Welcome to The Mystical Underground

 Hi, this is Noah. You know, the big reddish golden retriever that my humans sometimes write about. I’m now four and a half and old enough to write my own blog post. And I have plenty to say about dog day afternoons.

This term is one humans use to describe really hot summer days. And let me tell you, it’s been scorching hot in South Florida this summer – 95 degrees in the shade, the air so humid that when you draw it into your lungs it feels  as weighted as concrete. On some days, the heat index – what the air temp actually feels like – reaches 105. Since I wear a fur coat, that is very hot  and I am forced to find ways to mitigate it.

The first order of business is simple: drink a lot of water and cool off my paws by plunging into the pool that Cassie creates with a plain tarp in a square depression under a hose from which water flows.

Cassie is the human who owns two border collies – Kilt and Willow. Their breed of dog tends to be quite focused on a task  and at the dog park, that task is racing after and catching whatever the humans toss  their way. It’s usually a ball, but can also be a Frisbee.  Although I can run fast in short spurts, these two border collies are long distance Olympic runners. I don’t compete with them. But even Kilt and Willow are worn down by the heat and end up in the pool, where all of us eventually immerse our entire bodies. This is them – without me!

I’m a large dog – 111 pounds the last time I was weighed – and there’s hardly enough room for the border collies, Red the hound and Cody the husky, but we somehow manage. Here are Cody and Red in a hole they dug to keep cool – before they joined me in the pool.

Then there are some pups who join us – Gaucho, 5 months, who keeps stealing my large orange ball and tries to bury it in the deepest corner of the pool,  and some other nameless pups who bite my ears and lick my face.

It’s when the pups join me in the pool that I miss my Nika the most. She was just six weeks old when she joined our clan. She thought I was her big brother. She would bite my ears, leap up and try to box me with her little paws. When she slept, she curled up next to me, her paws draped over my legs. She lives with her human in another city now, but we visit frequently. I can always tell when she and her human are coming for a visit because my humans say things like, “Nika is coming to see you, Noah.” She and I had a wonderful week together in the Keys this summer.

With Nika gone, I’m forced to make new friends. That’s Zappo, king of the hill. He’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback,  younger than me, and definitely a more deft climber!

I like Cody and Red, too, and the border collies, of course. I have a certain fondness for Gaucho, whose owner was raised in Argentina (thus the name, okay?). I’m also sort of smitten with Fergie, the pup next door, a German short-haired pointer whose energy is infinite and who enjoys a good tug-of-war.

But you know what? None of them are true love like Nika and me.

My humans talk a lot about synchronicity – what it is, why it is, when it is, what it means. But for me, for most dogs, it’s really pretty simple. On these dog day afternoons, I just  surrender to the heat, to the cooling bliss of the pool, with the orange ball under my chin, and am thankful for what is. I shut my eyes for a moment, the heat pours over me, and I dream of the past, am fully rooted in the present, and embrace the future, whatever it may be. I’m in the flow – and that’s when it happens, where my inner and outer worlds come together in a meaningful way, without cause and affect.

I consider my day successful and happy when I can say, at every moment, Yes. Yes to all of it. That’s when I plunge my head underwater,  where the water is deepest, and grab my orange ball. Yes, I’m ready for another round with all my buddies chasing my ball.  Yes, yes, to mud puddles and chasing squirrels. Yes, I’m ready for my next visit with Nika, when she will jump out the car window to get to me before her human has even stopped her car. I understand that’s going to happen soon.

Yeah, it’s a dog day afternoon. I smell rain approaching from  the Everglades to the west, Gaucho has run off with my ball, Kilt has stolen my Frisbee, Cody is grumpy about his human being out of town. But there are so many scents that lure us, so many distractions that seduce us, so many squirrels to chase, so many tasks to fulfill, so much to love and enjoy, that I leap out of the pool, shake myself free of the water, and race out across the dog park, hoping a human will  hurl a ball or a Frisbee. Or both.

I am Noah. Welcome to my world.

This flash mob of dancers in India is one of the most moving I’ve seen.

 Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel in physics in 1965 for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics.  I had read about him from time to time, but he didn’t really register until I was reading a book about Wolfgang Pauli and  his obsession with the number 137.

The number puzzled most physicists. But it was Feynman, though, who 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.

 So the other day when I was at Barnes & Noble, I found a book called Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science.  I realized I didn’t know much about Feynman except for this 137 detail, so I bought the book.

 The book is fascinating – not only for insights into Feynman the scientist, but insights into Feynman the man. The love of his life was Arline Greenbaum, whom he met at a party when he was 15 and she was just 13. She was his opposite in every way – right brain to his left brain, endowed with artistic and musical talents.

“Richard and Arline were soul mates,” writes Lawrence M. Krauss, the author of the book. “They were not clones of each other, but symbiotic opposites – each completed the other. Arline admired Richard’s obvious scientific brilliance, and Richard clearly adored the fact that she loved and understood things he could barely appreciate at that time. But what they shared, most important of all, was a love of life and a spirit of adventure.”

 Feynman proposed to her when he was a junior at MIT. During the five years between his proposal and her death from tuberculosis, they corresponded constantly.  “…her spirit provided him with the vital encouragement he needed to keep going, to find new roads, to break traditions, scientific and otherwise,” writes Krauss.

 Their parents were concerned about their relationship. His mother was afraid that Arline’s physical condition – the TB – would be a drain on his ability to work and on his finances. But as  Feynman wrote his parents, “I want to marry Arline because I love her – which means I want to take care of her. That is all there is to it…”

 And so they were married. But  on June 16, 1945, six weeks before the atomic bomb Feynman helped to build was exploded over Hiroshima,  Arline passed away. “After she breathed her last breath in the hospital room, he kissed her, and the nurse recorded the time of death as 9:21 PM.”

 He later discovered that the clock by her bedside had stopped exactly at 9:21.

 Unfortunately, Feynman didn’t recognize the synchro. “A less rational mind might have found this cause for spiritual wonder or enlightenment – the kind of phenomena that makes people believe in a higher cosmic intelligence. But Feynman knew the clock was fragile. He had fixed it several times and he reasoned that the nurse must have picked it up and disturbed it to check on Arline’s time of death.”

I found this part of Feynman’s story deeply sad. He had just lost the love of his life, the clock on the bedside had stopped precisely at the time she had died, and he didn’t recognize it as significant. Yet, this phenomenon has been experienced by numerous people, under the same circumstances, and certainly qualifies as a synchronicity.

I think it illustrates how all too often we humans dismiss the obvious because to acknowledge it would force us, at the very least, to question how the world works and, at the outer extreme, might shatter our current worldviews.

 The day this photo was taken, it was 95 degrees in the shade and the heat index was 105.  Cody,  the husky,  and Red, some sort of hound, were so hot they simply found a cool spot in the dirt and panted.

Red belongs to Estis, a pianist who teaches music to elementary school kids and is on break this summer, and Cody belongs to Karin, who was out of town. Estis usually shows up at the dog park around four, and she’s   chatty and happy.  But when she walked in today with both Cody and Red, she looked miserable.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

Estis rolled her eyes. “Well, Karin left town on Thursday. My husband was going to drive her to the airport, so he first dropped me off at the dog park with Cody and Red. I had forgotten the park is closed  for maintenance on Thursdays, so I had to walk home with both dogs.” She lives about a mile from the dog park and Cody isn’t easy to walk on a leash.

But Estis and the two dogs finally got home and everyone settled in the kitchen – Estis and her two daughters and the two dogs.  Her daughters were painting and working on something and no one was paying much attention to the dogs.  Suddenly, Red begins to howl from another part of the house, a wild, frantic howling, and Estis and her daughters raced to the back of the house.

At the end of the hall, there’s a bathroom where they had put their caged parakeets while Cody was visiting, and the door was no longer closed. Cody had somehow managed to open the bathroom door and the door to the cage, and had grabbed one of the parakeets.

“He was totally wild, Trish, and raced up the hall with blue parakeet feathers plastered all over his muzzle, and his eyes were…just wild, I’ve never seen his eyes like that. My daughters were screaming, Red was still howling and cowering in a corner, and I raced after Cody, trying to catch him.”

Estis finally offered Cody a treat and as he opened his mouth, the dead parakeet fell to the floor. At this point, her daughters were freaking out, Red’s howls filled the air, and Cody raced up and down the hallway, “totally out of control.”

Estis got everyone calmed down and eventually put Cody out on the porch while she cleaned up the mess. Karin’s daughter was home, so Estis called her and  asked her to pick up Cody.

I was frankly astonished by this story. At the dog park, Cody is unusually gentle with other dogs, even when they’re playing and roughhousing. He races into the park every afternoon to greet his buddies – humans and canines alike – and  his joy so obvious that it’s a treat just to watch him. Then he  trots off, pursuing scents, chasing squirrels, playing king of the mountain on the mound of dirt at the far end of the park. Rob and I have often called him Cody the Trickster because he can be so mischievous. Estis’s story prompted me to think about the emotional lives of dogs, which is certainly as real as the emotional lives of humans.

Cody actually belongs to Karin’s son, but when he was in college he became Karin’s dog. She is his main person. Whenever she leaves the park to get something out of her car, Cody paces along the fence, watching her, waiting anxiously for her to return. She left town to meet her husband in upstate New York because her brother-in-law is dying. There has been a lot of tension in the household this summer and Cody, like most animal companions, has probably sensed it. So when his human drove off in the car with Estis’s husband that Thursday morning, bound for the airport, and then Cody ended up at Estis’s house, the bottom probably fell out of his world.

As Cody and Red panted in the shade this afternoon, I ran my fingers through Cody’s thick, soft fur and he dropped his head back, looking up at me with  eyes that are such an exquisite turquoise it’s as if you’re peering into an undiscovered sea. He ran his tongue over my hand, then my cheek as if to say, I know you what you and Estis were talking about. But I’m not a bad dog, really I’m not.  

 Red nudged Cody’s back with his snout. Hey Dude, I’m here, pay attention to me.  And they curled up in the hot shade, best friends forever.  

GOOD MORNING (afternoon, evening). Had any Kebernarans lately?

That word, kebenaran, which is Javanese, relates to unusual coincidences, and it sounds like something out of the world of Kurt Vonnegut with his karass and granfaloons.  Here’s some Javanese wisdom related to synchronicity.

“Events do not happen because of chance, but manifest themselves because of hidden forces that bring about each co-incidence, each kebenaran.   A new event is a crossroad, a co-inciding, in which the shadow of inevitability becomes a fact.”

– Niels Mulder, Mysticism in Java: Ideology in Indonesia, Amsterdam: the Pepin Press, 1998, p.84

‘Kebenaran’ comes from the root benar which means true.  The word means truth as a noun, but in its adverbial form it means by chance, by accident.  Thus, a Javanese understanding of the relationship between “truth” and “chance”?

The term “hidden force” is also suggestive and was the title of a novel from a century ago about Java by L. Couperus.

We’ve talked about the scarab beetle here before since it played a major role Carl Jung’s development of his concept of synchronicity. His story of a female patient telling him about her dream of a scarab beetle just as a beetle very similar to the scarab struck Jung’s window. He opened the window, caught it in his hand and showed it to the woman. She had been extremely rigid in her thinking and the remarkable meaningful coincidence was a break-through in her therapy.

Now we have a collection of ‘lost’ fairy tales surfacing from Germany that are entitled Prinz Roßzwifl. That’s a local dialect for “scarab beetle.” The scarab, also known as the dung beetle, buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Erika Eichenseer, cultural curator in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz, sees the beetle’s lifestyle as symbolic of fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

Eichenseer published a selection of the 500 new fairytales that were compiled in the 19^th century by a local Bavarian historian, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886), the same time a sthe Grimm brothers were gathering fairytales that became a world famous collection. The fairy tales had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years.

According to an article in The Guardian, Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, laborers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear.” Grimm went so far as to tell King Maximilian II of Bavaria that the only person who could replace him in his and his brother’s work was Von Schönwerth.

Von Schönwerth compiled his research into a book called Aus der Oberpfalz – Sitten und Sagen, which came out in three volumes in 1857, 1858 and 1859. The book never gained prominence and faded into obscurity.

Many of the fairy tales do not appear in other European collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch. However, the collection also includes local versions of the tales children all over the world have grown up with including Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and which appear in many different versions across Europe.

Von Schönwerth was a historian and recorded what he heard faithfully, making no attempt to put a literary gloss on it, which is where he differs from the Grimm brothers. However, says Eichenseer, this factual recording adds to the charm and authenticity of the material. What delights her most about the tales is that they are unpolished. “There is no romanticising or attempt by Schönwerth to interpret or develop his own style,” she says.

So now we have a whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches coming to light. Thanks to Jim Bansholzer for alerting us to this story.

 Here is one of those stories about a mysterious person who appears at the scene of a tragedy, make a difference, and then can’t be found.

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On Sunday, August 2, around 9:00 a.m, a 19-year-old woman, Katie Lentz, was hit by a drunk driver in a small Missouri town. Badly injured but still alive, Katie was trapped between the steering wheel and the seat. A rescue vehicle arrived at the scene and workers tried for 45 minutes to extricate her from her mangled car, but to no avail.

Her condition deteriorated and she finally asked the rescue workers to pray with her. That’s when a priest with gray hair, dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar, appeared on the scene and offered a prayer. He told everyone to remain calm and said that when they were done praying, Katie would be freed from her car.

Right after the priest finished praying for her, the fire department arrived with the equipment necessary to cut Katie free from her car. When she was pulled from the wreckage, nearly a dozen firefighters turned to thank the priest for his help. But he was nowhere to be seen.

The highway where the accident occurred had been blocked for a quarter of a mile during the 90 minutes rescue and there were no bystanders and not  a single parked car nearby. A friend of Katie’s told the local new affiliate KHQA hat they were looking for the priest to thank him, but so far no one had seen him.  He wasn’t in any of the dozens of photos that were taken of the accident and no one has been able to identify him.

New London Fire Chief Raymond Reed, one of the rescuers at the scene, told KHQA that it was a miracle. “I would say it was either an angel that was sent to us in the form of a priest or a priest that became our angel, I don’t know. Either way, I’m good with it.”

Katie’s mother agrees. She told USA Today that emergency workers said her daughter should not have lived through the crash. She believes the man may have been “an angel dressed in priests attire because the Bible tells us there are angels among us.”

 The young woman remains in serious condition  and has gone through surgery for her injuries.  The image above is a sketch artist’s rendition of what the priest looked like.

Stories like these have circulated for years. There’s a phenomenon called the third man factor or the third man syndrome that refers to an unseen presence – a spirit, perhaps – that provides comfort during traumatic and life-threatening experiences. But in this instance, the priest was a physical presence witnessed by others.

Thanks to Adele Aldridge, who sent us the cartoon.