The amber talisman

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Here’s another winning synchro in our Golden Scarab contest, this one from Andrew Hicks, a musician who lives near Portland, Oregon. By the end of the story, you’ll know who is pictured above with Andrew.

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“Back in the late 90’s, I met a guy named Steve. He was my first roommate away from home, and we established a solid friendship. Through Steve, I met a guy named Aaron who was married to a woman named Marcela. Marcela and I became quick friends, but Aaron was really jealous and protective, so he forbid me from having anything to do with her. That happened in summer of 2000.

“By 2002, I lost touch with Steve and frequently wondered what became of him. I would occasionally wonder about Marcela too, and felt like I had missed out on what could have been one of my greatest friendships. Lots of time passed. I had a lot of dreams about reuniting with Steve over the years, and some part of me knew I’d see him again (although the rest of me had its doubts).

“In mid-2009, I attended a “full moon ceremony” at a local new age bookstore in Michigan, where the participants were given amber talismans. I left the ceremony feeling rather euphoric and lighthearted. On the drive home, I noticed that I desperately needed gas, but something inside told me not to go to nearest gas station. The next station was across town, but I went with it. On the radio was a college station’s program that was referring to synchronicity, a topic that I’ve found compelling for many years. When I reached the next gas station, I sort of checked in with my intuition, and an alert went off inside of me, telling me: “Stop here! THIS is the one!”. I laughed at myself, but complied, not really expecting anything in particular.

“Inside of the gas station was a woman named Amy; Steve’s Aunt. We were incredibly excited to see each other; I was sure she would know where Steve was. However, it turned out that she hadn’t seen him for even longer than I had, and she was hoping *I* would know where he was. We had ourselves quite a mystery. We exchanged phone numbers and I went on my way. I was shaken to the core by how awesome it was that I followed my intuition to that place. It felt like a genuinely fateful experience.

“In September of 2009, I was headed out somewhere, when I had the sudden urge to pick up the amber talisman I’d received a couple months prior and put it in my pocket. “Well, why not?” – I pocketed it and went out to do whatever I was doing. That very same day, I received a text message: ‘Hey man, its steve.’

“So, I received a talisman on the night I ran into Amy. The talisman laid neglected on a shelf until the very day that Steve texted me. My mind reeled with gratitude that I was a spectator to such awesome events.

“Steve and I met up that night, and it turned out he was homeless; had just moved back to Michigan from Florida. I let him stay with me for a while, and forced him to get a Facebook account so that we wouldn’t lose touch again.

“Then around rolled 2010, and I received a Facebook friends request from Marcela. I didn’t remember her last name, nor did she remember mine, which is why we didn’t get in touch online sooner. However, she knew Steve’s last name so she found him on Facebook, which led her to me. If all of those events hadn’t brought Steve back into my life and I hadn’t hooked him up with a FB account, Marcela wouldn’t have found me.

“It also just so happened that Marcela was about to visit Michigan (she lives in the Pacific Northwest) in close time-proximity to her finding me online, so we arranged a visit on August 21. During the visit, I found out that she had gotten a divorce almost right after we lost touch, but she was never able to locate my contact information. Like me, she felt like we had a really special friendship and she wondered about me over the years.

“I also realized that her birthday is January 3rd, a date that is hugely significant to me for personal reasons. Furthermore, I’ve been wanting to move to the Pacific Northwest for over ten years, for it is a very special place to me and my heart has felt called there more than once.

“Now Marcela and I are living together near Portland, Oregon; exploring the potential of our friendship and seeing where the universe leads us from here.

“I forgot to mention how Steve got my number. Right after coming back to MI, he went to the hospital for some reason and ran into his Aunt Amy, who was also in the hospital. If they hadn’t been in the hospital at the same time, they would have had no idea how to find each other. Amy gave him my number, and he texted me the next day.

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You can find out more about Andrew at his blog here and his band, Anorkai, here.

 

 

Posted in contest winners, talisman | 22 Comments

Shocking synchros from Wales

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This winning entry  comes from Jane Clifford of Wales and is quite shocking. It involves  a murder in the village, missing jewels, and an assortment of omens. It sounds like the making of a mystery novel!

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“Not long ago, I ran over a squirrel, which upset me and is a bad omen. But I took comfort in the fact that it died instantly, not a long malingering death. A few days later, a woman was murdered in our village. It happened very close by and I actually felt it as it happened. I comforted myself that she died instantly. 

“Now this week I heard about jewels valued at half a million pounds that disappeared from a friend’s safe. A few hours later, I begin to read a short story. Astonishingly, it involved missing jewels valued at the exact same sum of money — half a million pounds!

“I was telling a friend about these two dramatic incidents in my life and I wondered if there would be a third incident. Ten minutes later, a blackbird hit my car,went straight up in the air and dropped like a stone! Yet another warning of challenges to come!”

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These are not cheery, light-heated tales. Jane had already told us about the murder, that she had felt a crushing blow to her head and later confirmed that she felt it at the time of  the murder. She later told a detective about it and soon started feeling pain in her head again. She thought it was a result of the re-telling. But she found out soon after that her mother had fallen and struck her head.
Posted in contest winners, murder | 16 Comments

An eye-opening synchro

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Trish and Rob
Here’s Nicholas Carroll’s winning entry from his days on the U.S. Navy ship anchored near Naples. The casual reader will find it interesting, if not astonishing. But to Nicholas it was a life-changing event in that in the aftermath he shifted his view of reality from a rational, materialistic perspective to being more open to the possibility that forces exist in the universe that are outside the everyday world of cause and effect.
We realized that this story must be one of the winners when we searched Google for ‘Naples, Italy images’ and immediately spotted among thumbnails of a dozen photos an image of an American navy ship anchored off Naples. That, in itself, is an illustration of an illustration of synchronicity!
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I was a young man in the Navy, stationed in Sardinia when I had my most profound coincidence. It began in January 1993 when I woke up with one of my eyes bloodshot red. It wouldn’t go away after a couple days. A month passed with my eye still bloodshot red. So I saw the doctor assigned to my squadron about it. He didn’t know what was wrong with my eye and recommended that I see an eye specialist at the U.S. Naval hospital in Naples.
Because the USS Orion was set to be decommissioned, with the USS Simon Lake sailing from Holy Loch, Scotland to replace it in La Maddalena, Sardinia, we had a lot of work to do in getting ready for the cross-decking (transferring everything from our office to the other ship). Besides, the Yeoman I worked for kept teasing me that going to Naples would be seen as a boondoggle and wouldn’t look good on my record. So, I kept resisting. The squadron doctor looked at my eye again and was alarmed when he saw some cells break apart. He didn’t know what it meant and he insisted that I had to go to Naples if I cared about my eye. He raised the spectre of possible blindness if I didn’t get it treated.
For not, I finally relented and got orders. I flew to the airport in Rome and had to rush to catch the last train to Naples before a strike went into effect. This was a common occurrence in socialist Italy. Unions would go on strikes all the time, shutting down the transportation and inconveniencing travel for everyone who didn’t have a private automobile…just for the hell of it. I did make the train, though. Otherwise I would’ve been stuck in Rome for however long the strike lasted (anywhere from 24 to 48 hours).
When I arrived at the Naval Hospital in Naples in the evening, a female officer on duty checked me in and set up an appointment with the eye specialist the next day. She even made sure I got a meal, bringing it to me like a concerned mother. I was impressed by her maternal instinct (it is unusual for an officer to serve an enlisted person, which is what she was doing by delivering a tray of food at the closed hospital dining facility).

I checked into the barracks at Capodichino (one of the sites that the U.S. Navy leases from the Italian government in the Naples metropolitan area). The next day, I went to my eye appointment at the Naples Hospital. The doctor looked at my eye and said that he had never seen anything like that before. He gave me some kind of ointment to put on my eye each night. When the appointment was finished, I boarded the shuttle bus to take me back to Capodichino barracks.

At the bottom of the hill, the bus came to a jerky stop. I stared out the window and saw two guys in suits on bicycles. One waved nervously to the bus driver. The bus drove and as we passed the guys on bicycles, I was shocked to see that one of the guys on the bicycle looked like my old friend from 7th grade, John Adams. He never kept in touch after I moved away from Nebraska in 1985, but I always remembered him. He was a Mormon and these two guys on bicycles were definitely Mormon missionaries. Back at the barracks, I looked up information about the Mormon church. I learned that one of the Navy Chaplains on the base was a Mormon, so I called him and told him about that coincidence in coming across this possible old friend of mine. He investigated for me and got back with me.

What I learned was that the missionary was indeed John Adams, but he was not assigned to a mission in the Naples area. He was in a Rome mission and I was able to get the address. After I received the confirmation of my hunches, I was shocked by the meaning of it all. I had not seen or heard from this guy in eight years. What was the likelihood that his path and my path would intersect on the road leading up to the U.S. Naval hospital in Naples, Italy in an afternoon in the spring of 1993?

As the Navy Chaplain told me, Elder Adams had to come to the American hospital to get new contact lenses. So, we both had an eye problem. And this chance meeting could have been missed if I had taken a later bus that day, or if I had gone to Naples weeks earlier as my squadron doctor recommended. It was a coincidence that depended on both of us being at that exact spot at that exact time and day. It also required that I had the ability to recognize an old friend (for John had no way of seeing who was on the bus or might not even remember me).

This coincidence opened the way for a new understanding. It was the one event I needed to shatter the logic-based view of atheism forever. I know that atheists and agnostics dismiss coincidences as “just a coincidence” but when I think about how improbable that situation was, I knew that there was an unseen force in our world that works in a mysterious way that defies any sense of logic or mathematical probabilities.

When I was released from the doctor’s care, I dealt with another of the Navy’s bureaucracy…getting back to my command in La Maddalena. I had to wait on a MAC flight, with no guarantees that I would get on a specific flight. MAC flights were twice a week, if I remember correctly. I kept my command up to date on my status. The Yeoman I worked for kept referring to my stay in Naples as a boondoggle, which annoyed me. The Navy was keeping me in Naples. True, I took advantage of being in Naples by shopping in the Navy Exchange and buying the latest paperback novels in the Stars and Stripes Bookstore (which La Maddalena did not have) and eating at Wendy’s (no American fast food restaurants in La Madd either).

But I decided that rather than wait for a MAC flight, I would return on my own dime and get reimbursed. Talk about initiative! The Navy was giving me an extended “vacation” in Naples by delaying my MAC flight spot, but I used my own travel abilities to get back to my command.

In Rome, I stopped by the Mormon mission office to talk with John Adams, who didn’t remember me as much as I remembered him. Everyone was curious about this coincidence story and I got to see how a mission office operated. They even gave me an Italian language Book of Mormon. Normally, American missionaries aren’t permitted to use a military hospital, but since Adams was an Air Force dependent, he had an I.D. card that allowed him use of the hospital. Back in the seventh grade, my circle of friends were all sons of Air Force personnel, since our junior high school was near Offutt Air Force Base.

After the short visit, I made my way to Civitavecchia to catch the overnight ferry to Olbia, Sardinia. The next day, I caught the bus from Olbia to La Maddalena, and my trip was completed. Did I receive thanks from my Yeoman supervisor? Hell, no. He was a complete dick. He thought the whole thing was a scam to get a free vacation to Naples, even though I had medical documentation. I think in retrospect that he was jealous that I got to go to Naples while he had to work for two of us. Besides, it seemed like the universe conspired a way to get me to that place of having an amazing coincidence.

What does that coincidence mean? To be honest, even eighteen years later, I still haven’t a clue to the meaning. I did get a letter or two from John Adams after our meeting, but no friendship sustained itself, so that’s another dead end. The best answer I could come up with is that this coincidence was a wake up call. The kind that God knew I needed to experience for proof of the spiritual force that operates in our world. It was the coincidence that began a series of coincidences.

My eye returned to normal. I think my red eye lasted for three or four months. I still don’t know what was wrong with it. Its one of those spiritual mysteries, I suppose, whose sole purpose was to get me to Naples to be in the precise location to experience that coincidental meeting. I consider the coincidence in Naples to be the biggest one of my life.

Posted in contest winners | 17 Comments

The 27 Club

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Singer Amy Winehouse, found dead in her London apartment, now joins the ranks of Kurt Corbain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones – musicians who all died at the age of 27.


Kurt Corbain

 

 

Janis joplin

Jimi Hendrix

 

Jim Morrison

 

We wrote about The 27 Club in 7 Secrets, in the chapter on clusters, and here  on the blog. Charles R. Cross, who wrote biographies of both Cobain and Hendrix, wrote that the number of musicians who die at this age is “truly remarkable by any standard.”  Brian Jones and Jim Morrison actually died on the same date two years apart.

There’s quite a lot of information about this club on the internet. One website lists 34 musicians who died at the age of 27, dating back as far as 1892.

This website includes a partial list of names with dates, causes of death, and “claim to notability.”  And contrary to what you might assume based on the deaths of the more prominent members of this club, drug overdoses aren’t always the cause:

Roger Lee Durham, with Bloodstone, died in 1973 when he fell off a horse.

Arlester Christian 3/13/71 Shot. Vocalist of Dyke & the Blazers, was shot in 1971.

Linda Jones, an R&B singer, died while in a diabetic coma in 1972.

Alexander Bashlachev, a  Russian poet, rock musician and songwriter, committed suicide in 1988 by “jumping.”

So what’s the deeper message with The 27 Club?

 

Posted in 27 | 14 Comments

A Hometown Synchro

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Trish and Rob


Tracy Wilhelm of British Columbia is our first winner of  our Golden Scarab Synchro award. She wins The Synchronicity Journal and the trade paperback edition of The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. She replied within an hour of the contest opening and offered the following story. We liked it!

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“I was on a working vacation in San Diego this past February, and brought The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity with me to read while I was there. On the Saturday before we were to fly home, I had just finished the first chapter, and had gotten to the part where it says to ask a question and by the end of the book, you would have your answer.

“Well, I asked my question but I put it out to the Universe that I wanted my answer by the end of my trip. I was contemplating moving back to the small town where I grew up, but still wasn’t sold on the idea. My question was whether I should indeed move there or not.

“The following day, we were headed up the Pacific Coast Hwy to get to LA to catch our flight. We stopped at a McDonalds along the way, and while we were there, I noticed a woman who I had seen at the San Diego Zoo two days prior. We traveled on to LA, and the next day went to the airport to catch our flight. Again, I noticed this same woman at the airport, and she was even on our flight.

“We had a stop-over once back in Canada and had to claim our luggage and then head to our next gate. This woman was standing near us and mentioned that she had seen us the previous day at the McDonalds. We got talking about where we were each headed, and she said she was from a town very close to where I grew up. I told her that I had grown up in this particular small town, and she responded that she was born there. I asked her what her last name was, and it turned out that she is the cousin of one of my closest friends from that small town.

“It wasn’t until I was home unpacking and retelling the story to my kids, that it clicked. I stopped in my tracks and went  ‘Aahhh, now I get it! That was my answer! I’m moving back.” What are the odds of seeing the same woman three times in three different locations, in California… in a matter of three days. (And 3 is my number). Love love love it!”

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Tracy followed up the story with this comment: “Oh and as a side note… I am now back living in that small town. I’ve been here just over a month now. =)”

Great story. Winner #1.

Posted in contest winners, moves | 5 Comments

Winning Synchro tales coming up

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Tomorrow we will begin posting the winning entries  in the Golden Scarab Synchro Contest.  We’ve got some good ones. Three of the five winners are posting synchros here for the first time.

Here are the winners in the order that their stories will appear.

Tracy Wilhelm of British Columbia –  7-23

Nicholas Carroll of Portland, Oregon – 7-24

Jane Clifford of Wales 7-25

Andrew Hicks of Beaverton, Oregon  7-26

E. Miles 7-27

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Meanwhile, here’s some sage advice for your day….ENJOY!

If you can start the day without caffeine…

if you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains…

if you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles…

if you can eat the same food everyday and be grateful for it…

if you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time…

if you can take criticism and blame without resentment…

if you can conquer tension without medical help…

if you can relax without alcohol…

if you can sleep without the aid of drugs…                                                                                                                                                                      …then you are probably the family dog.

Thanks to Doc Savvy for this one.

 

 

Posted in contest winners | 9 Comments

Wayseers

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Trish and Rob

I found this on Nancy Atkinson’s blog.  It’s powerful. We need more of this kind of thinking in the 21st century. Change starts with just one person, but it’s sure great to see this kind of momentum.

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

PS Synchro with Midnight in Paris

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

This synchro comes from Adele Aldridge, whose I Ching sites is one of my favorites.It’s about what she experienced as soon as Midnight in Paris ended. I think Woody Allen would appreciate it!

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I saw “Midnight in Paris” yesterday afternoon and experienced a sweet little synchro that I thought you two would appreciate, knowing you had seen the movie and you wouldn’t say if I told you the story, “So . . ?”

I went to a matinee at 3:00 p.m. It was hot and muggy here in Princeton so getting into the dark cool theater felt good.  Then there was that magnificent transport to beautiful scenes of Paris and the wonderful conversations and glimpses of some of my favorite characters: Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway . . . etc. You saw it so you know what I’m talking about.

I liked this Woody Allen the best of his movies because of the beauty of the scenes photographically as well as his dialogue and you know, all the rest. Anyway, the movie had that wonderful effect of forgetting where I was during that time – just what a good movie does. As you recall the movie ends with the Woody Allen substitute character and the beautiful Parisian young woman walking off into the rain, not having a care in the world, just enjoying each other and the rain.

When the movie ended and we all approached the front doors of the theater – a big rain storm blew up. It was just as if we had carried the movie with us. All the people who had been inside stood under the over hang of the theater, not daring to jump into the rain as no one was prepared with an umbrella. And the street was suddenly flooded.

What I loved was that we all just stood and smiled at each other and even laughed. We wordlessly experienced the synchronicity of that sudden rain in front of us just as we had left it in the movie. Usually one would think that being caught like this that people would be grumbling and saying things like, “Oh damn! Now what am I going to do?”

Instead, we all stood and waited and watched the rain and kept on smiling. A group of young teenage girls in the group ran into the street, holding out their arms, welcoming the rain, enjoying getting wet. No grownup scolded them. They appeared to be acting out the feeling the movie left us with.

I had parked my car about half a mile away so I stood there for about 15 minutes just waiting for this movie to move on to a different scene. And it did. I loved the movie and also loved that group synchro we all shared. I could tell that every person standing there, waiting in the rain, got it about the synchro, as we continued magically living in the movie.

I dare not tell this story to any one else. You had to have seen the movie and you have to get it about synchros. I don’t recall ever having one occur in a group before.

Posted in movies, Woody Allen | 14 Comments

The Dark Trickster and a Whistleblower Synchro?

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Many global stories often have embedded synchronicities, so let’s return to the scandal swirling around the now defunct News of the World and the perhaps soon to be defunct Rupert Murdoch empire. That empire, of course, includes the most divisive news organization in the U.S.:

On Monday, July 18, 2011, a man named Sean Hoare was found dead in his apartment. He was the first (and former) News of the World reporter to allege that Andy Coulson, the former editor- in- chief of the paper, was aware of phone hacking by his staff and actually encouraged it. Coulson, by the way, went on to become press chief to British Prime Minister David Cameron.

According to The Guardian, “Hoare first made his claims in a New York Times investigation into the phone-hacking allegations at the News of the World. He told the newspaper that not only did Coulson know of the hack, but he also actively encouraged his staff to intercept the calls of celebrities in the pursuit of exclusives.” The Times  investigation took place last year.

Last week, Hoare told the NYT that reporters at News of the World had paid off British police in exchange for using law enforcement technology to locate people using their mobile phones. This technique, known as pinging, measures the distance between a cell phone and the cell towers  to pinpoint the cell user’s location.

Hoarse was apparently fired from News of the World for drug and alcohol problems and had been in rehab. “But that’s irrelevant,” he told the NYT. “There’s more to come. This is not going away.”

He was certainly right about that. Unfortunately, Hoare is the one who went away. The Hertfordshire Constabulary said his “death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious.”

Really? If that’s true, then his death, at this precise juncture in time/events, is one whopper of a synchronicity.

This scandal has now jumped the Atlantic, with the members of Congress calling for an investigation into whether people in Murdoch’s empire tried to hack into the phones of families who lost loved ones on 9-11. The FBI is investigating. If it’s proven to be true, then Murdoch’s empire is going the way of Darth Vader’s.

So far, a whole bunch of people have resigned, including the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, who has worked with Murdoch for 50 years; Rebekah Brooks,  chief executive of News International (who was arrested and interrogated); the London police commissioner. And now the whistleblower who triggered this entire investigation turns up dead.

If he wasn’t killed and died of natural causes, then the timing certainly points to the work of the dark trickster.

 

Posted in Fox News, Murdoch, politics | 17 Comments

The Cloud Forest

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

We had one week to explore Costa Rica. We chose two spots – the Arenal Volcano region, which we wrote about here and Monteverde, known as The Cloud Forest. We wanted to see the Pacific coast and the southern part of the country, but when you travel by car through this country, you spend at least a day getting from one place to another. The roads in many places are bad, there’s just no way around that one. But even when the roads are bad, the scenery is so dramatic, so breathtaking,  your mind censors the potholes.

So on the morning of June 8, we set out in our little 4X4, headed for Monteverde and Arco Iris Lodge in Santa Elena. Just as we were leaving the property of the Arenal Lodge, the guard at the gate pointed upward. A pair of howler monkeys were bidding us farewell!  Well, the wave probably wasn’t for us, but I took this to be a positive omen for our journey.

The trip was supposed to take four hours, an ascent into the mountains to around 5,900 feet, higher than Denver, Colorado. The first hour or so, the road was fine – paved, with the usual dangerous bridge alert on our GPS.  At one point, Megan asked about the place we were going to be staying, Arco Iris. “What’s it like, Mom?”

“No clue,” I replied. “Got it off the internet.”

“Hmm,” she murmured. “Usually when you do that, the second place isn’t as cool as the first.”

Good point. Arenal Lodge would be tough to beat.

In some little village where we got coffee, the good road ended and the potholes began and the road was never again paved. But along the way, we met a baby goat, gasped at precipitous drops on one side of the narrow road, and could still pick up email on our cells.  Yes, I confess, this was more important for me than for Rob and was one of the criteria I used for lodging. How’s your Internet? I wish I could be more like Mike Perry, who travels to far flung spots with his wife and doesn’t even take a cell phone or laptop with him. But that’s not part of my script in this lifetime.

Finally, we reached the outskirts of…well, something. It looked like civilization, but the GPS was acting weird and we weren’t sure. We were supposed  to drive through a school soccer field. We were  in a town and were supposed to go down a hill and turn into what looked like an alley.  But suddenly, we were there.

The Arco Iris Lodge – the Rainbow Lodge – is tucked away on a hill off a well-traveled road in the village of Santa Elena.  Everything in town is within walking distance.But as we drove up the steep hill to the property, it was immediately obvious we were  in another world. Two friendly dogs and a cat greeted us. The man at the front desk spoke perfect English and took us over to cabin 1. Two bedrooms, one bath, a living room with TV, a small fridge for snacks, and yes, Internet!

The wide front porch overlooked the grounds and every afternoon, the fog rolled in and I felt as if I were walking into   scene from my novel, Esperanza. The first photo shows just how thick the fog gets. This is where we saw Capuchin monkeys zipping through a clutch of trees. We discovered a trail up through the property that led into an orchard of fruit trees, a small coffee plantation,  a place for the chickens that lay the eggs that were served for breakfast.

And here, in a magical moment that startled all of us, we encountered a white horse in a forest. A day later, we encountered two white horses in this forest, near a stream, and in my mind, they immediately became white unicorns, here but not here. When one of them charged Megan, we leaped back into the trees and they galloped past us, up a steep incline.

Santa Elena is a vibrant little town. Incredible restaurants, including one that is appropriately named Treetop, because a giant ceiba tree grows through the middle of it. People from all over the world come here for the ziplining. Unlike Arenal Lodge, where the guided hiking and horseback riding are free, nearly every  activity in this area costs something. That’s because most of the land is privately owned and is a preserved wilderness.

One day we paid a small fee for a guided tour through the rain forest and saw the largest and grossest spider I have ever seen – a tarantula that lived in the hollow of a tree. When the guide stomped on the ground near its tree, this sucker scampered out, and it was the size of a man’s fist. Atavistic. A throwback to some more primitive time. We also saw a pair of tremendous owls, the size of a barn, it seemed, perched together on a branch. “They mate for life,” the guide said. “Where there is one, there are always two.”

Every guide we encountered in Monteverde was an amateur biologist. Every waiter was a connoisseur of foods or wines, coffee or desserts. Every hotel clerk gave a little extra in time and knowledge. In the local market, every fruit and vegetable we saw was huge, excessive in size,  and prices were reasonable. Standing in line at the register, Rob noticed a woman wearing a black Namaste t-shirt and said, “My wife has one of those.”

It turned out that she and her husband were American expats who owned and operated a yoga studio in town, and that afternoon Rob  did some yoga in their studio while Megan and I shopped.  This was the town where Megan had the opportunity to head out for fun and exploration with  some girls her age from Australia who she’d met while we ziplined. This was the magical place where the sound of rain on rooftops whisks you back to your childhood.

I found that Costa Rica is my little paradise – and not just for the obvious environmental delights. You won’t find a single nuclear plant here. Electricity is generated through wind, solar, steam, hydro. They have no army, no death penalty. They welcome Americans. They respect and preserve the resources they have. The government is stable. And well, then there’s the odd animal life, like Stephanie, the macaw, and her ilk,  or the strange encounters in the woods with the unicorns.

Magic is the key to Costa Rica.

Inside the treetop restaurant

 

Posted in Costa Rica | 10 Comments