Effects of BP Oil Spill

When we first saw this photo, we thought it might be a gravel or cobblestone road. It’s dead fish at the mouth of the Mississippi River. It may well be a side effect of the massive BP oil spill. The original story is here.

A dead whale and thousands more dead fish were found near a Venice shipping canal. There’s not much else to say about a photo like this.
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We’re at a book conference and then on to Cassadaga tomorrow, but we’ll check in when we’ve got Internet connections. We’re hoping for some  good orb photos in Cassadaga. Or, even better, some ghost photos.

Posted in BP oil spill | 8 Comments

Nick and the Cars

 This story came from Ray Getzinger, who comments frequently on our blog. It’s about his grandson, Nick, and perhaps it will serve as a warning to all of us to pay attention to synchronistic patterns that unfold in our lives.
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On July 24, 2005, Nick was a passenger in a car going 100 MPH that hit a breakaway pole so hard the top came off the car and the bumper was tattooed with the license plate number. Nick walked away from that tangled mess of metal in the photo with just a few bruises and cuts and a sore shoulder. The driver was drunk and drag racing with another car. In this accident, Nick was the least injured. Here’s the bumper tattoo:

 Five years later, around another holiday – Labor Day – Nick was also the passenger
 in a car that was doing 60 MPH as it made a 10 MPH curve. This time, Nick wasn’t
as lucky. He lost a large chunk of his scalp, right down to the lining of his
skull. He’s out of the hospital now – the same hospital he went to after the first accident – and and his dressings are being changed by the mother of a friend who is a wound care nurse. In this accident, he was the most badly injured.

“I think that something like this series of accidents needs to be told as a warning
 to those who just don’t get how serious being on the roads is,” Ray writes.

The patterns are remarkable:
Both accidents happened on or around a holiday
Nick was a passenger in both accidents
He was treated at the same hospital both times
Both accidents resulted from excessive speed
Whatever Nick was supposed to learn with the first accident, where he walked away
 from it and was the least injured of those involved, apparently wasn’t heeded,
so the second time, the lesson was more forceful.

Posted in car accidents, patterns | 19 Comments

Hank and Judy, Photographers

                                       soul cards

 This synchro came from an old college friend, Judy, a professional photographer in Manhattan. For 35 years, she was involved with Hank, also a professional photographer. Their relationship went through various permutations over the years, but always, they were close. Hank died last year and Judy says she “feel lost without him.”

As the nosy person that I am, I asked Judy if she had felt Hank around since he had died. Her email pegs some of the elements of spirit contact. The Linda referred to in the post is my former college roommate and a mutual friend. She figured into another post, The Ghost and the Straight Pins.
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Hank died on the 23rd of October, 2009.  The 23rd has never been a good number for me for lots of reasons.  Oh, you bet I’ve heard from him, just not lately.

He was a photographer and there were three “blinking” incidents with lights.  The first one was a few nights after he died.  My sister gave me this lamp filled with seashells many years ago and it always reminded me of the summers that Hank and I spent on Martha’s Vineyard.  It was before Linda had a place there.  Anyway, I know I turned it off before I fell asleep because I always do, turn the light off and then fall asleep with the TV on.  Sometime around midnight the light turned itself on and woke me .  No, I’m not making this up.  It had never done this before and I knew it was Hank.

The second incident was after cleaning out his place.  I decided to make a time capsule from a briefcase that my dad had made for him when we were going together.  It was one of my last days there and I was so happy because I had found letters, old photos, some of his favorite shots (business and personal), things from Yosemite, a letter from his sister who passed away from pancreatic cancer, etc.  Another photographer was there with me that day to help me finish cleaning out so I have a witness for this one.

On the bulletin board over my desk was a pin that said “Hank’s soda.”  He loved Hank’s soda and sent out cases of it to family and friends for Christmas about 5 years ago.  They sent him a t shirt and the button for ordering so much and the button was on the bulletin board for 4 years or so.  I decided to put it in the time capsule and when I did so, it started to blink!  I didn’t even know there was a little light on it.  I called Mel to take a look and he said it was just because I touched it.  But it blinked until I closed it two days later to send   to the place where Hank’s ashes were going to be buried.  The day before his memorial, we opened the case again. It wasn’t blinking. You actually had to latch the little pin on the back to make it blink.  It still gives me chills to think of that day.  I know and am SURE it was him.  Call me crazy…

Are you still with me ?  Okay, the third incident involved a clock that his upstairs neighbor made for him.  Peter was an engineer and loved to create gadgets.  He made Hank this cool clock out of copper with tiny lights that blinked at the 12, 3, 6 and 9 o’clock hours.  It was not blinking while we were cleaning out the studio and I tried to give it to friends and/or sell it and no one wanted it.  I had a lot of stuff but took it to my apartment and hung it next to the door.  I swear I didn’t change the batteries because it kept perfect time and I thought the blinking mechanism had worn out.

One of the first evenings after I handed over the keys to Hank’s studio I had a really bad night, missing Hank, crying and hardly sleeping.  You know how it is after you lose a close loved one.  Anyway, as I was leaving for work it started blinking.  Really, honestly, truly.  It seemed to blink when I was leaving or when I came home.  Eventually it stopped and even though I’ve put in new batteries it won’t blink now.  Do you think that means he has moved on?
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Judy’s story seems to personify spirit contact.

Posted in judy and hank, spirit contact | 12 Comments

Hugh Williams and the great escape

Synchro detective Jim Banholzer has scooped out another good one. This time he has pointed us to a very unusual synchronicity that was first published in Incredible Coincidences, by Alan Vaughn.

“On Dec. 5, 1664, the first date in the greatest series of coincidences in history occurred. On this date, a ship in the Menai Strait, off north Wales, sank with 81 passengers on board. There was one survivor–a man named Hugh Williams. On the same date in 1785, a ship sank with 60 passengers aboard. There was one survivor–a man named Hugh Williams. On the very same date in 1860, a ship sank with 25 passengers on board. There was one survivor–a man named Hugh Williams.”

We don’t know if that’s the greatest series of coincidences in history, but it’s certainly ranks up there with Edgar Alan Poe’s astonishing fiction to real life cannibalism story and Morgan Robertson’s fiction to real life ship-sinking tale in his novel Futility.

Jim’s e-mail also included one of the most unique expamples of  stichomancy, which is about posing questions and randomly pointing at a page in a dictionary or another book for an answer.Sometimes the answers are quite startling. In this case, a fly chose the word and it was synchronicity.

This one was reported by Leah Garchik, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Garchik wrote that a  woman named Charlotte Muse and her co-workers were chasing a fly around their office swatting at it with a rolled up newspaper. The fly finally landed on an open dictionary and someone slammed shut. When the dictionary was opened, everyone was amazed to see that that fly had been squashed against  the word ‘housefly.’

Posted in Hugh Williams, Poe | 6 Comments

White Feathers

Recently, we’ve run across a number of white feather synchros related to spirit contact. This phenomenon first came to our attention months ago, through Mike Perry’s excellent blog on synchronicity. The other day, he posted another synchro involving a white feather that was particularly moving, about his daughter’s death years ago. Later that day I remarked to Rob that I couldn’t imagine losing a child. Parents are not supposed to outlive their kids. We’ve also run across stories about white feathers appearing during major transitions in our lives – moves, job changes, marriage/divorce.

 I’m wondering if white feathers are an evolving archetype for spirit contact. I don’t know if Jung talked specifically about evolving archetypes. But it seems logical this would happen as we become more connected as a species, a planet, as a mass consciousness.I think it was Butternut Squash who posed an intriguing question:

Are we  actually now seeing the same thing, or are we learning from each other to interpret in a similar way? 

Does something become an archetype when it reaches a tipping point? Does the Internet make this happen more rapidly, because of the luminal speeds at which we communicate?

In Malcomb Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, he defines tipping points as “the levels for which the momentum for change become unstoppable.” It’s the “moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” It’s when you utter a few words and a complete stranger from another continent snaps his fingers and says, “I know exactly what you mean.” Or: “The same thing happened to me.”

I think white feathers have reached that tipping point. They aren’t the only way that the dead communicate with the living, but perhaps they are some sort of universal symbol that says, I am here. I love you. I am watching over you…

Posted in spirit contact, white feathers | 20 Comments

Presidential doodles


Here’s a fascinating post by Jeff Wells that appeared on his cerebral and right-brain blog, Rigorous Intuition, in 2006.
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You’ve seen the story of the presidential doodles. There are many odd and revealing examples, such as GHW Bush’s “any more dead ones?” (ABC News says his sad and teary face “gives the note a bit of melancholy, or maybe humor,” appropriately ambiguous for a man of shimmering surface and black depths), but the one perhaps receiving the most notice hasn’t even been reproduced online. It’s a page from John F Kennedy, on which he’s written, repeatedly, “9-11,” and underscored the word “conspiracy” next to it.

Paul Joseph Watson wondered whether this was some kind of “inside joke” or a “hat tip to the 9/11 truth movement” before concluding “one thing’s for sure – it’s weird.” I’d say rather that two things are certain: it’s both weird, and it’s not.

ABC explains the numbers, without accounting for the word “conspiracy,” by saying that “It turns out that was the tally of a committee vote, not a foreshadowing of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” But that’s a misapprehension of foreshadowing, which always carries within it a duality, referencing both a prosaic explanation and a supra-prosaic that is revealed only in hindsight. If this were, say, a Richard Condon novel and not living history, and so foreshadowing just a literary device, there would be no dispute that Kennedy’s doodle fit the definition. It’s disputed now because people object to the impression that we may be the characters instead of the authors of our lives.

Kennedy’s doodle didn’t “predict” 9/11any more than The Coup’s cover art or The Lone Gunman‘s pilot episode, but all three are suggestive of a grander conspiracy – the grandest – that encompasses all of human history. I’m talking about the conspiracy of consciousness. That by encoding the narrative of history with artful gestures of interpretation – the things that make us go hmmm – consciousness conspires to bring us to comprehension.

Consider for a moment the familiar JFK and Abraham Lincoln coincidences, how their stories seem to enfold, and unfold, one another. Such details as Lincoln’s election to congress in 1846, JFK’s exactly 100 years later, and each entering the presidency 14 years after that; Lincoln’s having a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy’s a secretary Lincoln, and each being succeeded by a man named Johnson; both were shot in the head on a Friday, Lincoln by a man with three names born in 1839 who fled a theatre to a warehouse, while Kennedy’s alleged three-named gunman, born in 1939, fled a warehouse to a theatre; “Kennedy” and “Lincoln” each contain seven letters, and John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, 15 – you know the list, and how it goes on.

Of course, a grab bag of coincidence a century apart should defy the conventions of even the loosest conspiracy model. But in a holographic model, things change. It is consciousness – not individual consciousness, but the collective consciousness of all life – that draws locality and temporality out of the wave pattern of higher vibrations that form the holographic universe and constructs the space and time setting for our life narrative. And consciousness is a storyteller, employing literary devices such as foreshadowing as well as metaphor in our waking curiosity and dream state, while some astral project and remote view, and as plant shamans, with heads full of snakes, explore innerspace via such gateways as DMT and ayahuasca.

JFK didn’t “plan” 9/11, or have “inside info” as I’ve seen some Randiesque skeptics sarcastically assert. But repeating patterns, even across centuries or great distances, may still evidence a conspiracy. But the better kind: one of undifferentiated consciousness provoking us within the continuum towards greater reading comprehension.

Perhaps to help it write a happier ending.

Posted in 9-11, JFK | 13 Comments

Reminder: 10 Billion Beats Tonight

Ten billion beats is a global event that will use drumming to focus a collective positive intention around the world. It’s tonight at 7 PM. We had forgotten about it and just got an email reminding us! More information is here.

Posted in 10 billion beats | 10 Comments

The Archetype That Is Dexter

The other night, we went to a local bookstore to see Jeff Lindsay – who created one of the strangest archetypes in modern fiction. Dexter. Even Jung would be floored by Dexter: blood splatter expert with Miami Dade police department who is also a serial killer. Not just your ordinary serial killer (if there is any such thing) but a killer with a code that was handed down to him by his father, who was a cop.

Jeff tapped into the fascination with serial killers. Who the hell are they? What motivates them? What kind of darkness spawns them? But he went even farther. He gave his serial killer a family and the ghost of his father, his mentor. He gave Dexter a sharp-edged sister with her own issues. He created some idiosyncratic secondary characters. And above all, he gave his series humor.

Archetypes, another one of Jung’s inventions, represent our common experiences as human beings. When used effectively in movies and novels, they stay with us. Dexter is a keeper. He appeals to our dark side – but also our human side. He’s a monster, but he has a code. He kills with impunity – but the monsters he kills are worse than he is. Jeff has also given Dexter a rich family background, which has helped to define his needs as as a human being.

What we found so interesting about this signing was the utter rapture of the crowd – and the way Jeff came across. First and foremost, he’s a writer. That means he is supposed to be reclusive, hesitant about speaking in front of a crowd, it carries certain archetypes of its own. Well, Jeff defies our preconceived notions. He’s a riot. He used to be a standup comedian and it shows. He had us all in stitches. He probably has his demons, just as Dexter does, just as most writers do, but he’s also married and the father of three daughters. In his talk, it’s obvious that his wife, Hilary, is his bulwark and his creative partner. It’s also obvious that family is a big deal for him, just as it is for Dexter.

Family changes the dynamics for Dexter, also a father of three – two of which are his wife’s from a previous relationship.Dexter Is Delicious opens in an OB ward. Dexter’s daughter – Lily Ann – has just been born. His sentiments are certainly familiar to new parents – and to all parents with long memories!

We knew Jeff and Hilary before Dexter, met them at writers’ conference on Sanibel Island, a Hemingway event back in the late 1980s when our daughters were in grade school. She’s a Hemingway niece, but back then they were struggling, as we were. It’s uplifting to know that despite Dexter’s success, they really haven’t  changed as people. And Jeff is funnier now, fully in his groove, and undoubtedly grateful to his dark passenger, Dexter, for improving the quality of his family’s life.

May you live long and prosper, Dexter!

Posted in archetypes, dexter, ghosts, writers | 10 Comments

Subtle Synchros

 Today I dropped by our neighbor’s house to ask if she could watch our dog, Noah, for a few days at the end of the month when we’ll be at a book convention. She got out of her huge mom calendar, where her obligations and appointments are printed in red ink. “Sure, that looks good,” she said. Then gave me that look. “Ever since you and Rob gave us a copy of your synchronicity book…” And told me her latest synchro.

Annette is a twin and we’ve posted her synchros  here and here. This one involves her name. I don’t think the name is all that common – not like Jane, for instance, and when I hear it, I think of Anette Funicello from Disney’s The Mousketeers. Hmm. I may be dating myself on that one.

At any rate, a few months ago, Annette, a former flight attendant and now a stay at home mom, started cleaning a neighbor’s house. She did it at first as a service – the neighbor has recently gone blind. But now she does it once a week for pay. Somehow, the house cleaning burgeoned into a business and Annette now cleans homes four days a week, while her kids are in school. A nice supplement to the family income.

So the other day, she gets a call from a woman who would like her home cleaned. She lives 15 or 20 minutes from our area, too far, Annette thinks, but decides to drive out to the woman’s house to see what’s what. The home, she says was huge, 7500 square feet, and the woman has bad arthritis that makes it difficult for her to clean. They came to an agreement about what Annette would clean, then the woman said, “I knew I would hire you when I heard your name.”

“Really? Why?”

“My daughter in law’s name was Annette. She died at the age of 29 from ovarian cancer.”

For Annette, this was personally meaningful because she had read our synchronicity book. The woman who hired her, who hadn’t heard of synchronicity, recognized the importance of the connection in names. And that’s how synchronicity often works, in subtle ways, in our daily lives, humming along in the background.

Posted in names, signs | 20 Comments

Hereafter

The trailer for Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Hereafter, makes this one a must see for us!

Interestingly, here’s another trailer that relates to a paradigm shift.

https://2012timeforchange.com/site/index.html

Posted in afterlife, eastwood, movies | 13 Comments