The Owl and the Money Clip

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Here’s another good story from Jim Banholzer that involves owl medicine. He heard it from a friend, Tammy, after he helped her and her husband Richard move into a new house.
+++

At the old place, Richard and Tammy had lived with a single mother, an arrangement that worked great in some aspects, but also felt a little cramped, which tends to get worse during harsh Idaho winters. Both families had gone down to look at the prospective larger house a few times. All four kids loved it, as did Tammy and her single-mother friend. Richard wasn’t so sure; after all, they had already moved earlier this year. His hesitation was understandable, as the new house cost more and he is the main breadwinner.

With the pressure on to decide soon, one evening Richard vociferously announced that he was “going fishing.” He walked down to the river to spend some time alone and reflect. As the evening twilight progressed, an enormous owl swooped down over the water and dropped something shiny. Richard waded out to where the owl dropped the item and discovered an empty money clip. Examining it closer, he saw that the silver was emblazoned with his own initials!

Richard took the owl’s message as a sign, which helped him, decide that his family would be better off in the end if they made the move. Coincidentally, a few months ago, at their old house I had dropped off some animal totem books, including the one by Trish. On a whim, I marked one of the owl stories with a copy of my own owl story, using it as a bookmark. It’s called The Midday Owl who Withdrew from the Bank.

What’s interesting about my story is that it’s the same one that forty moons ago, I sent to Trish, when I saw a sentence towards the end of her and Millie’s totem book, which asked readers to contact them, if they had any interesting animal encounter stories of their own. In other words, the same story I stuck in their book is the same story that led to your and my Internet friendship and enduring exchange of ideas!
***
Thanks, Jim. And that was long before we began this blog.

Posted in messengers, money clip, owls | 14 Comments

More and Better

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Trish and Rob


MORE AND HIS BUDDY

BETTER

This story comes from a young woman in NYC, who is applying to graduate programs to pursue her master’s in fine arts.
+++
I was writing my MFA admission material and in my story I had these two birds. One was named “better” and I was thinking of naming the other one “More.” I ended up naming that bird Stendhal. But later that day, I was reading this essay that was totally unrelated and here was the first lines:

“For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch.” (from this blog)
+++
It seems to me that she’s on the right track. I mean, does it get any better than More and Better?

Posted in birds, word play | 6 Comments

Remembering Kate Duffy

Posted on September 28, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Yesterday morning, I thought about my former fiction editor, Kate Duffy, and wondered how she was doing. I considered dropping her an email, but didn’t. Then this morning, I learned that Kate died yesterday. Not a welcome synchronicity.

She was an original, an Aquarian with a Cancer moon who had a biting wit and a raucous laugh. She rescued my fiction career in February 1997, when she bought one of my paranormal thrillers, Hanged Man. We did a total of 12 books together and during that time, I came to appreciate how rare she was as an editor. She understood that novelists do their best work when they write about what they love and always gave me complete creative freedom. She was also a relentless cheerleader for my books.

But more than this, Kate understood the terrain of the human heart. When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimers and my dad moved in with us, she called frequently to find out how we were doing. In May of 2000, Kate called when I was sitting at my desk, sobbing, and I told her I would have to call her back. She wouldn’t let me get off the phone until I told her what had happened. I had just been told by my mother’s doctor that she wasn’t a candidate for hip replacement surgery because of the Alzheimer’s and that she was now doomed to live out the remainder of her life on morphine. Kate talked me through it. When my mother died, when my father passed on several years later, she was there to talk.

When her dad was ill, I remember looking at her birth chart – and his – and telling her about a challenging period that was coming up. A few months later, I felt something had happened to her and called her cell – which I’d never done before. She was on the train, her father had just died.

During a trip to New York, Kate took Megan and I out to lunch and asked Megan, then 15, about the time travel novel she was writing. She listened as though Megan were one of her authors and then gave her some advice about it. This is the kind of person she was.

Her time and expertise were always available to me and I used both liberally. I could give her a single paragraph of an idea and she would know immediately whether it would work. When I was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award, Kate sent roses. When I won, I sent roses to her.

At a romance conference in Orlando in 2005, the last time I saw Kate, she and I stole away at nine PM one night to watch Lost, a show we both loved. We drank wine and laughed, talked life and politics. On my way home the next day, I had a weird feeling that I wouldn’t ever see Kate again. Fifteen minutes later, I got a flat tire. At the time, I didn’t associate the thought with the flat tire.

The relationship between novelists and their editors is often complex. You may be friends, but you’re always aware the editor has the final say on what you write. So in April 2008, when I learned from my agent that Kensington wouldn’t be renewing my contract, I was hurt. I had sensed it might happen,but here it was. Real. Kate called me later that afternoon – something she certainly didn’t have to do – and told me how much she had enjoyed working with me. I understood it was business, so it didn’t feel like a dismissal. It felt like what it was – Kate reaching out one last time to offer encouragement, options.

We were both big Obama supporters, so it seems fitting that the last email we exchanged was right after Obama had won the election.

Me: We’re watching the birth of a whole new paradigm! Yahoo!!!
Kate: Went to bed in tears.

I’d say, rest in peace, Kate, except that you probably aren’t. I figure you’re starting your own publishing house on the other side and writers are already flocking to you. I’m sure I’ll see you around or hear that booming laugh in some unexpected place. Take care, Kate, and thanks for everything.

Posted in books, editor, Kate Duffy, writers | 16 Comments

Brick of Life

Posted on September 28, 2009 by Trish and Rob



Here’s a synchronicity tale sent to a friend, who forwarded it to us. It reminded me of the sort of things I used to do many years ago…back when the Sixties blurred into the Seventies, and it was still the Sixties. – Rob
***

My first year at college, I had a friend with whom I experimented with . . . substances.

One particular night we went on a merry adventure through campus, just kind of poking around in our altered state, marveling at the orange glow of the sodium vapor lamps, the waxy wonderment of the magnolia leaves, the still silence of our island in the midst of Los Angeles.

On the way back to the dorm, we found a pile of bricks being used for a repair job on one of the buildings. For some reason, we picked one up and carried it back toward our dorm. Things happened. We philosophized. The sun started to come up. We were hungry. We ransacked one of our suite kitchens, and found a box of Life cereal.

I went to my room and grabbed my camera. By the time we got back outside, it was light enough for me to take some pictures. My friend was gorging himself on Life cereal, having a good time, enjoying . . . life! At some point, I took a picture of him, looking blissed out, holding the brick in one hand and a box of Life cereal in the other.

Fast forward six months later. I had returned home for the summer, taking with me all of my stuff, including several rolls of undeveloped film. Since my father was an air force retiree, I could get my pictures developed on base for cheap, so I took all of my exposed rolls to the BX (base exchange). When I got the pictures back several days later, I looked through them all, laughed at the brick and Life photo, and headed to one of my best friends’ house.

When I got there I found him with a girl we had gone to school with. She was a few years behind us, but had become friends with my buddy sometime over the past year. They were both commiserating over having lost a boyfriend/girlfriend. I shared my “college pics” with them, and at one point their mouths fell open and they just stared first at each other, then at me, before bursting out into hysterical laughter.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

They showed me the brick and Life photo.

“Yeah?”

They then explained that, not a minute before I walked into the house, in the course of their complaining about how love had done them wrong, Tim had exclaimed that life was just so hard right then, as hard as a brick, and Ramona had said, “Yeah, life IS a brick.”

And then they had seen my photo. Now what are the odds of THAT??
+++
Strange, but true department:
Heard on (U.S.) National Public Radio:
More Czechs believe in UFOs than God.

Posted in 60s, brick, Life Cereal | 6 Comments

UPDATE on Human Butterfly Crop Circle

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Trish and Rob

According to Colin Andrews, a crop circle investigator, the human butterfly was man made. Quoting from his site:

“The media and others in The Netherlands have been hyping what they claim is the discovery of the largest crop circle ever. Well,it falls well short of that claim but is as shown in the photograph very attractive.

“When it seemed very few in the crop circle community were reporting upon the story, which was being circulated to a large mailing list of researchers around the world, more e-mails followed claiming that it was made by a team of 60. This claim was challenged by some people and a third circular followed stating that the construction was filmed and that this film would be released to the public.

“It’s really a no story, just another crop circle made by people, leaving many around the world without rational explanation and also many more that are indeed made by humans but that attracted paranormal attention – this neither tackled by the media who run with just easy, crazy stories that require very little work on their part. Time is ticking in a period of critical transition, not helped with more wasted effort and energy. We don’t seem to be passing the test of our time do we!”

Colin Andrews
09/09/09

Man made, but still really beautiful!

Posted in crop circles, human butterfly | 14 Comments

FlashForward and 137

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Trish and Rob

We posted a story about the #137 on February 21, when our blog was just two weeks old. We’re summarizing it here as context for what follows.

To recap: Wolfgang Pauli, a physicist and Nobel laureate, was an early supporter of Jung’s theory on synchronicity and investigated the phenomenon as well. He had a rather striking experience with a set of numbers. Pauli was confounded by one of the unsolved mysteries of modern physics, the value of the fine structure constant, which involves the number 137.

A prime number can be divided by 1 and by itself. Or, put another way, a prime number is a positive integer that cannot equal the product of two smaller integers. That makes 137 a prime number and a particularly baffling one. In Deciphering the Cosmic Number: the Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, Arthur I. Miller provides a brief, but fascinating history about the number 137 in the world of quantum physics.

It was ‘discovered’ in 1915 by Arnold Sommerfield, who was Pauli’s mentor when he was still a student. “From the moment 137 first popped up in his equations, he and other physicists…quickly realized that this unique ‘fingerprint’ was the sum of certain fundamental constants of nature, specific quantities believed to be invariable throughout the universe, quantities central to relativity and quantum theory.”

The number became so baffling to physicists that the great Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, said that physicists should put a sign in their offices to remind themselves of how much they don’t know. The sign would be simple: 137.

Not only is 137 “the DNA of light,” as Miller puts it, but also is the number associated with the Kabbalah. In a system that sounds very much like numerology, Miller explains that in ancient Hebrew, numbers were written with letters, and each letter has a number associated with it. “Adepts of the philosophical system known as the Gematria add the numbers in Hebrew words and thus find hidden meanings in them.” In Hebrew, the word Kabbalah has four letters that add up to 137. Not surprisingly, physicists began referring to 137 as a mystical number.

Pauli certainly found this to be the case. He wrestled with its implications most of his life. When he was admitted to the hospital at the age of 58 and learned he would be in room 137, he supposedly said, “I will never get out of here.” And he was right. He died shortly afterward.
+++

So: ABC has a new series that started September 24, called FlashForward, based on a novel by Robert Sawyer. Premise: for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, everyone on the planet blacks out and sees a scene from their own lives six months in the future. Now people have to figure out what it all means in terms of a global picture about the state of the world six months from now (April 2010). As one character put it, “Why did 7 billion people black out exactly at the same time, for 137 seconds?”

As soon as we heard that 137, we decided to TIVO for the second episode.

Posted in 137, flashforward, Numbers, Pauli, TV | 18 Comments

Largest Crop Circle

Posted on September 26, 2009 by Trish and Rob

When this photo appeared in our Synchronicity Google search, my first thought was that it was a photo shop crop circle.

Then we saw the video:

It’s not. Whether it’s man-made or not is another question. But it’s huge. It’s been referred to as the Human Butterfly Crop Circle and as the DaVinci Crop Circle.

It comes from the Netherlands. Here are the original comments that were posted with the video and photo.
***
A Gigantic Butterfly Crop Circle formation (530 Meters x 450 Meters), the Biggest Crop Circle Ever … appeared in Netherlands near a town in southern Holland called Goes, on the 8th of August 2009. It is an incredibly large butterfly with Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ in the center, depicting the metamorphosis of the Caterpillar into a Butterfly. I stumbled upon this brilliant crop circle today while randomly checking one of my friends’ profile on facebook … my first reaction was that of sheer amazement and the feeling of a rising wave of excitement within realizing the magical synchronicity communicating with all tuned in …
***
Any ideas on the origin of crop circles? Are they made by artists who work in the dark and make these sensational images, by some sort of cosmic intellect energy force…or what?

Posted in butterflies, crop circles, DaVinci, Netherlands | 32 Comments

Wizard of Oz

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Recently, we received an email from Ray Grasse, author, astrologer, and associate editor of The Mountain Astrologer. He had found our blog through a mention on another site and suggested that we check out his book on the topic, The Waking Dream. We already own the book and it’s one of our favorites. It begins with a synchronicity we’d heard, but had forgotten about the making of the movie based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. So, thanks, Ray!

This story was originally dismissed as a publicity stunt for the movie, but in The Making of the Wizard of Oz, author Aljean Harmtez contended that it actually happened.

+++
Frank Morgan played five different parts in the movie, including the disreputable Professor Marvel. For that role, the director and wardrobe man wanted him dressed in a “nice-looking coat, but tattered,” said Mary Mayer, a unit publicist on the film. So they traipsed down to a second-hand clothing store and purchased a rack of coats. Then Frank, the director and the wardrobe guy all got together and selected one of the coats.

In Harmtez’s book, it was described as “a kind of Prince Albert coat…black broadcloth…worn velvet collar.” The coat fit Frank and gave him a “shabby gentility,” the look they wanted. One hot afternoon, Frank apparently turned the pocket inside out and found a name sewn into the lining: L. Frank Baum.

The tailor in Chicago who had made the coat vouched that it had been made for Baum, his widow attested that it was the same coat, but the publicist could never get anyone to believe the story – thus the notion that it was a publicity stunt.

So what are the odds that the author’s coat would end up as a prop of the movie version of his story? Then there’s the added synchronicity that both men who wore the coat were named Frank.

Posted in Frank Morgan, L. Frank Baum, Wizard of Oz | 9 Comments

It’s a sign

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Trish and Rob


A few days ago, we went into Barnes and Noble after eating dinner at a nearby restaurant. While Trish was looking at Dan Brown’s new novel, I picked up a novel under new releases, read the first couple pages, then picked up another and did the same.

In the first novel, Shimmer, by David Morrell, we’re in a chopper with a police pilot who is chasing a pickup truck along a desert highway. In the second novel, THE SIGN, by Raymond Khoury, we’re racing across the desert in a pickup, pursued by a chopper.

What are the chances of that: desert-desert, chopper-chopper, pickup-pickup. Point of view above; point of view below. But if it’s a synchronicity, how is it meaningful?

Maybe because I was reading and editing our synchronicity book for the final time before submitting it, I attracted what I was focused on. Or, more esoterically, there’s the ancient alchemical saying: As above, so below. The macrocosm is the same as the microcosm. Now maybe if I read The Lost Symbol, which Trish did buy, I’ll find out more.
Rob above
Rob below
***
From the strange but true department (which is most everything we put up):
Now there’s a wine from South Africa called Synchronicity.

Posted in books, dan brown, synchronicity wine, writers | 17 Comments

Don’t I know you?

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Here’s a relationship synchronicity that gives us a peek at the complex web of intertwining lives, reinforcing the concept that we are linked. It was originally posted by Richard Swank on The Strange Coincidences Archive.
***

I’m from Atlanta, Ga., but in the summer of 1991 I had the opportunity to go to Los Angeles to help organize a political fundraising event.

The woman I worked with there, Joyce, was worried that I would be somewhat homesick, because she knew it was the longest time I’d ever been away from the southeast at the time. She told me that she knew someone who knew someone whose sister was also in L.A. that summer from Georgia. She thought we could meet and perhaps comfort each other about being strangers in a strange land.

The only fact she knew about the sister was that she had graduated from the University of Georgia in the spring, and that her name was Delia. I think she was actually trying to set me up for a date, but being gay, I wasn’t really all that keen on it. As far as I knew, all we had in common was that we were the same age and from the same state. I had never met anyone named Delia in my life.

Finally, just to get the hyper-enthusiastic Joyce off my back, I agreed to meet this sister of a friend of a friend. Joyce made the arrangements, and I was given Delia’s phone number.

Reluctantly, I called the number a few days later. It was answered by a smoky-voiced young woman who sounded instantly familiar. I identified myself by my first name and started to tell her why I was calling. Suddenly, she interrupted me, asking, “Is this Richard Swank?”

I replied, “Uh, yeah. How did you know my last name?”

She said, “This is Dee Dee Johnson! [last name changed] I go by Delia now!”

Her voice sounded familiar because it was. She was a high school classmate and friend of mine from Georgia. We had lost touch in the intervening four years; neither one of us had a clue that the other was in California. I had gone all the way across the country, and ended up being set up with a high school friend by my boss.

Years later, I’m still trying to get my head around that one.

Posted in relationships | 14 Comments