Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Noah, carrying someone else’s newspaper to the park

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Over the years, I’ve noticed that people often speak of themselves as “cat people” or “dog people.”  For years, I was one of those people who referred to myself as a “cat person.” I’ve had a cat – or several – ever since I was in college. My parents had a dog when I was growing up in Venezuela, a long-haired dachshund who was a sweetie, but she was their dog, not mine or my sister’s. 

When Rob and I got married, we each brought a cat to the marriage. My cat was Damian, whom we nicknamed Doolittle. I had rescued him from a shelter in Tallahassee when I was in graduate school, and he was with me for 16 or 17 years. Rob’s cat was a beautiful Persian, Shelley. 

When our daughter was born, we had Damian, Shelley, and Fox, a tiger cat, so Megan was always surrounded by cats. When she was seven or eight, Fox had passed on and Megan’s friend, Amber, asked if she wanted a golden retriever, Jessie, that she and her family were fostering. The owner had to give the dog up because their young son developed allergies to it, so Amber’s family had taken the dog in. Amber’s dad, a school cop, put Jessie through a training program to sniff out drugs in school lockers. Jessie had washed out of the program, so they couldn’t afford to keep her.

Megan and I drove over to Amber’s place one afternoon to meet Jessie. We decided to take her for a trial period to see how she acted with our cats – Tigerlily,  Whiskers, and Powder. Needless to say, she settled next to Rob and was with us for eleven years.  She developed a beautiful relationship with our white cat, Powder.

Jessie was one of those golden retrievers who loved everyone, unconditionally. Every human she met, she befriended. For her, there was no such thing as a human enemy. Nor were there any cat enemies. She was even friends with Kali, the dusky conure we had at the time.

Enemy simply wasn’t in Jessie’s vocabulary.

On a night in 2007 before we had to put Jessie down, Powder stood vigil. She knew her buddy was ailing. When we came home that afternoon without Jessie, Powder went looking for her.

Between June 2007 and November 2009, we were dogless. But we had three cats – Tigerlily, the oldest, Powder, and Whiskers, our tuxedo male. He was born in our backyard to a feral cat whose five kittens were rescued and brought to our back porch. The mother eventually joined her kittens on the porch to nurse and care for them. We gave four of the cats to “cat people” and kept Whiskers.

He was a character, always feisty yet loving, the king of the block who sometimes followed us when we rode bikes down to our neighborhood park with Jessie. One morning in late 2007, Whiskers suddenly began to convulse on Megan’s bed. Megan and I swept him up and sped to the vet’s – only to realize it was a Sunday.  We didn’t get to the emergency animal clinic in time  He died in Megan’s arms and is buried in our backyard with Kali, Tigerlily, and an idiosyncratic hamster, Garfield, who was part of our menagerie over the years.

After Jessie died, we were dogless for nearly two years. But Simba, an orange tabby, joined our crew, and is still with us.

Then in November 2009, it struck me that I missed having a dog. Cats don’t leap up and dance when you come home. They don’t meow. They don’t grab the nearest toy and race over to you and drop that toy at your feet.

So I started my Internet search for a golden retriever and ran across the South Florida Golden Retriever Rescue Center. And there, I found Presley, a nine-month old golden retriever male, a reddish golden, like Jessie. We visited him at the home that was fostering him, and two days later, the adoption was complete. He was brought to our house. That name, Presley, didn’t fit him. We renamed him Noah.

And he was big. And powerful.

Tigerlily fled into the backyard and stayed out there for two days, hiding in the bushes. Simba fled every time Noah entered a room where he happened to be. Powder made friends with him and eventually, Tigerlily realized Noah wasn’t going to eat her and came back inside. And Simba now just struts around Noah, with his tail twitching.

In 2011, Nika entered our lives – Megan’s first dog. And she’s a whole other story, and is probably Noah’s secret love.

And this post doesn’t include all the baby ducklings we rescued over the years!

The point, I think, is that no one is really “a cat person” or “a dog person” or even “a bird person.” We are “animal people.” Our lives are enriched and even defined by the animals who join us on our journey – and whose journey we join. Our moments with them and our memories of them are intimately connected to our moments and memories of family, friends, events all of the peaks and the lows and the plateaus of life.

Perhaps these animals are linked to our past lives. Perhaps they are our teachers- or we are theirs – life to life. Who knows?

What I do know is that without them  I would be diminished, less aware, less whole, less compassionate.

Years ago, my dad gave me several  excellent pieces of advice:

1. Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make

2. Don’t bother with people who are indifferent to animals because they ultimately will be indifferent to people as well

3. Love what you do, whatever it is

I think he was right on all counts.

There is something startling about a preying mantis as part of a synchronicity. This little creature is so strange looking, with an alien-like face, and its behaviors are just as weird. Not surprisingly, we don’t hear too many synchros involving this creature. In fact, the first one I ever read about happened to author and mythologist Joseph Campbell. It bore eerie parallels to the golden scarab synchro that launched Carl Jung’s study of synchronicity.

Campbell was at home on the fourteenth floor of the building where he lived in Manhattan. He’d been reading about Bushman mythology, specifically about the preying mantis, a hero symbol, and felt a sudden urge to open the window, which he rarely did. And there, on the rim of his window, stood a preying mantis. He said it was huge and peered right at him. “Its face looked like the face of a Bushman. It gave me the creeps!” Campbell wrote.

Now, really, what are the odds of a preying mantis on the rim of a window 14 stories up in Manhattan?  And what are the odds that Campbell would be reading about this creature and Bushman mythology moments before he opened the window and saw the mantis?

Recently, we heard another preying mantis story. We were on Daniel Ott’s live podcast, and he mentioned a preying mantis experience he’d had and asked if we thought it was a synchro. We replied it was definitely a synchro, one of those strange synchronicities that seem to reflect our immediate environment. I asked him to give us some details:

“It was the middle of summer and I was mowing through four foot high weeds on my garden tractor. So the weeds were about shoulder height. It was a beautiful clear day in the middle of summer.

“I had a distinct unction to turn off the tractor, stop where I was and pray. I don’t think the prayers were for anything specific, but a strong desire of thankfulness for being alive pulsed through my being. I felt a very close connection at that time to the Great Spirit, as if it was a time and a place where He was actually listening. Some might consider that on the order of a divine appointment.

“As my prayer concluded I opened up my eyes, looked to my right and there on a very tall weed, eye level, was a very large six inch preying (praying) mantis, his head turned, looking right at me.

“He wasn’t there when I began. Its presence there and the way it was looking at me confirmed for me that it was a signature of the presence of the Great Spirit.”

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Pretty cool.The synchro was a play on words and an accurate reflection of what was going on at the time.

Mike Clelland sent us the following story from his Hidden Experience blog about a dream featuring an aggressive bear. When I read it in e-mail, it was the third reference to bears I’d encountered that morning.

First, while meditating shortly after getting up, a memory from long ago popped into my mind. A friend and I were camping in Rocky Mountain National Park when a bear entered the camp at night and ripped a hole in our tent, trashed the campsite, then fortunately left us alone.

A couple of hours later, at the gym, one of my yoga students told me she was leaving for North Carolina for the summer. I asked where she resided in N.C. and she mentioned a rural town outside of Boone. She described the natural beauty of the area and added that there were bears in the nearby woods.

So when I read Mike’s e-mail about this dream, I knew I should post it here. Actually, it was the owl that was both in and out of the dream, as you’ll see, that fascinated Mike. And, appropriately, I had copied a photo of the above mural, featuring an owl, a couple of days ago to save for a future post.

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“The dream started in a bland suburban setting, and I was standing out in the driveway of a house that I assume was mine. The other homes were spaced sort of far apart, it was summer and the lawns were green. The sun was low in the sky and everything was calm.

“Then I saw there was a grizzly bear poking around on the lawn across the street! At first I didn’t feel nervous or threatened, it was an amazing sighting. Then I realized this big thing was sort of lumbering towards me, and I retreated into the garage.

“I went into the house through the inside garage door, but I realized there were a bunch of doors from the garage into the house (I think as many as six), and they were all slightly open. I quickly went into one as the giant bear entered the garage. I locked it from the inside, but typical of this kind of anxiety dream the whole thing felt awkward and frustrating, I needed to force the bolt in place.

“I went to each door, one by one, and locked it from the inside, and each door was progressively more flimsy and each lock was harder to latch. I could tell the bear was right outside each of these doors. Just like me, it was going from door to door, and each was just a little bit open as I got to it, so I could see the bear as I pulled it closed.

“Eventually, the doors would just barely close, as if they were sized wrong for the frame. The locks were broken, and parts would fall off as I tried to get them to work.

“The final door was nothing more than a small sheet of thin plywood, far too small for the door frame. It was barely hanging in place on deteriorating hinges. The plywood was warped and rotten, and I could see the bear over the top and sides of it, slowly coming towards me, then his big paws were reaching through the open spaces as I frantically tried to somehow get it locked.

“Suddenly I was hearing the hooting cry of an owl, steady and clear. I could hear it as this bear was pulling at this thin sheet of plywood with it’s claws.

“It was at that point I woke up, but the hooting continued. I lay there in bed, with the pale light of dawn easing through the only window in my bedroom. I was hearing the unmistakable call of a great horned owl, and it must have been on the telephone pole right outside my window.

“I lay awake for a long time, deeply impressed at the symbolism of the dream, and that a real owl would invade my dream-scape just as a bear was about to pull down the final flimsy barrier between me and it. (Bear? Barrier?)

“I have lived in this cabin for over 20 years, and I’ve occasionally heard an owl, and very rarely seen one nearby. But starting at the end of March of this year, I’ve been hearing them outside my bedroom window and they’ve been waking me up, something that’s never happened in the decades I’ve called this my home.”

This evening, Rob and I watched NBC’s anchor, Brian Williams, interview Edward Snowden, the first interview for American TV that Snowden has done. And he came across exactly as Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the story, described him in his book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. He seemed completely at peace with what he’d done.

Snowden was articulate, calm, pensive, and utterly convincing in his reasons for having taken thousands of NSA documents and fleeing the country with them. As he noted, sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break the law. And, according to the U.S. government he definitely broke the law, has been called a traitor for “compromising the security of the U.S,” and there were outcries that he should return to this country and be tried for what he did.

But if Snowden returned to the U.S., he would end up like Bradley Manning, the soldier who turned over documents to Julian Assange and was sentenced to 35 years. He would be instantly silenced, like Bradley. He’s a whistleblower, not a traitor.

“Can you show that I have damaged my government?” he said to Williams.

Williams asked what his life was like as an exile in Russia. Snowden commented on the irony that he had ended up in Russia, a country not exactly known for democracy. It sounded like the dark synchro trickster was at work with that one.

One of the most interesting segments of the interview involved a phone. Williams remarked that he’d read that a simple cell phone could be turned on remotely by intelligence agencies in the U.S. China, Russia. He brought out his “burner” phone that he’d carried to Russia with him to cover the Olympics. A “burner” is typically used by drug dealers.

Williams admitted that he’d used the phone once to check on the score for a sports game in the U.S. Snowden looked at the phone and sort of laughed. “It’s an expensive burner. But any intelligence agency can own that phone as soon as it connects with their network,” And the fact that Williams had used it to check on the score for a sports game would tell any intelligence agency quite a bit about his lifestyle, his psychological profile, who he is. That’s part of what systems analysts do.

The capabilities of the NSA are uncontrolled and unregulated, Snowden said, and the extent to which this appears to be true is staggering. A recent article in the Huffington Post certainly underscored that point. And according to Greenwald’s book, for a one-month period beginning on March 8, 2013, BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, one of the NSA’s data mining programs, collected data on more than 97 billion emails and 124 billion phone calls from around the world.

When I first saw those numbers, I thought, well, there’s no way they can sift through all that data in this lifetime, so my privacy is safe. But what do I have to hide? Zip. Nothing. But that really isn’t the point.  Even though the NSA’s focus is defined by statute on “foreign intelligence,” some of the documents Snowden took clearly show otherwise. On April 25, 2013, a top secret order from the FISA court was issued, “compelling Verizon to turn over to the NSA all information about its American customers’ telephone calls,” Greenwald wrote.

This bulk telephone collection program was just one of the Orwellian atrocities established under the Bush administration and expanded under Obama. PRISM collects data directly from the servers of the Internet’s largest companies. MUSCULAR was a surveillance program intended to invade private networks of Google and Yahoo.

“Taken in its entirety,” Greenwald writes, “the Snowden archive led to an ultimate simple conclusion: the U.S. government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide…The agency is devoted to one overarching missions: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp.”

And it’s all done in the name of the war against terrorism, as a result of 9-11. Snowden notes that he was inspired by Obama’s call for change. But the change never happened.

I voted for Obama – twice. I believed in his call for change. I believed what he said. Our situation now would have been far worse under either McCain/Palin (wink, wink)  or  Romney/Ryan (Atlas Shrugged is my bible, Ayn Rand is my god) but none of that excuses Obama’ expansion of Bush’s programs. None of his rhetoric explains why no one in the Bush administration was charged with war crimes. Snowden notes some of this in his interview with Williams and Greenwald discusses it in his book, which reads like a political thriller.

Snowden’s leaks caused not only a political firestorm, but triggered conversations nationwide about privacy in the age of the Internet. About how the world has changed since 9-11. Conversation is good; it bring the darkness out into the open and demands an explanation.

But the bottom line is that Orwell’s novel, 1984, was right, just 30 years too early. If you or I run a stoplight now, a camera mounted above the road records it and in a couple of weeks, we receive a ticket in the mail. If I Google you or you Google me, you can find out if I have an arrest record, my marital status, the names of my parents, where I went to college, where I was born, and whether I own my home. If you’re robbed in the parking lot of your mall, it will be on a security tape somewhere.

Our daughter’s twenty something friends routinely run Google checks on guys they meet to find out if they’re who they say they are. In her generation, you become a couple via Facebook – and break up the same way. Publicly, explicitly.

I think of Robert DeNiro in the comedy Meet the Frockers. He plays an anxious father who looks at his daughter’s fiancé (Ben Stiller) and brings his index and third fingers just under his eyes, then points them at Stiller. I’m watching you.

 Hello, Big Brother.

WE HOPE YOU JOIN US TONIGHT ON DARK MATTER RADIO WITH MARK JOHNSON, from 9-10 PM EDT. WE’LL BE TALKING (LIVE) ABOUT OUR FAVORITE TOPIC- SYNCHRONICITY!

AND HERE’S A LINK FOR THE LIVE CHAT ROOM DURING THE SHOW.

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Imagine it. You’re George Colby, a guy in upstate New York in the late 1800s, and your spirit guide – Seneca – directs you to establish a Spiritualist camp in the wilds of Florida. So what do you do? Well, you head out for Florida, of course.

Back then, Florida was a swamp, a mosquito haven, a place of sweltering heat and wilderness so extreme that unless you had some landmarks, you would count yourself among the lost and the missing. But Seneca had given Colby some landmarks – seven hills, a lake…  And in 1875, Colby arrived and five years later, he filed for a homestead of nearly 75 acres.

Today, Cassadaga is divided into two distinct areas and the dividing line is Cassadaga Road. Everything south of the road is the Spiritualist camp. For more than a century, the “real” mediums lived in the camp. They were supposedly tested by the association for their mediumship skills, their ability to communicate with the dead. Psychics and mediums who practiced on the other side of the road were supposedly phonies, just living there for the spillover gravy train. This attitude and the border persist to the present.

On the porch of the Cassadaga Hotel, the main landmark at the border of the camp, you can see the buildings on the other side of the road where the non-camp psychics live and work. It’s like standing at the border between two countries. The people in these two countries speak the same language, share the same customs and belief systems, but this phony border separates them.

I’ve been visiting  Cassadaga since 1975. In all these years, all these readings, I have found three mediums who were the real McCoy – Wilbur Hull, a paraplegic who first read for me in 1975; Don Fleck, who read for Rob and me in the mid-1980s; and Hazel West Burley.  The rest of my readings in this strange town have been with psychics who live on the other side of Cassadaga Road and they were every bit as good at the three mediums who lived within the camp.  

This border has persisted for more than a century, but a subtle shift may be underway. Here’s why.

Within the camp, there are several natural lakes – Colby Lake and Spirit Pond. In the past when we have visited, the lakes were a dominant presence in the community, filled with water, a gorgeous sparkling blue that attracted all sorts of wildlife – frogs, wading birds, eagles, rodents that lived in the lushness that surrounded the lake.  If water represents spirit, then Spirit Pond was its paragon. It seemed to whisper, I represent the veil between worlds, and here in Cassadaga, that veil is quite thin…  At the shore of Spirit Pond, there’s a pagoda where you can sit and take in the beauty of the lake and the surrounding area. 

The problem is that Spirit Pond and Colby Lake are little more than mud holes now. The docks of private homes on the lakes are now high and dry, the frogs that used to croak in the evening have mostly vanished. Yes, part of the problem is a lack of rain. But there’s something else at work here. If you look at this symbolically, it’s as if the spirit of Cassadaga  as it has been defined for more than a century – a Spiritualist community where the living commune with the dead – is changing, shifting.

Several weekends ago, we stayed at a B&B in nearby Lake Helen,  but spent most of our day exploring Cassadaga. We walked way out into what used to be Spirit Pond, and I was struck by the symbolism, that Cassadaga, like the rest of the world, is in the midst of a paradigm shift.Here’s a photo of the dry lake.

I was thinking about this as I sat on the porch of our B&B Saturday evening and heard and then spotted an eagle moving between the trees.   

Esoterically, eagles are about seeing the larger picture. What is that larger picture for the Spiritualist community of Cassadaga? What if  this silly border – didn’t exist? After all, the veil between the living and the dead can be penetrated from either side of the road.  

It will be interesting to see what happens in Cassadaga in the years ahead.

Our friend and fellow writer, Nancy Pickard, sent us the following synchro about the fate of an abandoned baby goose.

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Last night, I spent a couple of hours reading a wonderful book,  Providence of a Sparrow by Chris Chester, about a couple who rescued a bird. Shortly after I put the book down, my son, Nick, called to say, “Mom! Alex and I just rescued a bird!” Alex is his fiancée, and they’re getting married on June 21. The photo at the top of the post is Alex with Zazu, the little goose they rescued.

They were driving along the street in front of their apartment complex when a baby Canada goose ran under the car! Nick braked, scared he had run over it. They stopped right in the middle of traffic and got out to look. No bird under the tires. They looked around, and there was the baby, who had run to a curb and was trying to get over it, but it was too high.

Nick and Alex picked it up, and then parked and went looking for its family. They did find a goose family, but the geese wanted nothing to do with them. And when they tried walking away, to see if baby would go after the geese, of course he ran right after Nick and Alex.

So they took him to their apartment.

I went over to visit last night and this morning. Oh, he was so cute. He loved to cuddle, and his favorite thing was to lie pressed up close to your neck, snuggle his head under your collar, and sleep on your shoulder while you held his feet up with one hand. But he wouldn’t eat or drink.

Eventually, by comparing photos, Alex figured out he must be only a day or two old, which made not eating okay because he was still full from yolk. She theorized he’d been a late-hatcher and had gotten left behind. They named him Zazu.

This afternoon, they took him to a wildlife rehab center, where they confirmed he was, indeed, only a couple of days old. They put him under a heat lamp immediately, and his mom and dad left, feeling sad, but happy he would now be fine.

It’s been a sweet little episode, but so weird that I was reading about the couple rescuing a bird, only to receive a call about “my” couple rescuing a bird.

I was just now watching short vids of the bird and man who star in the bird book I am reading. I took a break to play Words With Friends and started a new game. The only word I could spell from the letters? AVIAN!

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Geese mate for life, so I take this as a great sign for Nick and Alex!

 The other night, we were guests on Daniel Ott’s interesting live podcast.  In the fifty plus radio shows we’ve done for our last two synchronicity books, his audience asked some of the most provocative questions.  I jotted down some of them and glanced over my notes later on.

Is déjà vu related to synchronicity?

Are fractals in nature connected to synchronicity?

Can sex trigger a synchronicity?

Is luck a form of  synchronicity?

Is synchronicity connected to fate or destiny?

When you have a synchronicity, does it mean you’re on the right path?

Is synchronicity the devil’s work?

Is synchronicity a sign from God?

Is synchronicity mentioned in the Bible?

Are all synchronicities good?

Can aliens control or generate synchronicity?

I realized that I although I have a loose checklist about what I believe about synchronicity, I need to write it out and have it handy for these shows. So here’s my checklist. It’s certainly not definitive. Feel free to add to it!

– Synchronicity may be the voice of the higher self- or of God, Buddha, whatever your spiritual beliefs.

– If we are multidimensional beings, then déjà vu could be one form of synchronicity.

– I don’t know if synchronicity is mentioned in the Bible, but signs are. And synchronicity is all about signs.

– No, all synchros aren’t good. Some are warnings to follow – or not – a particular path. Some are dark tricksters, which are often seen in mass media events. This type of synchro seems to be designed to shake us awake, to make us more aware.

– Synchronicity is at work in spirit communication. Some of the best examples are found in the white feather stories on Mike Perry’s blog.

– As for the devil and synchronicity…well, I think that depends on your belief system. If you believe in a devil, then the darker synchros may be interpreted in that light.

– Just because you have a synchronicity, it doesn’t mean you should follow that guidance. Sometimes, synchros seem to present options.

–       Luck versus synchronicity. We addressed this issue in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity  and did a post about it.  In essence, luck is a fortunate synchronicity unless the adjective ‘bad’ comes before it. Luck is something that appears unplanned, outside of cause and effect, hence, synchronicity. But here’s the difference. Imagine jotting down six numbers and they turn out to be the ones that win the powerball lottery the next day. That’s synchronicity. But if you bought the ticket and used the numbers, that’s luck. It took action before the synchronicity turned into something incredibly lucky.

–       Synchronicity & fate/destiny. This is a sticky question because I believe that we are beings endowed with complete free will. I believe that we – our souls, our higher selves, whatever you want to call it – choose everything from our parents and the circumstances of our births to the experiences we have as physical beings. I believe that we create our reality from the inside out. And yet, astrology, through a point called a Vertex, suggests that we before we’re born, we make certain agreements to meet up with someone, to have a particular experience.  But our free will ultimately decides whether we keep this appointment or not.

– Synchronicities happen more frequently when we’re aware of them and that often begins when our lives are in the grips of major transitions – falling in love, marriage, divorce, birth, death, a professional leap, a move, a change in financial status- i.e., BIG changes.

-Sex or any intense emotional/physical experience can trigger synchronicity.

– Can aliens or inter-dimensional beings control and generate synchros? According to contactee Sandy,  the answer is a resounding yes.

– Synchronicity is an interface between the living and the dead; between the face we represent to the world and who we are in the deeper recesses of our souls; between us and the  underlying reality that permeates our lives; between the conscious and the unconscious.

Synchronicity is the most obvious manifestation of the ways we are connected, one to another, you to me, to you, to you and you, on up the line to more than 7 billion souls. Synchronicity reminds us we are all in this together.

In The Synchronicity Highway, Chapter 1, The Synchro Travelers, begins this way:

When you venture forth on a journey, a trek that takes you out of your normal routines and concerns, your consciousness has greater freedom to explore. Your comfort ones are gone, your kitchen, your bed and your pillows are memories. You’re in new, unfamiliar territory and must confront who you are.

That condition is especially true during lengthy trips, when travel turns into journey. Not being anchored in your usual world can stimulate stress, but also synchronicity. Here’s a story that perfectly fits what we were talking about in the that chapter. It’s from Steve Finegan, who has a blog called ‘Achieving Wow!’

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“When I was 19, I spent the summer trekking through Europe with my girlfriend. It was great, for a while. But throw two kids together for a few months, traveling on filthy buses and trains, frequently sleeping out in the open, often in the rain, and never-ever getting enough to eat, and you build up a certain amount of tension. Anyway, this tension mounted, until one day, riding a bus through Munich, we just stopped speaking to each other.

“Eventually, we got off and started walking. Twenty minutes and many twists and turns later, I heard my girlfriend groan. I turned. She was sitting on the curb, her head between her knees, sobbing. She’d left her little blue travel case on the bus and had been too tired to miss it. That was it. The last straw. We had it out right there and wound up breaking up.

“Determined at least to make an attempt to find her case before going our separate ways, we found a police station and went in, planning to report it lost, even though we knew the odds of getting it back were zero. But inside the station, we found a woman beside herself with excitement. She waved us outside. A bus had pulled up. We made a dash for it. The doors hissed opened, and there was my girlfriend’s case, sitting beside the driver.

“He smiled and pointed at it. “You lucky, ja!” In the rush of relief, the tension broke, and my girlfriend and I made up on the spot. Our relationship wasn’t to last, but we finished our travels through Europe together without having another argument. The experience had changed us.”

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 Just reading Steve’s story reminded me of past journeys to foreign lands where new and unexpected experiences – some good, some not-so-good – occurred on a daily basis. A big part of those trips were the friendships made, short-lived, but intense – one following another. And as a lone traveler, spells of loneliness. Some of those stories are included in that chapter of the book.

THIS EVENING, FROM 8:15 TO 10:00 EDT TIME, WE’LL BE TALKING WITH DANIEL OTT ABOUT THE SYNCHRONICITY HIGHWAY. HOPE YOU’LL JOIN US!

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For Rob’s birthday, we headed north to Orlando for the weekend to celebrate with our daughter. The plan was that we would spend Friday night at Megan’s place, then drive over to Cassadaga on Saturday and back to Orlando on Sunday for one of Megan’s Paint Nites.

The highlight for Saturday was lunch with Sandy, a contactee,  and her husband, George. We’ve written about Sandy before and have been doing synchronized meditations with her once a week or so, a kind of experiment in high strangeness.  She’s a retired veterinarian whose specialty was animal neuroscience. Her encounters have never involved the classical abduction scenario, medical experimentation, or being taken into a craft.

Some of her experiences of these beings – whom she refers to as energies – sound utterly terrifying to me, but over the years she has learned to control her fear and now works consciously with these entities.  She has names for them – Watcher, Marshal, John –  which makes it easier for her to distinguish them in her journals.

George called around 11 a.m. Saturday to let us know he and Sandy had arrived in Cassadaga.  I explained we were getting off to a late start but would arrive 30 or 40 minutes later. I called them after we’d checked into the B&B where we were staying. George said that Sandy was having a reading and explained where he was waiting.  It turned out that Sandy was having a reading with psychometrist Kathy Adams, who we have also written about before. It wasn’t a synchro; we had told her we were going to get readings from Kathy. That said…

It was a Saturday, one of the busiest days in Cassadaga. In the past, we’ve had to wait for readings with Kathy because she had so many clients. But this Saturday was different. Rob went in while Sandy was still getting a reading, and sat in the waiting room. George and I waited  in the garden with Nika and Noah. Megan and her friend, Sommer, arrived and joined us in the garden. It turned out that 5 of us, one after another, got in to see Kathy for readings.

This was so unusual that I kept wondering what was going on. Even though other people arrived and could have entered Kathy’s waiting room at any time, they didn’t. For whatever reason, they walked on. I knew that Sandy and George had a limited amount of time to spend in Cassadaga and, on any other Saturday, we might have spent all that time waiting for our turn with Kathy. It was as if an energy shift had occurred and that shift deflected interruptions of what was apparently some sort of flow the six of us had hooked into. I took it as a positive sign.

After our readings, we headed over to the Cassadaga Hotel for lunch, and ate out on the porch.

The conversation, naturally, quickly turned to contact and synchronicity.  Here’s a cluster of hummingbird synchros Sandy experienced that proved to be quite powerful – and healing.

In August of 2013, she was worried that her dog, Nellie, might be ailing. She was twelve and a half, wasn’t eating well, just wasn’t herself. One night, Sandy had a magnificent dream about two hummingbirds hovering around her mailbox, facing each other. They were larger than normal hummingbirds and she sensed they were mates. In the dream, their wings came together to form a heart shape.

A couple of days after she’d had the dream, she and George were sitting in their yard and a hummingbird appeared, larger than most hummingbirds, just as in her dream. “Hummingbirds are winter residents in Florida and it was mid-August; I have no idea what a hummingbird was doing here at this time of year,” she says. “To me, the hummingbird represents angelic energy, joy.”

A few days later, she was downloading songs that a friend had sent her years ago – 200 songs, odds and ends. She figured she should get them into the music file on her computer. While the songs were downloading, she noticed a hummingbird out in the garden and went over to the window to get a closer look. But it had flown away. She turned back to her computer and saw that the download had stalled. The song that refused to download? Seals & Croft’s Hummingbird. 

She snapped a screenshot of the song refusing to download:

The next day, Sandy passed a road she’d never seen before and glanced at the sign: Hummingbird Lane.

It was now abundantly clear to her that she was in the grips of synchronicity and she felt it was related to Nellie’s  deterioration. Sandy checked her over – and found a large mass in her abdomen. She took the dog to her vet, and sure enough, he identified it as well. He didn’t think Nellie was a candidate for surgery and not long afterward, Sandy and George had to have her put down.

Sandy understood that the cluster of hummingbird synchros had been alerting her to Nellie’s condition. Hummingbirds not only symbolize joy, but in some indigenous traditions are considered to be messengers from the spirit world. “The synchro softened the blow of her passing, and helped to heal our broken hearts.”

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Rob will be posting about a conversation he had with George, about a UFO sighting – and possibly an abduction – that he experienced. There was lot going on at this seemingly casual lunch!