Years ago, we published a fascinating triple synchronicity story offered by novelist Tony Vigorito, author of Nine Kinds of Naked. It was called Eyes of a Blue Dog and we included it in The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.

Now Tony has a new story about synchronicity that he tells in his deeply personal way. He’s got a great voice and his self-deprecating humor keeps his story from descending into a lengthy ego trip.

One of the best parts for me was his story of meeting a beautiful woman at a music festival, talking to her for hours, then pulling one card out of his tarot deck. It was the card for courage (pictured above), that shows a small plant growing out of a crack in a rock. The woman was just going through a break-up of a relationship so the card was meaningful to her. Tony told her to keep it, thinking – and hoping – that he might see her sometime later and retrieve it. He never saw her again, and now every time he open his tarot deck he realizes that it lacks the courage card, which he says is reflected in his own life.

That’s just one of many anecdotes you can find here if you read his story called The Cathedral of Eternity.

https://www.tonyvigorito.com/blog/chaos-synchronicity-technology-magic/

Yes, I realize that a lot of people think Mercury retrograde is silly, that it doesn’t apply to them, that it’s just some nutty designation astrologers create. Well, it’s not. If you pay attention to what’s going on in your life during the three Mercury retros each year, you’ll find that things don’t run as smoothly as you would like.

Computers go haywire, appliances break down, toilets back up and overflow, creating chaos in your basement. Relationships suffer from miscommunication, travel plans go awry, you get locked out of your house, your manuscript is rejected, your car breaks down on a highway at night, the bank errs and it’s not in your favor. For Geminis and Virgos, which are ruled by Mercury, these periods tend to be really annoying. But everyone experiences Mercury retrograde in a unique way and the first retro of 2016 starts on January 5 in Aquarius at 8:04 a.m., slips back into Capricorn, and turns direct again in that sign on January 25, at 4:50 p.m. eastern time.

To give you an idea of the global scale of a Mercury retro, look back to November 7, 2000. Mercury had been retrograde since mid-October – first in Scorpio, then it slipped back into Libra and at 9:20 p.m., it turned direct in that sign. When Mercury stations – which means it’s about to turn retrograde or direct – the potential for miscommunication is strong. But for that date, the station caused bedlam because it was election day in the U.S.

Astrologers were predicting chaos and, sure enough, at 7:49 p.m., NBC decided they had enough data from exit polls in Florida and Tom Brokaw called the state for Al Gore. With Florida’s 25 electoral votes, it meant he had won the election.

However, shortly after 10 p.m. – less than an hour after Mercury had turned direct – Brokaw backtracked and said that George W. Bush had won the state and the election. We all know what ensued after that – the endless dispute over the chads on Palm Beach County’s ballot and the eventual decision by the Supreme Court that Bush was the 43^rd president of the U.S.

On a personal level, your best way to navigate this period is to follow the rule of the 3 Rs: revise, review, reconsider. Don’t start anything new, don’t sign contracts, don’t move or travel, don’t take anything for granted, don’t assume. In fact, if you can get away with it, just hang out at home for a few weeks, sleep and eat and indulge your fantasies. Yeah, sure. Like any of us can do that without feeling totally guilty and anxious about what we should be doing or must be doing or…well, something.

Our daughter, Megan, is going to be moving and when I was looking at charts for January, I suggested that she be moved into her new place before January 5, when Mercury turns retrograde. As a Virgo, she’s now well-versed enough in this Mercury retro business to know what it means. She readily agreed.

These periods, despite how they seem in the external world, really aren’t negative. They give us a chance to lay low, to mull over, to move within and rearrange the furniture of our inner lives. People we haven’t seen in years often resurface. Old opportunities surface with new faces and possibilities. If we happen to travel during these periods, then our itineraries change without rhyme or reason, but we will undoubtedly revisit our destination in the future.

Mercury is about communication, travel, our conscious mind, how we learn and absorb, the stuff of our daily life. It can be a trickster planet, for sure, but it’s also the messenger, our most immediate and direct conduit to our left brain, our reasoning self, our ego. It’s smart to honor the retro with a gesture, a ritual, an intention: I’m going to quit eating desserts, stop smoking, start a regular exercise regimen. And well, if your toilet backs up and floods, so it goes. Take a deep breath. This, too, shall pass!

From 1950 to 1956, I think it was, our family lived in an oil camp in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where my dad worked for a Standard Oil subsidiary, Creole. One of my clearest and earliest memories is from late 1952, when my grandmother – my mother’s mom – arrived from Tulsa, Oklahoma. My mother was very pregnant with my sister and my Nana was there to help her out after the birth.

My grandmother was an entity – no other way to describe her. Born in Odessa, Russia, she had emigrated to the U.S. speaking nothing but Russian, and had somehow made a life for herself in the States. She was large, matronly, kind of intimidating, and had been widowed for years. She was also infinitely kind, a lover of animals.

In those days, of course, no one knew the gender of their unborn child. But I had a feeling this child, my sibling, would be a girl. I think my parents had a feeling about it, too, because they had already settled on a name – Mary Margaret. I’m not sure who was honored by the Mary part of this, but the Margaret was my dad’s youngest sister.

At 12:30 p.m. on January 3, my sister, Mary, came into the world. My mother brought her home on the second or third day – this was back when they didn’t kick you out of the hospital the day after! I was five and a half, had been in kindergarten for a few months, had learned to read comic books and was now moving on to real books. I remember sneaking into the baby room after everyone else had gone to bed and staring down at her, this little thing all curled in on herself, beneath a swath of blankets.

And suddenly, her eyes opened. Huge eyes, dark chocolate eyes. And I thought, Wow, where did you come from? We just stared at each other, Mary and I, and in those moments I sensed some sort of strange connection that went through many lives, many relationships. I didn’t have any context into which to fit these feelings, so I quickly hurried back to my own room and crawled into bed.

The photo above was taken in our living room in Maracaibo. I remember that I was initially barefoot and my mother insisted that I put on socks and shoes. I’m not sure why, except that my mother was sometimes a stickler for conventional details. Everyone in a family photo wears socks and shoes!

Today, that little thing next to me in the photo is 63 years old, an R.N. who has overseen an assisted living facility for more than a decade. In February, she will become the regional nurse for a new company in Georgia that owns several facilities. She has three grown sons and, more than a year ago, met a new guy, Neal, who, as she puts it, is the guy she’s been looking for her entire life.

Mary and I, like many siblings, have had our ups and downs. But the blood link is stronger than any disagreement you encounter through the years. In a larger, cosmic sense, it may be why we are born into a particular family at a particular time. I still remember looking down at that little thing all those years ago and thinking, Wow, we really are in this together!

Happy Birthday, Maruja!

Here’s a peculiar and somewhat ominous synchro that ironically is linked with Christmas. It comes from Jane Clifford of Wales, a psychic healer who is a magnet for synchronicity.

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Three years ago on Christmas morning, a little bird tried to fly in through a slightly open window. I stood up to close it and at that moment, a sparrow hawk swept down and captured the bird inches from the window. It carried off the screaming bird.

I interpreted it a warning. The startling incident happened behind my son’s head. Within days, he had the anguish of discovering his partner had been sleeping with his best friend and was moving in with him! Ouch!

So this Christmas day, the morning began with the screeching of a distressed bird. A few feet from the house a sparrow hawk had caught the bird and was busy killing it. The screeching  went on and on until the hawk finally carried the screeching bird away. This time, it was my daughter who had noticed it. So something challenging is coming her way, I think.

There’s never been another attack by a sparrow hawk near the house…just those two, both on Christmas morning.

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One thought occurred to me about the story. The sparrow hawk is having it’s ‘turkey’ dinner, but with a small species of bird! The symbolism, of course, is another matter, and hopefully nothing too distressful will happen to her daughter.

FROM US TO YOU!

I was looking around in a website called INSPIRING QUOTES for something appropriate for the new year. What do I come across, but a quote from Trish! A New Year’s synchronicity.

I’m not sure how inspiring it is, but it certainly fits our world today where multiple realities seemingly co-exist…sometimes under the same roof. It’s all part of the paradigm shift as old ways die and some struggle to keep the past alive…while others move on to a new reality, hopefully a better one and a better world.

“Most of us suffer from a kind of myopia. We see only the things that fit in with our beliefs about the world.”

Here’s a good example of the law of attraction. In this case, it’s siblings who didn’t know the other existed who ended up in the same town, at the same job, and finally driving around together making deliveries in the same truck. That’s when they got suspicious as one person after another said they looked like brothers. Notice how they’re even wearing similar glasses. Here’s the story.

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After working side by side for weeks, two coworkers discovered that they are actually siblings brought together by a series of incredible circumstances.

Gary Nisbet and Randy Joubert, who share the same parents, were adopted and raised by separate families in neighboring Maine towns, never knowing the other one existed.  They attended rival high schools, moved to the same town of Waldoboro, Maine, and both wound up working for the same company, Dow Furniture.

The two rode side by side in a delivery truck and slowly put the pieces together.

“Something clicked with me,” Randy said. “So I got him up by the truck and said Gary, this is going to sound bizarre, but were you adopted?”

Gary, somewhat perplexed, confirmed that he was in fact adopted.  After comparing some notes — dates of birth, and finally birth parents names — they stared at each other in disbelief.

“This is such a small world,” Gary said.

Our friend and author Kathy Doore  died in the spring of  2015. She was an intrepid explorer of the weird and the strange, so it’s no surprise that she brought the ancient spiritual site of Markawasi, Peru to the western world in her book by that name.

Her memorial service in April 2015 was held on a boat and was arranged by Lynn and Bruce Gernon,  who were friends of Kathy’s. During that great boat ride, I mentioned to Bruce that I was expecting Kathy to put in an appearance of some sort. I think that appearance has finally happened. Today we received this email from Bruce:

Hi Rob and Trish,

Here is a Christmas ghost story for you.  On Tuesday the 22nd of December 2015 I had an interesting experience.  I was home alone when I got up at sunrise and had breakfast.  After eating I headed back to the bedroom and stopped in the living room because I heard a strange noise.  It was humming and vibrating.  It only took a minute to realize it was my large attic fan running on low speed.  At first I thought my wife Lynn must have left it on, but then I would have heard it the night before.  Then I thought I may have walked by it and the sleeve of my robe must have caught the switch and turned it on.  This has never happened before in 20 years so it seemed unlikely.  So I thought I will surly figure it out later and I forgot about it.

After going out and returning later that day I went into the front garage for the first time that day.  While I was in there I noticed that the garage outdoor lights were on.  So I turned them off and started thinking maybe the same thing happened as with the attic fan.  When I walked back into the house I realized that could not have happened because I would have seen the front garage lights were on the night before. 

As I walked through the hallway I stopped dead in my tracks as the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up and my entire body tingled.  I have never felt this strong of a nervous feeling before.  It was at this point I realized it was Kathy Doore letting me know she was out there.

Happy holidays,

Bruce

Note that Bruce’s experience happened right after the winter solstice and just before the full moon in Cancer on December 25. Both dates, I think, are important. While we traditionally confer Halloween as the time when the veil is thinnest between the living and the dead, the winter solstice is Pluto’s terrain, the time of the dark underworld, when Pluto ferreted Persephone away. The full moon in Cancer, though, got a friendly beam from expansive Jupiter, and that planet was critical to Kathy’s life and death.

In life, she lived Jupiter’s archetype – I’m nomadic, I live to explore where no one else has gone, and I bring you gifts from those places. The last time we met, at Macaroni Grill for lunch, I took a look at her natal chart and saw that Jupiter was coming to a beneficial place relative to her sun and chart. “Great year coming up, Kathy,” I said, and explained the specifics.

“Really?” she exclaimed. “I don’t feel it. I think I may be checking out.”

Checking out may not be the phrase she used, but it was what she meant. And when it came true, I recalled the advice from Renie Wiley, my mentor in astrology and many other facets of the paranormal, who passed on many years ago.

“A beneficial angle from Jupiter can also give the soul a way out, Trish. Never forget that. It may not predict an easy death, but it does give you a way to bow out spiritually.”

And that was what Kathy did.

And if Bruce is right, then she is now back.

Thank you, Bruce, for sharing.

A postscript to this story. Lynn and Bruce Gernon have several thousand of Kathy’s books in a closet, and are now selling them on Amazon, They “inherited” the books when Kathy died. The book originally sold for $35, but the Gernons are selling it for $9.99 because they are going to be moving and can’t take all these books with them. The book is a visual feast of a profoundly spiritual journey.

When a professional psychic tunes in on future events in your life – or when you experience a precognition about something in your future – is that future set in stone?

Throughout history, there have been numerous instances of people who experienced precognitions about their own deaths and avoided the circumstances and situations they’d glimpsed and lived to talk about them. Take any manmade or natural disaster – and there have been an abundance of both since the twenty-first century started – and you’ll find these kinds of stories. Some are documented and many are anecdotal, but they suggest that the future isn’t fixed and can be changed.

“For those pondering the puzzle of precognition, the Pribram-Bohn holographic mind theory seems to offer the greatest hope yet for progress toward the sought-for solution,” writes David Loye in The Sphinx and the Rainbow.

He contends that the sticky problem of how information can be transmitted psychically is eliminated with the holographic theory. In a hologram, each part contains the information of the whole, so “…if we are each parts of a larger whole…if our minds and bodies are, in effect, holograms within the larger hologram of the universe, then there is no transmission problem, because the information is already within us!”

Loye believes there are many different holograms drifting around within the primal waters of what Bohm calls the implicate or enfolded order. When we experience a precognition or a psychic tunes in on a future event in our lives and we then act to change the outcome, what we’ve actually done is moved from one hologram to another.

This idea is similar to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, which says that we live within a web of infinite timelines. If an action you take has more than one possible outcome, then when you act or choose not to act, the universe splits off. The 1998 movie, Sliding Doors, plays with this idea. Gwyneth Paltrow is a young woman in London whose love life and career – and everything else – depends on whether or not she catches a train. We see the ramifications of both possibilities.

Frequency, a 2000 movie with Dennis Quaid, also plays with the Many Worlds idea. An anomalous radio signal links a father and son across thirty years and enables the son to save his father’s life. This interference creates a new timeline with unforeseen consequences.

So if a professional psychic sees you on a road trip where you’re stranded on a dark road in the pouring rain because of a flat tire or with steam pouring out from under the hood of your car, you can change that outcome. You take your car to a mechanic and have it checked out thoroughly. You buy new tires. You make sure that on your road trip, you drive only during the daylight hours.

The action you’ve taken causes reality to split off. In one reality, you may still get stranded on a dark road, but in another you arrive safely at your destination. Perhaps in a third reality, you get stranded during the day because you run out of gas or your vehicle develops some other problem. At some point, it all begins to sound like an episode from The Twilight Zone. But suppose it’s an accurate depiction of the nature of reality?

In 2011, an indie production company released a movie called Another Earth. It’s about the discovery of a second Earth that proves to be identical to this one, right down to the seven billion souls who inhabit it. It focuses on the story of a brilliant young woman whose passion is astronomy. On the day she learns she has been admitted to MIT, she celebrates with one drink too many and on the way home, hears about the discovery of Earth 2 on the radio. She inadvertently crashes into another car at the intersection and kills the driver’s wife and son and puts him in a coma.

The story follows her through prison and a release four years later. By now, scientists have communicated with their counterparts on Earth 2. They have learned that until Earth and its twin became aware of each other, everything between the two was identical. But now, certain small details have begun to deviate. And there is it, that moment, reality splitting off. Alternate worlds, alternate futures.

“…are the vagaries of life truly random or do we play a role in literally sculpting our own destiny?” asks author Michael Talbot.

Hollywood does a great job of depicting these ideas in visual stories. But they really hit home when they happen to you.

Christmas Eve or Christma Day, they’re the same for me. A time of fun, magic, surprises, love.

In my childhood, it meant a tree would go up in our living room, bright with lights and decorations, against a backdrop of the spectacular Mount Avila that dominated the Caracas skyline. It meant that my sister and I would often sneak out into the living room after our parents had gone to bed and peek at our presents and giggle and oh and ah about how beautifully our presents were wrapped. Our dog, a Dachshund named Cindy, usually came to inspect the gifts, too, because there were usually treats wrapped up for her.

For me, Christmas has never been a traditionally religious day, not even when my sister and I were dragged off to mass on Christmas Eve of Day. I liked the mass in Latin, such a mysterious and archaic language that no one but priests spoke. But I really resented being forced to sit there in an uncomfortable pew, listening to a sermon about sin and redemption. I rebelled early.

Even in the years before I met Rob, I always had a real tree wherever I lived, one that emitted that sweet scent of pine. I would experiment with lights and decorations and usually had a spot set for myself under the tree where I could read. Over the years, I started collecting special decorations – frogs, ornaments that had been in my family since my sister and I were kids, and then later, various types of ornaments collected in our travels.

When my first editor, Chris Cox, died, his sister sent me Chris’s special ornaments – a flute player from Colombia, a ceramic doll from Peru, and other ornaments that had been special to him. So every Christmas when I decorate our tree, I am reminded of Chris, my parents, my early childhood. There’s a silly snowman ornament on our tree which, I swear, must be 50 years old.Our newest special ornament is one that Megan painted of our Golden Retriever, Noah.

So for me, Christmas isn’t about religion or dogma,  sin and redemption and guilt. It’s not not about angry gods or Adam and Eve and how anyone was born to save us from ourselves. It’s about how we’re shaped by our experiences, our stories, and how those stories change over time. And it’s about love and gratitude that we feel for the people who are closest to us, that we feel for ourselves and for those who have gone before us and those who will come after us. It’s about loving life in all its glorious permutations.

So from our household to yours, may your Christmas and new year be joyful, prosperous, and abundant!

One of the most frequent questions Rob and I are asked is, Where do you get your ideas?

I like writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s answer to this. In her most recent book, Big Magic, she talks about her belief that ideas look for receptive writers. If you agree to explore the idea that finds you, then it’s a commitment. If you break the commitment, the idea goes looking for another writer who might be able to bring it to life. She provides several stunning examples from her own life that are convincing. Rather than reiterating what she has written (buy the book!), here’s a similar example of an idea that found me.

Back around the time of the new moon in Scorpio in November, my friend Nancy Pickard suggested that I try writing short stories for Ellery Queen Magazine or some of the other fiction magazines that still exist. The first thing I ever sold was a short story to Young Miss, a teen magazine with fiction geared toward women in high school. I was thrilled when I received my first check ever for writing anything – $350. Not long afterward, my first novel sold. I also wrote one other short story for a Dean Koontz collection. That one took place in the Amazon. Short stories are a much different form than novels, but I decided to try Nancy’s suggestion.

I ran over to Barnes & Noble and bought several short story magazines. I read three or four stories in each magazine, to get a sense of what they published. I decided to try Ellery Queen first. Nancy had told me they don’t publish much paranormal fiction, so I wrote a straight suspense fiction/mystery story and felt my mother peering over my shoulder as I went to work

It takes place in an Alzheimer’s unit, where my mother spent the last several years of her life. I used some of the characters I met in that twilight place. Alzheimer’s/dementia enabled me to play around with the nature of consciousness without calling it paranormal. I wrote the story in two days, in a kind of possessed state, then gave it to Rob. He made some great suggestions, particularly about the ending. I integrated them into the story and sent it off to Nancy.

Nancy is a versatile writer who’s a master at short fiction. She read it and loved it and introduced me to the editor. I submitted it a few days after the new moon in November. On December 9, two days before December’s new moon, the editor wrote and said she wanted to buy it. I was thrilled.

In between, I had a particularly vivid dream about my former fiction editor, Kate Duffy,  who died in 2009. In the years since her death, this is the first time I’ve dreamed about her. In the dream, we were talking and laughing about life and politics and books, just as we used to do when she was alive, and she referred to my short story. I don’t know if she used the title, but the implication was that I should write a novel based on the short story.

I had this dream the night before Megan and I left Atlanta, where we’d been visiting my sister. During the long drive back to Orlando, spurred on by nothing more than the vivid intensity of this dream, I figured out the plot, characters, the book. When I got home, I started making notes, then wrote a couple of sample chapters. I realized my short story was the basis of the present life where the dementia/Alzheimer’s patient –Rose  (my mother’s name) – is tuning in on a life in a vastly changed future. In this future life, the geography of the planet has been altered by climate change and people like Rose’s future self – Ellie – have developed psychic skills and abilities to deal with it.

So far, it feels good to me, something I can pick up between other projects and run with wherever it takes me.

Thanks, Kate! And thanks to Nancy Pickard and to Janet Hutchings, the editor of Ellery Queen. And yes, thanks to my mother, who is still peering over my shoulder, whispering, Do this. Do that. No, that’s not right. Yes, go there.

Her 99th birthday would have been December 23.