Welcome to The Mystical Underground

As writers, it’s always gratifying when we hear that something we’ve written has had a positive impact on someone. We received this email from Dale Dassell about the post called A Kindred Spirit.

Rob & Trish,

Thank you so much for this uplifting post on your blog. It gives me hope in this time of sadness in our family. My mom has been a cancer patient for two years (diagnosed with lung cancer in July 2014), and she has taken a turn for the worse. The cancer spread to her brain in December, when she underwent surgery to remove a tumor. She seemed to be recovering well (under pain medication) until recently when an MRI revealed the cancer had moved to her spine. A round of targeted radiation treatments were applied to the small spots, and then she became ill almost immediately after. We’ve just spent a week with her in the hospital, and she is now back home with us under hospice care because the cancer returned to her brain again. Doctors initially said that she has about a month or so left, but she is very sedated, weak, and incapable of swallowing (food or medicine), and the hospice people advised us that, realistically, she probably has a week or so left.

Dad and I are trying to keep her as comfortable as possible, just as we always promised her. Mom was always practical and matter-of-fact about her cancer, and has been preparing us for it since the beginning, which is a blessing now because her words have given us strength to carry on amid our grief. She’s been sedated and sleeping since her stay in the hospital, and it’s just a matter of time now. Last night I told her that I loved her very much, and she replied: “I love you, too. I’m so proud of you.”

This afternoon I was outside with our dogs while the nurse was visiting to check on Mom’s condition, sitting on the patio when something flew into my shirt and landed on my chest. I reached into my shirt and found a ladybug crawling on my hand. I’ve always considered ladybugs a sign of good luck and happiness, and immediately realized it as a sign from Mom. I mentally spoke to it, promising that Dad and I would keep her as comfortable as possible until she leaves us, how much we love her, and I asked her to give us a sign when she reaches the other side. The ladybug remained perfectly still on the tip of my index finger (for about 10 minutes while I grieved), then a gusty wind swept across the yard and it flew off into the clear blue sky, carrying my promise away. My spirit is lifted, but it will still be devastating when she passes.

I confess that although I picked up Synchronicity and the Other Side when it was first published, I have yet to read it. But I will be doing to in the near future, I know. Thank you both for reassuring us that life continues beyond this physical plane, and showing how to connect with our loved ones. I received a dream message from my grandmother six months after her death in late 1999, and she told me that she was fine and not to be sad. Now I know that Mom will be with her soon, and that gives me hope and serenity.

– Dale

Our thoughts are with you and your mom and family, Dale.

Update: Dale’s mom passed this afternoon at 5:52 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsDDkG9dIgQ

Today, is a really big super Tuesday, with 5 states conducting primaries. I cast an early vote last week, and was surprised that there was actually a waiting line. I admit I didn’t ask anyone in the line how they were voting!

For the Dems, this means Clinton or Sanders. Let’s take a look at life under both of these presidencies.

 Life Under Cliton

Consuelo

She has never met a war she didn’t like.

We Latinos are only a voting block for her.

Tom

Did she ever fight in the Mideast? Did she ever meet a Jihadist face to face? I did. We can’t continue being the world’s cop.

Dawn

I would love to see a woman as president.

But not this woman. Give me a woman who mean what she says. Give me a true progressive like Elizabeth Warren.

Leandra

I read blogs, I read sites, I read and read opinions and I get out there and take it all in. And you know what? We Americans really are a crossroad – as a people, a culture, a society, and I think I need to go deeper underground.

Richard

OMG, she’s beautiful, Clinton is just beautiful. She really loves us Wall Street guys because we’ve funded her Superpacs to the max and she is going to make life much easier for us, yes indeed. Hello, Hummer redux. Hello, tax loopholes. Hello, hello.

 Life Under Sanders

Consuelo

I may be living in an alternative universe. I clearly remember a dream where my abuelita was taken away by the Guardia. She has lived here for forty-eight years as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, who cleans houses, raised three kids, and has five grandchildren. I’m 31, the oldest among them, and I know what I dreamed.

And yet, today my abuelita and I drove over to a federal office with all her documents – when she came here, why she came here, what she has earned since she came here, the taxes she has paid in her forty-eight years in this country. She had photos, journal entries, notarized statements from her children, grandchildren, employers…And at the end of three hours, she was granted residency.

She and I and the rest of the family and our friends, more than seventy of us, celebrated in a local park. It turned into a press extravaganza, with a parade down Calle Ocho in Little Havana.

Is it too good to be true? Are we now living in a new dream, a new story?

Tom

I was going to enlist because I thought it was the only way I could find a job. And then the election happened and over time we began to withdraw troops from the Mideast, even from South Korea. I realized that if I could get into the architecture program at the University of Florida, my tuition would be free.

I spent months studying for the SATs and compiling a portfolio of my best designs for alternative-fueled buildings. In April, I was accepted at UF, and now here I am. I still pay for the dorm and for my food, but that’s a fraction of what my tuition costs would have been in the times before. That’s how I think of it: the Times Before and the Times After. It feels apocalyptic, but in a good way.

To cover my vastly reduced expenses, I work part-time at this fast food joint and make the minimum wage – 15 bucks an hour.

In Times Before, this job paid about half that. Instead of paying $300 a month for health insurance that kept denying me coverage for this or that, I pay a $5 co-pay for everything. And hey, I’ve always been healthy and the few times I went to a walk-in clinic with the flu or whatever, the drug I needed cost several hundred bucks. Now, I can get that same drug for my $5 co-pay.

Am I happier? More productive? More creative? More compassionate toward the plight of the people with whom I share space on this incredible planet? You bet.

Dawn

I’m 28 years old. White female. I have a college degree in English. I teach at a public university in Asheville, North Carolina, where I earn more than $86,000 a year. An amazing wage for  a teacher. I have no college debt, of course, because my tuition was free, and I was able to work part-time and pay for my other expenses.

My husband, an engineer, and I are thinking about starting a family. We can afford to do it now because we have universal health care. When my mother had me, it cost her and my dad nearly ten grand. Jake and I will pay nothing. Plus, I’ll get four months of paid maternity leave and he’ll get four months of paternity leave. If we stagger it, our child will be nearly a year old by then and will qualify for in home care. That cost is 50/50.

Yeah, we pay higher taxes. But you know what? I don’t care. Everyone is paying higher taxes, even the corporations, the uber wealthy, and the benefits to the rest of us are great.

If this is a dream, never wake me up, okay?

Leandra

For the first time in my life, I feel hope for people of color. I feel the way my mother did when she marched with King back in the early sixties, when her buddy Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. I feel the way many of us did when Obama was elected to the presidency. But he was up against such an intractable congress that he couldn’t implement many of the things he promised. Or maybe so many of us were beaten down by the years under W that Obama looked like the progressive that he wasn’t.

When Obama came to our city, I waited in line for four hours to hear him and Biden speak. I was riveted, buoyed, and sobbed the night he swept the election. And then the reality set in, that he could only do so much. I have a theory, see, that these newly elected presidents are shown the Zapruder clip of the JFK assassination,  and are told, Tow the line or else. But I don’t think Bernie was intimidated by this film. I think he looked at it with that wry expression and then said, “Really, dudes? Well, bring it on.”

And they didn’t bring it on because the old scare tactics don’t work anymore.

Richard

Holy shittin’ hell. My attorney says I need to cut my losses and run.

And he means it literally. You got money parked in the Caymans, Rich? Then head down there and live the high life because if you stay in the U.S., you’re going to find your ass in prison. They’re indicting the Wall Street crowd that brought the country to its knees in 2007. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Yoo, and most of Wall Street.

Even if I stay here and somehow evade prosecution, I’ll be paying my employees 15 bucks an hour and will have to pay for maternity leave and paternity leave, and I’ll have to abide by federal regulations. My tax loopholes have vanished.

I sold my Hummer two weeks ago for 300 bucks, to an outfit that takes the spare parts to fix other Hummers. I had to take my kids out of private school because the tuition was so high. But next year, she’ll be going to Florida State tuition free. The social security my parents have been collecting for the last three years has risen and it galls me because I’m funding it. Me and people like me – you, you, you.

This is part one of a continuing series about what life would be like under various presidential candidates. This one is about life under a Trump  presidency, how it might actually impact people.

Consuelo

Last night, they took my abuelita away. She had lived here for forty-eight years, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, who cleaned homes, raised three children, and has five grandchildren. I’m 31, the oldest among them, and I was still awake when the six men in black uniforms broke down the front door and demanded to see the passports of everyone in the house.

The Guardia always wear black, are always men, always come at night, and if you want to live to sunrise, you turn over what they want. I handed them seven American passports. I was born in a refugee camp in south Miami. My two brothers were born in Little Havana. My mother and father were born in Key West, my ten-year-old daughter was born on Tango Key, where we live now, and abuelita’s bogus passport said she was born in Fort Lauderdale.

They zeroed in on that fake passport. We had paid a lot of money for authenticity, but they’d taken her anyway, hauled her out of the house in the darkest dark of the night, and I have no idea where they have taken her. An interment camp, that’s my guess, and there she’ll be out on a train headed for Mexico? Is there a tunnel through the fifty-foot high wall?

Wait, are there trains into Mexico? I don’t think so. Does this mean my abuelita and eleven million plus other illegal immigrants will be transported by a convoy of trucks?

Tom

I enlisted because it was the only way I could get a job. Even McDonald’s wouldn’t hire me, said I was over-educated. So my college diploma isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

I had hoped to go to grad school to become an architect, to design incredible buildings that are powered by the sun, by wind, by oceans. But I couldn’t land the scholarship I needed and couldn’t afford the tuition and my parents, who have low credit scores, couldn’t even co-sign on an educational loan for me.

So here I am in a place of endless deserts, endless, scorching heat, endless strife and poverty and rage. It may be Syria, but I can’t be sure. We were dropped here in the middle of the night, part of a massive boots on the ground brigade, and I’m scared shitless. I don’t want to kill anyone. But I’m surrounded by these nationalist fanatics who pump their fists in the air and shout in unison: “USA! USA! USA!”

Dawn

I’m 23 years old. White female. I have a college degree in English, am $91,256 in debt, with a thirteen percent interest rate on that debt. I earn what is considered to be a respectable salary as an English teacher in a privatized school system. But hello, the truth is that I can’t live on what I earn.

My rent in Asheville for an apartment the size of a closet is nearly fifty percent of my income. The rest of what I earn is divided among my college debt, food, utilities, Internet, gas for my car. Fortunately for me, I own my car, such as it is. It was my grandfather’s car way back, and after he died, I got it. A Mazda 3 is as long lasting, I hope, as the Duracell battery. 111,111 miles. All those ones bother me.

The other thing that bothers me even more is that I’m nine weeks pregnant and can’t find a clinic within 200 miles that will perform an abortion. Wasn’t this right upheld in Roe v Wade?

Leandra

The water running out of my kitchen faucet is dirty, dark, the color of my skin. And it smells as rotten as old fruit. Or as sour as really dirty feet. Or like sweat-drenched clothes. It’s been like this for months and the government tells us not to worry, the water’s fine, like they think we’re blind or something.

My fourteen-year-old daughter is losing her hair, it’s coming out in clumps and I saved the clumps, put them in a jar, and took the jar to the major’s office.

“What the hell’s going on, Mayor Louise?”

She was one of my mama’s friends way back when and she’s seen me riled up plenty of times before. But this time, she doesn’t pat the air with her hands. She moves quickly past me, shuts the door, and hurries back to where I’m standing, clutching the jar that holds clumps of my daughter’s hair.

“They’ve poisoned the water, Lee.” She whispers this. “With lead. Same thing that happened in Flint few years back. But this time, no one’s comin’ to change out the pipes, no one’s coming with bottled water, and the press is barred from entering town.”

Richard

Listen, he was the best thing that ever happened to this country. He’s making America great again. I can see evidence of this everywhere I look.

All the damn illegals are being deported, just like he promised, and that means more jobs for Americans.

The stupid minimum wage bill the Dems tried to jam through the Congress failed. I mean, c’mon, twenty bucks an hour for a secretary? Or a janitor? Or for someone cooking burgers at Mickey D’s?

He lowered the tax on corporations, just like he promised, so that my company now pays less than one percent in taxes on our gross revenues, which was about thirty million last year. I park a lot of my personal wealth in the Cayman Islands.

And you know the best thing? Humvee is producing again and I just bought my first one. The wife and kids love it as much as I do. Life is good. America really is going to be great again. Yes, siree.

Stay tuned for part 2 of Life Under…

The universe constantly surprises me. Over the weekend, I received a Facebook message from one of my daughter’s friends,  asking if I remembered a kid she and Megan had gone to high school with – let’s call him Bob. His mother, the friend said, wanted to get a tarot or astrology reading. Apparently I had done Bob’s chart back in high school and he remembered it. So I told Megan’s friend to give the mother my email.

This morning, she emailed me. Let’s call her Rita. (I’m using pseudonyms because she works in the corporate world.) She said that for her job, she covered three counties and was in Palm Beach County today and did I have time to see her? We made an appointment for four. Shorty before she arrived, I wondered if she was married to a Scorpio. Random thought, right? But I brought out a copy of Unlocking the Secrets to Scorpio for her just in case that random thought was precognitive.

Rita was a few minutes early and from the moment she walked in the door, I felt a connection. She’s an upbeat, attractive woman in her late forties, nicely dressed, gorgeous hair. We sat down at the dining room table and talked a few minutes about our kids and a job she had just accepted. She had sent me her birth data, but didn’t know the time, so I erected a solar chart – using noon for the time.

A solar chart doesn’t depict the correct houses, which depend on the time, and the moon in a solar chart is always iffy because it moves so quickly. But it gives me the relationship of planets to each other and I ran transits to the chart and saw that she was probably going to move. It wouldn’t be a to the next town type of move, but a major move.  Before I started with the cards, I blurted, “Are you married to a Scorpio?”

She looked startled. “Yes.”

I gave her the Scorpio book and knew things from this point forward were going to move along well.

When I laid out the cards, everything pointed to a move that her husband and two youngest children still felt conflicted about. It also indicated a contract, her trailblazing spirit, her need for change.  Yes, yes, and yes, she said, nodding. The move is to the northeast, for a job that would engage her fully, and for a lot more $. The transits indicated the move would be fantastic for her.

From here, our conversation veered into the stuff I love to talk about – life after death, reincarnation, synchronicity, spirit communication. It turned out that for the last few weeks, she’d been feeling anxious about her decision concerning this new job and had been asking her deceased relatives for insights – her parents, a younger brother who died suddenly and unexpectedly a year ago. Her sister had called her out of the blue and told her she’d had a really vivid dream about their brother, in which he’d imparted information about what was going on in her life. Rita didn’t understand why he’d communicated in this way with her sister, who “doesn’t believe in this stuff. I’m the one who is open and ready to receive, why did he communicate with my sister?”

After her mother died several years ago, Rita was devastated. “Her death was sudden, she was my best friend, and I kept thinking, If only I’d had another day with her. It took about two years for her to finally contact me.” The contact occurred through a dream so vivid that Rita awakened from it sobbing. “In the dream, my mother said she was here so we could spend one last day together. And that’s exactly what we did. And toward the end of the dream, she told me I had to release her now.”

I told her my experience with my own parents in one of Rob’s meditation classes, in which I’d seen them in a corner of the room, engaged in life on the other side, a confirmation for me that they had both healed from the physical ailments that had killed them.

This experience with a woman who had walked into the house as a stranger and left as a kindred spirit drove home the point that synchronicity is always at work in our lives. It hums along in the background, prepared to wake us up, shake us up, surprise and delight us, and does it when  we least expect it.

+++

This was the second experience I’d had within a few days where a stranger and I talked about spirit communication. I suspected it was leading somewhere. Sure enough, today Rob and I talked about writing a book called The Talking Dead, about the language that the dead use to communicate with us and how common this experience is.

That language is synchronicity, but that’s like saying your native language is English or French or Spanish and doesn’t really address the specifics. The dead, it seems, use virtually anything they can to say hello – dreams, objects, sounds, clusters of numbers and names, animals, patterns of clouds..the list is long. These things are their nouns and verbs, their conjunctives and prepositions, their adjectives and adverbs. But the connecting thread to all of it is love. They reach out because they care. Because they want us to know they’re not only around, but are doing just fine, thanks, and have info that may be helpful.

Skeptics, of course, think you’re nuts for even thinking about this stuff, much less writing about it or talking to strangers about it. But the older I get, the less I care about what skeptics think and the more eager I am to engage a stranger in a conversation that veers into the strange, the mysterious, and the ultimate unknown.

Rob and I usually take Noah to the dog park somewhere between 3 and 5 every afternoon. He has an instinctive awareness about this time and usually starts getting restless around 3. On Fridays, when Rob teaches a private yoga class at 3, I often take Noah to the park by myself. He, of course, is hopeful that squirrels will put in an appearance.

On this particular Friday, not too many people were there when we arrived around 3:15. He trotted off looking for squirrels and I walked over to a woman who has two really cool dogs, both rescues. Jo-Jo is a female yellow lab mix, and adores Noah. They sat together for awhile and the woman and I talked. I’m ashamed to admit that although I know the names of her dogs, I don’t know her name. That happens a lot at the dog park. But for the sake of the story I’ll call her Rachel. I do know she works with pre-schoolers at a Jewish center. That day, she was talking about how grandparents visited the preschool that day and it had exhausted her because she had to be “on.”

The conversation veered into a story about a Golden Retriever she and her husband had owned several years back. The dog ended up with cancer and had to be put down. It devastated both of them, but her husband took it especially hard. They had the dog cremated and decided to bury the ashes in their backyard. Her husband dug a huge hole in the back yard that would accommodate not only the dog’s ashes, but the entire ottoman where the dog had spent so much of his time in the final days of his life. She finally suggested that they cut off the cushion and bury that with the ashes.

Not long afterward, her husband was diagnosed with cancer and lasted about five months. It was, she admitted, a sad time. Now, when I hear a story like this, I have to ask: “Do you ever feel him around?”

“All the time.”

“In what way?”

“Well, he was a frugal man, and very soon after his death, I started finding pennies in odd places around the house, in my car, in my clothing, in my suitcase when I was traveling. I knew it was him. These were pennies, not quarters,” she said with a quick laugh.

I told her about white feathers,  the archetype that our blogging friend Mike Perry has talked about on his blog.

“A medium was invited to our Jewish women’s group and he stood in the middle of our circle of chairs and started talking about what he was receiving.” The medium explained that whoever felt this information pertain to them should raise their hand. “He said an accountant was coming through. ‘Does anyone have an accountant in spirit?’ he asked.

No hands went up. So Rachel raised her hand and said, “Yes, my husband was an accountant.”

“He wants to know why you stopped kissing his picture,” the medium said.

Rachel was floored. On the wall above her head were photos of her kids and husband. Every night before she went to bed, she kissed her fingers and touched them to her husband’s photo to wish him good night. But recently, she’d been renovating her bedroom wallpaper and had to take the photos down and had stopped kissing her husband good night.

“No one knew this,” Rachel said. “Not even my closest friends. I’d never told it to anyone. So how did this guy know that?”

“He was a genuine medium,” I replied, and asked her if she knew about Cassadaga, the town of mediums and psychics just north of Disney World.

Nope. She’d never heard of the place, which is the usual reaction when I mention Cassadaga. But she took down the name, we looked at Google maps, and she said that she has friends in Orlando that she’s visiting in a few weeks and she’s going to check it out.

“So has your husband been around recently?” I asked

“Not so much anymore. That first year after he passed, he was around all the time.” She pointed at Jo-Jo. “But he urged me to get her.”

In other words, he was around for the important stuff.

At this point, Noah spotted a squirrel and took off at the speed of light across the field and I followed him. I made a mental note to put a copy of Synchronicity & the Other Side in the car so I could give it to Rachel when I ran into her again. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the first in a series of stories about spirit communication that I would hear from women I didn’t know. The second is coming up  on the 17th. I’m expecting a third.

Our dog park may be the most interesting place in town!

During our infrequent cool spells in South Florida in January and February when the temps dip into the low 50s and even briefly skirt with the 40s, Trish and I like to sit outside by our fire pit. Once the rainy season is here or near, the fire pit goes into hibernation. The sub-tropics don’t cool in the evening like it does in the North or the desert Southwest. So we take advantage of these few days by stocking up on wood and watching for ‘cold’ fronts to come our way.

This year after stoking the fire on our cool nights, I would typically sit back on my Adirondack chair and gaze skyward into the night. I had a view between our front yard palm trees of one particular bright star that I would watch. What fascinated me was that after staring at the fire, then looking up, the star would appear blue. That reminded my of the Hopi Indian legend of the Blue Star kachina.

When a blue star appears in the sky, the blue star kachina will dance alone in the plaza indicating the end of the Fourth World and the beginning of the Fifth. Kachina dances are held in the plazas of the Hopi villages during a variety of seasonal-related festivities. But the Blue Star kachina has yet to appear for its world-changing dance. The exception is in my novel, Time Catcher, my fourth and last novel in the Will Lansa mystery saga that starts when Will is a high school student and ends in Time Catcher when he is in his late 20s, a cultural anthropologist who is called back to the reservation by his aging grandmother.

Seeing the ‘blue star’ hovering in the southeastern sky was more of a personal experience than a shared one. In fact, when I pointed it out to Trish, she found the star, but it didn’t appear blue to her. Maybe she was staring at the iPad on her lap, instead of the fire, before she looked.

Regardless, blue or not, I was staring at the most mysterious star in the sky. It’s embedded  in legend and mythology of  numerous  cultures. It is, of course, Sirius, the Dog Star, of Canis Major, the most luminous star in the night sky. Mystery schools and secret societies throughout time have attributed special status to Sirius. Is it merely because of its brightness that Sirius it is the brightest star in the sky, or do humans have an ancient connection with the star?

Sirius played a large role in the mythology of ancient Egypt. It was revered as Sothis and was associated with Isis, the mother goddess of Egyptian mythology. Isis is the female aspect of the trinity formed by herself, Osiris and their son Horus. Anubis, the dog-headed god of death, was linked with the dog star and Toth-Hermes, the great teacher of humanity, was also esoterically connected with the star.

The Egyptian calendar system was linked to Sirius. Its appearance was linked with feasts and celebrations.  Several occult researchers have claimed that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built in perfect alignment with the stars, especially Sirius. The light from these stars was said to be used in ceremonies of Egyptian Mysteries.

The star’s celestial movement was also observed and revered by ancient Greeks, Sumerians, Babylonians and countless other civilizations. Legends of a tribe of people in Mali tell of a watery planet within the Sirius star cluster that is the home of a race called the Nommos. Supposedly, the Nommos came to Earth and instructed humans in science and trade. Maybe it’s a synchronicity of sorts that the tribe in question that still maintain legends of the dog star are called the Dogon people.

Finally, I decided to look for any Hopi legends related to Sirius. I figured there might be something, and I was right. Amazingly, and here is my synchronicity – the Hopi name for Sirius is Blue Star kachina. Seriously? I did not know that – or if I did, I had forgotten. I’m not sure how that fits with the prophecy of the appearance of a blue star, since Sirius has been up there shining brightly throughout all human eras. But there it is. Sirius, the blue star kachina. I just knew it looked blue from my chair at the fire pit!

We recently posted about the unique creativity of poets that enables many of them to sense the future. And then we ran across a study by James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas.

In 2001, Psychosomatic Medicine published Pennebaker’s article about a study he conducted that showed how a poet’s words can foreshadow their suicides. It sounds like a tool along the lines of Minority Report, doesn’t it?

In the movie, three precognitive women predicted crimes before they happened. In Pennebaker’s study, the tool was a computer analysis of 156 poems written by nine British, American, and Russian poets who killed themselves. The analysis found stark differences in words and language patterns compared with the work of nine poets who died naturally.

Among the suicidal poets who were studied were Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Hart Crane, Sergei Esenin, Adam L. Gordon, Randall Jarrell, Vladamir Mayakovsky, Sarah Teasdale.

Their work was compared with 135 poems written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Boris Pasternak, Matthew Arnold, Joyce Kilmer, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Osip Madelstam, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Pennebaker’s findings are intriguing.

Suicidal poets, Pennebaker said, used words that indicated detachment from other people and a preoccupation with themselves. Words like I, me, and my were used more frequently by suicidal poets than by non-suicidal poets. “The words we use, especially those that often appear to be the unimportant words, say a lot about who we are, what we are thinking and how we approach the world,” Peneebaker noted in the article. “People who are suicidal or depressed use ‘I’ at much, much higher rates and there is also a corresponding drop in references to other people.”

Just as the precogs in Minority Report pinpoint strong probabilities of a crime that will be committed based on the patterns of violence and emotions in the images they pick up, Pennebaker found that suicidal poets generally reduced their use of words like talk, share, and listen as they approached their deaths. Non-suicidal poets, he found, generally increased their use of those words as they got older. The potential suicides used words associated with death more frequently than the second group, but there wasn’t much difference in the use of words like hate and love.

Pennebaker also noted that suicide is more prevalent among poets than other writers or the general population. “Poets are more prone to depression. No one would call poets a particularly bubbly, chipper group.”

He believes these patterns of language used by poets who eventually killed themselves could be “linguistic predicators of suicide” in poets who are still with us. “We are not saying that if you use I a lot, then you will commit suicide. It is simply a marker of greater risk.”

The danger in technology using “predictors” for any sort of behavior is that people change, grow, evolve. Our emotional lives are as ephemeral and ever changing as the oceans. The priorities we had at fifteen, the emotions we experienced, the way we understood the world and ourselves within it bears little resemblance to what we experience at thirty. Or fifty.

The poets in this study who were suicides lived in times and cultures that no longer exist. In today’s world, if you’re a depressed poet, you probably tweet about it, start a closed Facebook group, Instagram it, publish a You Tube video. You write a free e-book that is downloaded two million times and you’re offered a six-figure publishing contract and suddenly have a renewed interest in life. In other words, the Internet offers an almost instantaneous community. What would make for an interesting study is the words that poets use now, fourteen years after Pennebaker’s article was published.

Since 2001, the world has changed drastically. If you would like the specifics, just Google (there’s one of the changes!) How did the world change between 2001 and 2016? You can bet that today’s poets are among the first who have reacted and are shaping those changes. Our friend Jenean Gilstrap – Gypsy – is one of them. Google her name on Facebook and treat yourself to her beautiful words.

Barring a major loss in the March 15 primaries, it does look as if Trump – sigh –  will be the Republican nominee. None of them are good, but he’s the worst of a rotten crop. In the Super Tuesday primaries – 11 states – he swept 7 states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Massachusetts and Vermont. Clinton also won 7 states. So, can Clinton win against Trump? Questionable. This troubling article from The Atlantic explains why.

One of the pundits I like is Cenk Uygur, who wrote an insightful piece about why Bernie Sanders actually won Super Tuesday.   The other reason Sanders was the big winner is because in February alone, he raised more than $42 million from small donors – not super pacs – and $6 million of it was raised on the last day, leap day, February 29. He raised more than everyone else, even Clinton.

But in the end, when all is said and done, how can so many Americans support a man whose platform is based on hatred? Is racism and xenophobia and misogyny still that entrenched in our culture? Well, yes, that appears to be the case if the Republican debate this evening is any indication.

I found it deeply disturbing that so many people in the huge Fox crowd cheered and applauded Trump when he mentioned how he would ratchet up torture, build his fifty-foot wall along the Mexican/U.S. border torture, boost the military, ban Muslims from entering the country, deport 11-12 million illegal immigrants. Really? We’re going to have a parade of buses and motorcades filled with millions of illegals being taken back to Mexico? We’re really going to have a 50-foot wall built along the border that Mexico is going to pay for?

The NY Daily News ran a clever – and horrifying – article about what Trump’s first hundred days in office would be like.

The only thing I like about Trump is that he has sent the establishment of the Republican party into a feeding frenzy that may well result in its collapse. If that happens, there will be no Rest in Peace message from me. My response will be, Good riddance, dudes.

And oh, a rather shallow postscript here. How about if Trump’s wife or one of his ex-wives, find him a new hair stylist?

Another PS, not so shallow. Thanks to super delegates – Democratic politicians who can votes on candidates – Clinton is well ahead of Sanders. This super delegate thing is a rigged system designed to keep out candidates that the establishment doesn’t want. Google it. So much for democracy.

With practice, anyone can ask a question and glimpse the future as it is most likely to unfold from that moment in time. By taking advantage of certain readily available tools, you can hurl open the window to events before they unfold. When you do so, you’re stepping into the world of divination.

Throughout time and across cultures people have peered into the future with divination tools – the I Ching, tarot cards, astrology charts, patterns made by tea leaves or the toss of bones, numerology, scrying. The principle of synchronicity lies at the heart of every divination system. When you toss coins or lay out cards, they form a pattern intrinsic to that moment. The pattern, Carl Jung pointed out, is meaningful only if you’re able to verify the interpretations through your knowledge of the subjective and objective situations, as well as the unfolding of subsequent events.

The term ‘divination’ comes from the Latin divinare, meaning ‘to foresee,’ and it probably was practiced even before humans learned to control fire. Diviners among the ancient Babylonians read patterns in animal entrails, in smoke, oil on the surface of water, and through the behavior of animals. The Druids favored crystal balls and read patterns in knotted tree roots, the calls and movements of birds, and in the patterns of clouds and stars. The ancient Greeks had their Oracle at Delphi, of course, but also divined patterns in dreams, in the murmuring of springs, and by tossing small stones or pieces of wood, knucklebones, or dice.

In Mesoamerican religious life and in every civilization from the Olmecs to the Mayans and Aztecs, divination was a part of daily life and scrying was commonly practiced. This system involved looking at any smooth or translucent surface— water, stones, crystals, mirrors— with the belief that images about the future would appear.

Eventually, divinatory tools were created. Around 1,200 B.C., the Chinese used a divination system called fuji, similar to a Ouija board, which was followed a millennium later by the I Ching. Tarot cards arrived in Europe from Turkey near the end of the Middle Ages, where related card games had existed for centuries.

Any question you ask a divinatory tool is personal, a one-time experience that can’t be replicated. So, like art, it falls outside the scientific process. It exists as a subjective reality, one that can confirm your own anecdotal encounters and explorations.

My two favorites are the tarot and the I Ching. The tarot is fascinating because it’s visual and the 22 major arcana card images are archetypal. From the first card in the Major Arcana, The Fool, to the last one, The World, our journey through life is depicted.

The other 56 cards in the deck represent the details, events, people, and situations in our lives. My favorite deck is the round Tarot of the Cloisters, where the images are presented like stained glass. I’ve had the deck for about 20 years and it’s difficult to find now. I’ve never thought there’s much point in reading reversed cards and this round deck makes that impossible!

The I Ching – a divination system that dates back several thousand years to ancient China – is chatty. I use the Richard Wilhelm translation and also enjoy Adele Aldridge’s take on the I Ching. With this system, there are 64 possible hexagrams you can get by tossing 3 coins six times. Heads count for 3, tails are 2, and the numbers 6 (three tails) a broken line, and 9, a solid line, are considered to be changing lines that become either solid or broken. Visionary Terrence McKenna believed the I Ching illuminated the nature of time.

These days, I use an app for the I Ching – the I Ching Pocket App of Wisdom – that I have on my phone and my iPad to toss the coins and then look at the interps of James de Korne  or Adele’s interps. She is illustrating every line in each of the 64 hexagrams – a staggering total of 960 lines! – and knows this stuff inside out. And I email Nancy Pickard, who for years was the only other person I knew who used the Ching, thus my name for her – Mistress of the Ching.

When I need a quick answer I pose a question, then open a book at random and point to a spot on the page. Sometimes, the word or phrase makes no sense at all. But other times, the word/phrase is right on target. Another method I love is to think of a question and state that the next thing I hear will answer it. This works nearly every time.

So, tapping into the future is something we can all so and you don’t have to wait for a dream, vision, or a hunch!

Visual tricksters: these cracked me up.

and my personal favorite: