Christy’s mother later confirmed this fact.

Later that night, we left the station with Renie and one of the police officers and drove around, following Renie’s directions until we arrived at a wooded area surrounded by a high barbed wire fence. Renie felt that Christy’s body was buried somewhere in the woods and that the mother’s boyfriend had killed her.

Skip ahead twenty-four years, to 2008. Los Angeles psychic Dennie Gooding called to tell us she would be visiting South Florida in March,  that she would be working on a missing person case and was there any chance we could all get together? It turned out she would be in town over the same weekend that other friends involved in the MU (mystical underground) would be visiting from around the country, so everyone agreed to meet at our place.

The day before the festivities, we were going through some old books, weeding out what we no longer needed. A check fell out of one of the books. It was dated 1986, made out to us for $50, repayment on a loan, and was signed Renie Wiley. We exclaimed about how strange it was, that the check had been inside the book all these years, and we wondered if Renie was trying to contact us and we just hadn’t been aware of it. In all the years since she had passed away, we’d never experienced any contact with her.

The night of the festivities (as we gathered with psychics, mediums, a past life therapist, a writer for the Simpsons), Dennie told us she’d been hired by  a police officer at the Palm Beach County sheriff’s department who worked in the cold cases division. When she began describing the case, Trish suddenly interrupted her.

“Is this the Christy Luna case?”

Dennie’s eyes widened with shock. “Yes.”

“You’re not going to believe this,” Rob said, and walked over to the drawer where we’d put Renie’s check, and brought it out. “Here’s how we know.”

It was as if Renie had reached out from the afterlife through the unsolved disappearance of Christy Luna and the psychic who had been hired to delve into it nearly a quarter of a century later. The synchronicities were remarkably layered and the contact occurred in an unusual way. Here are the facts:

Renie and Dennie didn’t know each other. Renie had long since passed away by the time we met Dennie through a Canadian astrologer who touted her psychic ability and gave us her contact information. If Trish hadn’t left a comment on his blog about his post on Mercury’s retrograde during the 2000 presidential election, they probably wouldn’t have communicated at all and we never would have met Dennie.

Rob had a reading with Dennie around 2002 or so. We gave her name to another friend, Nancy, who recommended Dennie to the wife of the police officer who eventually hired her to delve into the Christy Luna case.

Neither of us remember sticking Renie’s check inside a book. In fact, in 1986,  we were just starting out as writers, money was tight, and it’s likely we would have cashed the check as soon as we’d gotten it.

The cluster in this instance revolved around the unsolved disappearance of Christy Luna and the two psychics who, separated by nearly twenty-five years, worked on the case.

At any point in the past, different decisions might have been made and none of the events described here would have happened. So who was orchestrating all this, anyway? And that’s always the bottom line, isn’t it?

Thanks to Adelita for posting this on her blog! How cool would it be to actually be able to do this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB3EwcDH8Ak

On Thursday evening before I went to bed, I noticed on a news site that there was a tropical wave somewhere off the coast of Mexico. This year, the Pacific has had a lot of waves, storms, and typhoons, so it didn’t strike me as unusual. But when I got up this morning and looked at the news, I was stunned.

The wave was now a category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 200 mph and a central barometric pressure that surpassed anything I’d ever seen – 880 millibars. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 had a central pressure of 892. Hurricane Katrina’s lowest central pressure was 920 at landfall. Hurricane Wilma’s central pressure at her peak was 881 millibars. The barometric pressure of a hurricane is really the key to everything.

In about 30 hours, this wave had exploded into the most powerful hurricane ever recorded on the planet. Its barometric pressure had dropped 100 millibars, faster than the 97-point drop of Wilma in 2005. So throughout the day, I monitored the various weather websites. Patricia was headed to the western coast of Mexico, somewhere between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanilla.

It made landfall at 6:15 pm central time, winds at 165 mph, about 55 miles south of Manzanilla. CNN’s Martin Savage is in Mexico and CNN will probably have a scoop on the aftermath.

As of tonight, a few videos are dribbling in from people in the affected area, but it’s difficult to tell anything about the damage because it’s dark. By sunrise, it will be a different story. One of the weather tweets I was following earlier in the day was by a guy with the weather channel, who had stopped by one of the shelters in the targeted area. There was no inner room, no inner sanctuary; the shelter was all windows! A hotel in Manzanilla reported that it had secured its windows with masking tape.

If this type of preparation was common in the affected area, then the destruction will be beyond belief.

Before the hurricane made landfall, Mexico’s climate negotiator pleaded with his colleagues at the UN for some sort of global pact about taming greenhouse gasses – i.e., climate change.

This evening, Rob and I were talking about the hurricane and agreed that if a storm with winds of 200 mph was headed toward South Florida, we would flee. We would close up our storm shutters, secure the house, then pack up our pets and some books and our computers and get out of here. The problem in Mexico is that the government had about thirty hours to order evacuations.

In South Florida, just for the counties of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami/Dade and the Keys, it would take 3 days to evacuate everyone. And that figure is from 2005, our last bad hurricane season. Now, with the increase in population and tourism, it would probably take twice that. During this kind of panicked evacuation, it’s doubtful that we would  make it beyond Orlando, less than three hours north of us in central Florida. But it’s at least more than a hundred feet above sea level, far better than the east coast of Florida!

The latest stats on Hurricane Patricia tonight just after midnight came from the Weather Channel.  The storm is now a cat 4, with winds of 130 mph, but when it made landfall with winds of 165 mph, some gusts were up to 211 mph.

Ever since a hurricane figured into one of my novels in 1994 and then again in 2004/2005, I’ve been fascinated by these storms. There is something about them that suggests sentience, a kind of organized intelligence that you recognize when you see an eye as perfectly formed as Patricia’s.

In the larger scheme of things, what kind of creatures are these hurricanes? Yes, Patricia is evidence of climate change, but what’s the deeper message for us as a collective, a species? What’s this tell us about the future of this planet? That ubiquitous eye stares back at us from space, where this photo was taken, and seems to say, Hey, folks, guess what? I’m your wake-up call and where would you like to go from here?

There’s an odd postscript to this. When I woke up this morning my first thought was that it was Michael Crichton’s birthday. In retrospect, it seems that Hurricane Patricia is the kind of story he might have written.

A home in the mountains somewhere is looking very good right now!

Yesterday, Hilary Clinton spent 11 hours testifying before the Benghsazi committee of twelve – 7 Republicans and 5 Democrats – about what happened at Benghazi. This investigation has lasted for 17 months and, depending on who’s talking, has cost between $4.5 million to $20 million. Congress has held 21 hearings on the Benghazi attacks, in which four Americans were killed; it held 22 hearings concerning the events of 9/11, where 3,000 people died.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Yoo – remember those names? Not a single person in the Bush administration has ever been called before a Congressional committee and questioned about torture at Gitmo or about why we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, Bush and Cheney testified for just three hours during a private session to the 9/11 commission.

If you watched any of this hearing, you undoubtedly noticed the chairman of this committee- Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor and Republican Congressman from South Carolina.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, holds the panel’s first public hearing to investigate the 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where a violent mob killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2014. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

This guy is creepy, the paragon of the Republican tactic to make Clinton look bad and to undermine her campaign for president. In fact, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted as much on Fox News.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought,” McCarthy said.

As the Washington Post noted, “McCarthy’s statement gave Democrats what they have long sought: a rather strong public hint that this investigation was never on the level. ‘This stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public,’ said Congressman Elijah Cummings (D- Maryland), the committee’s ranking Democrat. ‘The core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an evenhanded search for the facts.’”

And that ploy was certainly evident during the hours of the hearing that Rob and I watched this evening. Bernie Sanders is my choice for president, but honestly, after watching Clinton during these hearings, I was blown away by her endurance, her crisp answers, her certainty, her utter cool. The Republican members of this committee, particularly Gowdy, kept trying to trick her, asked the same questions in different ways, hoping to grab a Gotcha! moment. But he and the other Republican members of the committee – in particular Lynn Westmoreland from Georgia, and Martha Roby from Alabama – came across as foolish inquisitors cut from the mold of the Salem witch trials.

At one point, Roby’s line of questioning collapsed into absurdity. She was trying to depict Clinton as a cold, heartless bitch who didn’t give a damn about her employees or about the people who were killed in Benghazi. She asked Clinton about the night of the attack, when Clinton left her office and went to her home in Northwest Washington:

ROBY: Who else was at your home? Were you alone?

CLINTON: I was alone, yes.

ROBY: The whole night?

CLINTON: Well, yes, the whole night. [Laughter]

ROBY: I don’t know why that’s funny. Did you have any in-person briefings? I don’t find it funny at all.

CLINTON: I’m sorry, a little note of levity at 7:15 [p.m.]. Noted for the record.

This entire hearing backfired on the Republicans. I think they handed Clinton eleven hours of uninterrupted publicity – and the presidency.

As Rob remarked later, “Can you imagine Trump sitting there for eleven hours? He would’ve gotten angry and started criticizing the committee members’ looks, and then walked out.”

I dislike the sense of entitlement that Clinton brings to this campaign. Two Bushes were more than enough for me, thanks. But the ideas of two Clintons is sweetened by the fact that she’s female. And yet, Hilary voted for the Iraq war and is much more hawkish than I like. And she’s a Scorpio – the most secretive sign in the zodiac – and, like Bush, has a cluster of planets in the 12th house, the most private and secretive house in the zodiac. That said, after seeing her in this hearing, listening to her measured, intelligent responses to even the most ridiculous questions, her composure never cracking, I was impressed.

If she turns out to be the Democratic candidate, I will vote for her – not because she’s my favorite, but because she’s resilient and the alternative – Trump? Ben Carson? Marco Rubio? –  would be grounds for moving to another country.

This campaign is like something from The Hunger Games. As they said at the beginning of that movie, Let the games begin!