Neda – The Divine Calling

Posted on June 21, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Most of us have seen the demonstrations and the violence in the last few days in Iran as the masses rebel against the government, the status quo, and the highly questionable election results.

Yesterday, I mentioned to Trish that we should watch for synchronicities related to this mass event. Such high drama involving millions and attracting world attention also attracts synchronicity. While watching the news Sunday evening, we found it.

One young woman’s death on the street during a demonstration has been highlighted and become a symbol of the movement. The graphic video is being shown on cable news over and over and it’s being spread through the Internet’s social networks.

The synchronicity here is her name: Neda in Farsi means The Divine Calling. Her death is seen as a sacrifice to a greater cause.

P.S. Anyone who uses Twitter should change the time zone to that of Iran, which will make it harder for the government to locate the Iranians who are Twittering to the outside world.

More news on Neda from Huffington Post

Posted in global, names | 7 Comments

The Two Toms

Posted on June 21, 2009 by Trish and Rob

This story is from Janice Cutbush, a retired teacher and friend in Ballspa, New York. Her husband, Tom Cutbush, died about ten years ago. Her son, also named Tom Cutbush, lives in Haddenfield, New Jersey. About a year ago, Janice’s son was in a bad accident – thus the reference in her story to visits made to a hospital.
***

When Tom and his wife Sara became godparents to their niece,they went to Sara’s family’s Methodist Church in Haddenfield NJ. They had to meet the Reverend and sign some papers, etc. before the christening. When Tom wrote his name on the paper, the Reverend looked up and said, “I graduated from high school with a Tom Cutbush.”

Tom said, “That was my dad.”

Rev. George Morris was stunned. He told Tom that he had a great deal of respect for his dad and even though they didn’t hang out in the same crowd, he and his dad always maintained a mutual friendship outside of school.

Rev. Morris went on to baptize Tom’s little girl Elizabeth two years later and when Tom’s accident happened, he came to the hospital every week and said prayers at his bedside. When I met him at the christening we talked about the coincidence of it all and he said he preferred to think of coincidences as “spiritual appointments.”
***
An added note to this story. When Tom senior was alive, he and Janice were avid runners. One morning, halfway through their run, Janice said she was going to stop, she was tired. Tom turned to her and said, “That’s fine. I’ll go the last mile alone.” He started out, then pitched forward and died of a massive heart attack.

I’ve always found that last statement of his eerily prescient.

Posted in clusters, encounters, family, names | 6 Comments

Fox I Ching synchronicity

Posted on June 20, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Here’s a foxy tale from Adele Aldridge.
***
Three months ago I made a difficult move from one state to another and am just getting settled. Recently an opportunity presented itself to move again into a larger apartment. I need more space so I decided to make the move even though I’m not recovered or settled yet. I notified the post office and friends of this new pending change. But the more I re-packed up my books the more my body went into total revulsion of what it would take to make this move again after just three months. So feeling such strong resistance in my body from something I wanted to do in my mind, with great ambivalence, I decided not to make this move now. Maybe later.

That evening I took a walk in the nearby woods when suddenly about thirty feet in front of me a fox crossed the path in front of me. The fox saw me at the same time I saw him. We both stood still and looked at each other for a full minute before he plunged into the other side of the woods, jumping over a small stream.

Except for years ago in a dream, which foretold an interesting encounter, I have only seen a fox once before. That was about five years ago, when one came hunting for dinner near a pond where some baby geese had hatched. The mother bird made a wild and awesome racket, scaring the fox away.

Since it is a rare event for me to come across such a beautiful red bushy tailed creature I mused upon the encounter, remembering my dream of years ago and thought, ala Casteneda, “Umm … I wonder what seeing this fox is all about for me.” I don’t tell such thoughts to just anyone, but here is okay.

The next morning, while sipping my breakfast tea and doing my daily I Ching reading, I threw Hexagram 63, “After Completion” with the first line changing into Hexagram 38, “Opposition” or as Karcher calls this Hexagram, “Diverging/The Shadow Lands” and …”strange meetings with hidden spirits, the ghost world..”

Reading Karcher’s interpretation for line one, Hexagram 63, he says,

“Already Crossing.
Breaking his wheels. Trailing her cord in the water.
The small fox soaks its tail.
This is not a mistake.”

And his interpretation, “This is righteous and not a mistake. You have a great connection but you are starting too quickly. Hold back. Start slowly. Let yourself be lured on. This is not a mistake. Re-imagine the situation. Gather your energy for a decisive new move.”

My I Ching reading echoed the sighting of the fox, affirmed the decision I’d just made not to move again. Thank you, fox. Thank you, Synchronicity. Thank you, I Ching.
***

Frank Joseph, in his terrific book Synchronicity & You, notes that fox symbolism “speaks of shape shifting, lycanthropy, and all forms of physical as well as psychic change, most often involving female transcendence.”

Jung had a fox synchronicity while walking through a wooded area with a patient.She was relating a dream she’d had as a kid, where she saw a “ghostly fox” descending the stairs of her parents’ home. Just then, a real fox emerged from the trees and walked along for several moments as though it were part of the situation, the narrative.

Joseph notes that foxes have a rich tradition in many cultures. In Japan, they are considered to be magical creatures. Among Native Americans, the fox is believed to protect families.

I Ching Meditations
Yoga Babe Cafe
Cafe Press
Adele Art

Posted in animals, fox, I Ching | 6 Comments

Portland Synchronicity

Posted on June 19, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Several weeks ago, a blog called Life in the Second Half came up in a Google alert for synchronicity. I lurked on the blog for a couple of days, enjoyed what I read, and really liked that the author called herself Lover of Life. So I left a comment on Nancy Atkinson’s blog.

We subsequently began an email exchange. Three or four days before Rob, Megan and I were going to leave for a vacation in Hood River, Oregon, Nancy mentioned that she and her husband were going to Portland for her daughter’s graduation. We discovered that our times in Oregon were going to overlap. Bingo! A Google alert for synchronicity ultimately leads to a synchronicity in timing. So on June 12, we met Nancy and her husband for lunch at a beautiful spot midway between Portland and Hood River. The lunch was great, the company fantastic. Synchronicity works magic.

Posted in blogs, connections, creativity | 5 Comments

N.F.D.

Posted on June 18, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Years ago, an editor asked me if I would be interested in completing a novel for an author who had died. He was forty and passed on very suddenly of a heart attack. He’d written four chapters and left behind an outline.

Trish and I knew him–though we’d never met in person. He and Trish had the same editor and agent. We’d exchanged e-mails and participated in the same mystery novel blog on GEnie, back in pre-Internet days. (They didn’t call them blogs, though.)

I worked on the novel for a few months, and from time to time I felt the author, Dave Pedneau, standing behind me, watching, and sometimes I thought he was laughing! It was kind of eerie. So I wrote faster. Finally, I finished the novel, but there was one thing I hadn’t figured out. Oddly enough, I didn’t know what the title meant. He used law enforcement acronyms for his novels, like B.O.L.O. (Be On the Lookout), or A.K.A. (Also Known As). But this one just had the letters: N.F.D. with no parenthetical meaning and I had no idea what it meant. I couldn’t tell from the story, either. Finally, just before I turned it in, I asked a cop at the gym if he knew. He frowned, then said: “Oh, that’s easy: No Fricking Deal.” Though ‘fricking’ was not quite the way he put it.

That was the title of the book! Suddenly, I knew why Dave had been laughing.

There is a little synchronicity here, too. A few years ago, I was teaching private yoga lessons to a very well off woman. She was religious, also kind of prim and proper, and always had her housekeeper or cook around when I was there. One day I was waiting for her to get ready and looked at the books on a shelf. There weren’t many, maybe a dozen. Just as she walked in the room, I spotted N.F.D., and blurted, “Hey, I wrote that book.”

She picked it off the shelf, looked at the cover, and asked: “What that title mean?”
Rob

Posted in c6, creativity, ghostwriting, trickster, writers | 9 Comments

Book sale synchronicity

Posted on June 17, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Here’s an interesting and somewhat humorous synchronicity related to the sale of our book proposal on synchronicity.

Last week, an editor who heard that we had an offer decided to immediately pitch the book to the sales staff. She was very interested in it. In today’s publishing market, getting the support of the sales department is essential. Without it, there’s no book. At the meeting, she handed out the proposal or a shortened version of it, and started her pitch. She was very enthusiastic and hopeful that the other players would agree. Suddenly, the director of sales looked up and said: “Hey, I just signed a petition asking LucasFilm to re-instate Rob’s Indiana Jones novel.”

It turns out he is a long-time Indy fan and asked the editor to e-mail me for more details on the Indy book. He and others also had a couple of questions about the synchronicity proposal. We responded quickly on both counts, and soon our agent informed us that he’d gotten an offer. After some negotiating, we had a deal.

I’m not sure what role the Indy synchronicity played, but it certainly didn’t hurt.
Rob

Posted in books, publishing, writers | 8 Comments

Hexagram 51

Posted on June 16, 2009 by Trish and Rob

For anyone familiar with the I Ching, the hexagrams you throw are sometimes eerily literal. Such was the case for Kysha Jackson, a sales rep who lives in West LA. On May 15,Kysha was using an online site for the I Ching and got Hexagram 51:

Shock.
Progressing.
A shock comes, fright, fright!
Laughing and talking, ha, ha!
The shock startled in a hundred li,
but one did not lose the ladle of sacrificial wine.
There is a shock that has a lot of impact. Although one is alarmed by the shock, there is no real harm done. When it’s over one might even look back and make fun of it. Notwithstanding it’s force one does not allow it to break one’s concentration.

She writes: “On May 18th at 9:45pm PDT there were two small earthquakes, 5.0 and 3.4 near south LA. We were watching a movie, laughing, eating and drinking wine at the time! According to this site a hundred li equals about 25 miles – that’s about how far from the epicenter the earthquake was felt.”

Posted in divination, earthquakes, hex51, I Ching | 4 Comments

Our Book Proposal Sells!

Posted on June 16, 2009 by Trish and Rob

At 10:16 a.m. PST, June 15, we found out that we had a deal. Our synchronicity book will be published by Adams Books. One other publisher also made an offer, but Adams topped them.
Rob & Trish

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Vox Piscis

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Trish and Rob

We’re traveling this week so we’ve availed Robert Ripley’s Giant Book of Believe it or Not a couple of times. Here’s another one.
***

In 1626, a fishmonger in Cambridge, England pulled out a book that was bound in sailcloth from the belly of a large fish that was just caught and killed. The book was still legible, and after it was perused, it turned out to be a theological treatise written about a hundred years earlier by John Frith.

In 1533, John Frith was considered a heretic and was burned at the stake because of his controversial writings. John Frith had written the book while he was imprisoned in a cellar in Oxford which was actually used to store dead fish. The stench inside this cellar was so rancid that many other prisoners had died from it. The book was reprinted in 1627 as Vox Piscis, which literally means, “Voice of the Fish”.

Posted in books, fish, heretics, word seriality | 7 Comments

Dueling Phone Calls

Posted on June 14, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Natalie sent us this story June 3 about synchronistic and simultaneous telephone calls. As you’ll see, almost everything about these two calls was synchronous. Natalie also noted that I had the same initials, R.M. as the two male callers. Rob
***

At ten o’clock yesterday morning, the office phone, and the home phone, rang in unison.

Hub wasn’t going to answer his work phone, as he was swamped, and didn’t recognize the number on the display. I wasn’t going to pick up the home phone for exactly the same reasons. But after a few rings, we both picked up.

On his line was an old friend who he had not seen, or spoken to, since June, 2006. This friend was part of a couple who were good friends of his during his previous marriage. They had lost touch with Hub after he married me. The caller was also conversant with Hub’s work, and out of the blue wanted to run an idea by him.

On my line was an old friend who I had not seen or heard from since June, 2006. Like Hub’s caller, my friend and I had lost touch when I married Hub, and started a different kind of life. I was knowledgeable about his work, since I’d worked with him on many occasions in the past. He was calling, just like Hub’s caller, to run an idea by me. (Also out of the blue)

Both conversations were long and very pleasant. Both callers were talking about a computer-based work idea they’d had the night before. One for Hub to help with, and one for me to participate in.

Both callers were male. Both callers have the initials R.M. So many synchronicities.

Posted in clusters, communication, names | 3 Comments