Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Most of us spend about a third of our lives sleeping – and dreaming.  Sometimes our dreaming lives seem whimsical, silly, outrageous. But more often than we realize, our dreams can provide insights into concerns in our waking lives  and can also offer creative ideas.

Brahms, Puccini, and Wagner, for instance, all claimed that their musical ideas often were born during hypnogogic states of consciousness, that strange netherworld we enter as we’re falling asleep. Mary Shelley said her idea for Frankenstein came about as a result of horrifying hypnogogic images. It makes sense.

As we’re falling asleep, we’re entering another state of consciousness, where our logical left brain goes dormant and our right brain, that creative side of the brain,  comes awake.

Stephen King refers to the writing of a novel as “dreaming awake,” and I know what he means. When you’re plugged into a story, the rest of the world vanishes. It’s just you – and the characters, the story, all of it unfolding in a kind of dreamlike state.

Thomas Edison used to take catnaps when he was stuck on a particular problem. When Einstein was stuck in his formulation about the theory of relativity, he supposedly took a nap and woke up with the answer. It’s as if intense left-brain activity needs to take a break at some point. It needs help from the right brain, and despite its resistance to that help, physical exhaustion takes over and the right brain rises to do its thing.

Creativity is an innate ability in all of us and one way or another, finds expression in our lives. Some years ago, an old friend of mine from my childhood in Caracas visited us and remarked how she didn’t feel creative at all. I was shocked. She’s a Sagittarius, and one of the things this sign is known for is its nomadic tendencies, its love of travel. She had spent nearly 20 years as flight attendant for Pan American Airways and has probably traveled to every continent except Antarctica. Travel is your creative outlet, I told her, and her eyes lit up and I knew she suddenly understood that creativity isn’t just about a physical product.

Creativity is an inner journey, a spiritual journey. It might be who we are when we aren’t resisting who we are. Maybe it’s one of the most direct routes to experiencing synchronicity, which tends to occur more frequently when we’re in an intensely creative period in our lives. In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, creativity is one of the secrets.

During this hypnogogic period of sleep, our physical bodies undergo big changes – intense relaxation, a drop in blood pressure, a slowing of heart and breathing rates. We let go of our conscious lives. And by doing so, we sink into what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, what physicist David Bohm called the implicate or enfolded order of the universe, a primordial soup that births everything, perhaps even space and time.

Pretty cool. Is it possible to dream a better world into existence? A more equitable world where no one goes to sleep hungry? Where war is a tragic anachronism of a prehistoric past?

May the creative flame burn in all of us. Dream on!

 Recently, a Google alert came through for synchronicity that led to a piece in the Huffington Post.

It starts off in a positive way, talking about Jung and the golden scarab that led to his theory about synchronicity, what synchronicity is. The  article even mentions the Wilhelm edition of the I Ching, to which Jung wrote the forward  in 1949, the first time he “came out” about synchronicity.

And then, rather predictably, the article veers in this direction:

“So how, and why, did these events occur? Jung argued that the psychic event (for instance, the dream of the scarab) and the coinciding physical event (the actual scarab on the window) are objects “of the same quality,” which causes them to co-occur, or coincide. It’s an interesting theory, but because of the lack of scientific backing, many psychologists since have been unsatisfied with Jung’s answers.

“Post-Jung, some psychologists and statisticians have held a more skeptical view about the meaning of coincidences, which they say can be explained away by a common (and fallacious) habit of mind.

“Our inclination to find connections and patters in random data is what’s known in psychology as apophenia. So when we spot a coincidence, what’s really happening is that our brain is simply exercising its fundamental ability to identify patterns — something we can do even when there are none, statistically speaking.”

Wait a minute. If we recognize significance in synchroncities, we’re actually suffering from some sort of cognitive dysfunction called apophenia?  According to the article, coincidences may be explained by “cognitive biases” that keep us from seeing casual connections between coinciding events. This explanation sounds an awful lot like that of professional skeptic Michael Shermer, who experienced a synchronicity we wrote about in The Synchronicity Highway and  then went to great lengths to discredit his own experience. 

The article cites an abstract by a couple of men in the psychology department at Stanford. The abstract is entitled, Randomness and Coincidences: Reconciling Intuition and Probability Theory.  Once again, science/psychology goes to great lengths to explain away the significance of meaningful coincidence.

In many ways, this entire sequence of arguments against synchronicity as significant strikes me as the desperate gasp of a dying paradigm. You know the paradigm I’m talking about – the one that says everything you experience is random, we live in a random universe where nothing is connected to anything else, where we are quasi mechanical beings in a materialistic universe and that’s it, folks, so sorry.

The Huffington Post article ends with this paragraph:

“[Coincidence is] a porthole into one of the most interesting philosophical questions we can ask: Are the events of our lives ultimately objective or subjective?,” writes Jill Neimark in Psychology Today. ‘Is there a deeper order, an overarching purpose to the universe? Or are we the lucky accidents of evolution, living our precious but brief lives in a fundamentally random world that has only the meaning we choose to give it?’”

Really? That’s the best conclusion the author could provide? Well, how about this as a counter-argument, a quote from Jung: “Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have the eyes to see.”

(Psychology Today is the ‘popular front,’ the media spearhead, of the dying old paradigm. If there’s any doubt about that, take a look at our post on the magazine from July 2012 about a proposal we submitted for an article about synchronicity that cited a researcher who has strayed from the old accepted ways and recognized meaningful coincidence. Not only did they not bother to respond to us, but they scoured our blog—as we documented—then assigned a derogatory article about synchronicity that read like something out of People Magazine.)

The problem here is that the dying paradigm seems to be threatened by the very notion that perhaps the world and our experience of it is more than what our five senses tell us. Perhaps quantum physicist David Bohm hit the truth when he said that synchronicity may hint at a deeper order in the universe, one he called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primordial soup that births everything in the universe. Bohm believed that even time unfolds from this implicate order and that our external reality is the unfolded or explicate order. Synchronicity, then, is where the implicate and explicate, the inner and the outer, meet.

Once you’re aware of meaningful coincidence, it seems to be everywhere. You recognize it in the oddest places, at the strangest junctures.  Past life researcher and author Carol Bowman has noted its occurrence in past lives and our recollection of those lives. Her next book is about this very topic.  Interestingly, Huffington Post had an article by a physician about this very thing.

I suspect that as we move farther into the 21st century, the old paradigm will continue to fall apart as humanity’s collective experiences confirm what the mystics have known all along. As William Blake put it: “To see the world in a grain of sand…”

Alexis Brooks is an author of self-help/New Age books and host of Conscious Inquiry Radio. Alexis interviewed us for her show recently, and you can hear that interview here. We had a great time talking with Alexis. She’s very knowledgeable and it’s always great to talk about this ‘weird’ stuff with someone who understands and doesn’t think it’s weird at all. In other words, we were on the same wave length.

Before the interview, she had read The Synchronicity Highway, which inspired her to write a blog post. We’re posting an excerpt  below, and you can read the entire post here.

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In Trish and Rob MacGregor’s excellent new book, The Synchronicity Highway, they say, “…your guidance system lies in your awareness, curiosity, feelings, intentions, and beliefs.  It lies within.  Once you trust that inner guidance, synchronicities seem to pop-up everywhere.  They are signposts, friends, allies that guide and direct you, warn you, clarify and confirm your decisions, laugh at you and with you.”

It seems to me that if there were any time in history where this ally is greatly needed, it is now.  Synchronicity is still one of those less understood and yet persistent anomalies that we’ve all encountered at one time or another.  We’d have occasional coincidences – acknowledge them and invariably shrug them off.  They’d just pop into view or earshot and show themselves just enough to give us a chuckle or a “hmm, interesting.”

For those who have a sneaking suspicion that there’s more to synchronicity than meets the (mind’s) eye, my suggestion is that we consider taking their presence just a bit more seriously.  In fact, why not enter into an agreement with the Universe to commit to seeing them more often and then utilizing them to navigate this rollercoaster ride?

The point:  We do have a guidance system, an inner GPS if you will, that if yielded will guide us, and without the necessary DVD upgrades to boot.  It doesn’t falter or fail – it just gives information and I truly sense it has our best interest at heart.  Its only caveat?  Pay attention!  So even though the roller coaster of life has managed to build an infrastructure with increasingly more dips and curves, perhaps the purpose is to get us to take it on in order to tame it, to ride it through and to change the course altogether…”hmm, interesting!!”

The Current Times

I’ve always found it intriguing how the English language tends to have multiple definitions and yet a singular and fundamental connection.  Take the word “current.”  In one definition, current denotes a time of now, of present – our current situation.  But current also means, flow – something that moves, that is agile and not resistant to change.  What current are you experiencing?  Are you flowing with it or against it?  Might the presence of synchronicity (once recognized) be your compass to navigate the current with more agility?  It’s something to contemplate for sure!  And once you do?

All of reality becomes meaningful…

Getting back to the MacGregor’s book in which they beautifully illustrate how synchronicity is key to understanding the myriad ways the Universe works to communicate with us, let’s talk about 11!  What is it?  Why is it? And more importantly what about its presence as it relates to the current times?

Here is an excerpt from their book, Synchronicity Highway that might give us a clue:

“Carl Jung considered numbers to be archetypal and believed that when you experience clusters of a particular number, it has become active within your psyche.  It apparently stays active until you get the message.  The message of 11:11 seems to be about evolution of consciousness, that you’re being ushered into a greater reality, the flow (yes – the current!) of universal energy.  It can also act as a warning and as confirmation.”

It appears that these current times are critical – monumental in fact.  And the thousands, no – millions who are and have been experiencing the 11’s on a regular basis are indicative of the fact that our current times are nudging us to graduate to a level of consciousness that will ironically release the lock-hold of finite potential and open the doors to in-finite reality – a reality that will imbue us with the realization that we are not mortal (mediocre, average, everyday) humans but immortal (infinite, extraordinary, creative) spiritual energy, and once set free ( and recognize this through synchronicity), we will fly!

 Back in the late 1980s, Rob and I had a chance to write about the making of Miami Vice – the original Vice, with Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. Doing this project for Ballantine Books was great fun. We got onto the Vice set in Miami, were flown out to LA to talk with director Michael Mann and whoever else would give us the time of the day. But what’s really interesting about the project is how it came full circle with one of the people we interviewed.

Even though the two stars – Johnson and Thomas – refused to be interviewed for the book, the people who did talk to us were just great. One of the nicest men we met during this project was Ernie Robinson, who doubled for Philip Michael Thomas on stunts. When we met Robinson, he was 53 and looked twenty years younger. He stood nearly six feet tall, weighed 163 pounds, and was built similar to Thomas except in the legs. When he had started in the business in the 1960s, there were few qualified black stunt men.

“I was involved with the Tenth Cavalry – an equestrian outfit – and through them I met white stunt men. At the time, white guys had been doubling for blacks. You  know, they used makeup and stuff.”

We asked Robinson if he’d ever doubled for a white actor and he laughed heartily, making us think the question was preposterous. “Hey, I’ve doubled for everybody even women, with wigs and clothes and all.”

His start as a stunt man was slow. But eventually he started finding jobs doubling for people like Bill Cosby, Roscoe Lee Brown, Harry Bellafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Richard Pryor. Big names. And he had nothing but nice things to say about all of them. Cosby, he said, was just as nice as he seemed. Poitier was soft-spoken, the elegant type. And Pryor? “He doesn’t even have to start any dialogue. It seems that just in conversation, he gets people cracking up. I really enjoyed working with him.”

Robinson and about 20 other black stunt men started the Black Man’s Stunt Association and he served as its president for a decade. Through the association, he trained blacks who were struggling to become stunt men and always told them the business was more dangerous than it seemed because it looked so easy.

Synchronicity was no stranger to Robinson’s life. He paid attention. When working on the movie Greased Lightning, he experienced something that he spoke about in a hushed, almost reverential tone. “I did this stunt on a track that wasn’t supposed to happen. I was just supposed to be driving. The car I was in had little tires, skinny tires, it was a period-type car. Anyway, so I was  turning sideways to start skidding on two wheels and as I brought the car back down another car went under mine. The front wheels of my car leaped off the track and the car fell fifty feet to the ground. It landed so that I could get out, and just after I did, it exploded.

“Half an hour later, this car pulls up to the track and this guy walks toward me and I knew he had bad news. He told my my father had died. I think he died at the same time I went over that fifty-foot drop. I shoulda been dead, see. I should’ve had at least a scratch. But I had nothin’, not even a bump on the head.”

Fast forward decades. This morning, one of the emails in my box was from a woman named Nonie L Robinson, who had tweeted:

Rob and Trish | https://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets/?p=12830 … via @trishmac – Thank you for writing about my grandfather Ernie Robinson, Stuntman on Miami Vice!!

 We had written up this very synchro in November 2012. I wrote her back and told her he was one of the nicest people we had met on the set.

Nonie has also been involved in movies and TV.  I somehow find this full circle stuff quite gratifying!

Crossroad has since brought the book back into ebook and audio format. On Amazon, the sole review of the ebook illustrates a basic misunderstanding of how these kinds of projects worked then and now. Our instructions with this project amounted to: This is not a hatchet job.

And really, other than the fact that the two principal stars refused to be interviewed, there was little to criticize. Michael Mann ran a tight ship. He knew his characters, the location and the story. But he also gave his actors the freedom to make their own decisions. When we mentioned that Johnson and Thomas didn’t want to be interviewed, he shrugged. “I can’t make them talk to you. Write around them.”

So we did. In the end, they were pretty much incidental to the book.

Bridges have been in the news quite a bit in the last few days and weeks. First, there’s Bridgegatein New Jersey. The governor of that state, Chris Christie, is allegedly responsible for closing down traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge, the busiest in the U.S. as political retaliation against the Mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing him for governor.

The bridge was tied up for several days,  creating a traffic nightmare for commuters between Fort Lee, New Jersey and New York. New allegations surface daily and Christie has his hands full denying all of it. At least 20 subpoenas have been issued, and there’s talk that the scandal has damaged Christie’s shot at the white house in 2016. It’s going to be interesting to see how this all unfolds.

I had just finished reading the updates on the Christie scandal and then Rob and I sat down to dinner and turned on the local news to NBC Miami. One of the stories was about a bridge – that was the first word I heard, but it was actually a deck – that collapsed at a building in Bay Harbor Island.

Twenty people were gathered on the deck for a commemoration ceremony for a friend who had recently died from cancer. They were tossing flowers into the water when the bridge suddenly collapsed, and all of them fell into the water. Two of them suffered minor injuries and were sent to a local hospital.

I was struck by the trickster element in this story – a memorial commemoration for a friend and the deck collapses, a kind of punctuation point to the man’s life. But a deck, like a bridge, is also a structure over water. While the George Washington Bridge didn’t collapse, Christie’s political ambitions may have. These two things don’t qualify as a cluster of synchros, but I’m on the lookout for a third.

I was looking for flash mob videos in 2014, but so many of them are, well, like full scale productions. This one from 2010, in a college union building, is a feel good event that retains some of the spontaneity and surprise of onlookers that makes these events so much fun!

The Allen telescope array in search of alien life

Mainstream science tends to be Earth-centric when it comes to investigating alien life. In other words, when scientists talk about the search for aliens civilizations, they take the perspective that such beings generally will act – if not look—like humans. The aliens would announce their presence when they arrive and either be friendly or aggressive. They would have advanced technologies, but they wouldn’t break physical laws that we assume exist for the entire universe. They would be techies, but they wouldn’t walk through walls or float sleeping humans out of their bedrooms or communicate telepathically.

All these assumptions – and of course I’m making my own assumptions about mainstream science from what I’ve observed – lead us to Fermi’s paradox. Simply put, the paradox is the apparent contradiction between the supposition that civilizations must be abundant in the universe and humanity’s lack of contact with ETs, or evidence they exist.

Physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael H.Hart puzzled over the problem. They noted that the Sun is a young star, there are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older. Some of these stars no doubt have Earth-like planets, where intelligent life evolved. Presumably, some of those civilizations developed interstellar travel, and over tens of millions of years, the galaxy would be completely colonized.

So Fermi wanted to know what happened. Why haven’t alien colonizers arrived? He asked: “Where is everybody?”

The simplest solution would be that there is nobody else. No one is home elsewhere. In fact, there are no homes. If that’s the case, it seems that our vast Milky Way Galaxy would consist of a lot of wasted real estate. That belief was better suited for the Middle Ages. Yet, some scientists actually suggest that we may be the only intelligent race in existence anywhere. Hmm, talk about an Earth-centric point of view.

Another popular reason for the lack of contact is the so-called impossibility of inter-planetary space flight. In other words, it would just take too long to get anywhere—even if there were no traffic jams in deep space. But that again assumes all civilizations are restricted to the same limitations we face.

Meanwhile, mainstream science stubbornly rejects all hearsay and anecdotal evidence that aliens are already here and have been throughout our history, that humans are being abducted and subjected to invasive procedures, that the aliens have extraordinary abilities that bypass some of our physical laws. When asked about such contentions, they simply say that the evidence for an alien presence is non-existent.

Certainly, there are scientists who disagree, but who understand that speaking out on this issue is a career buster. And that’s the real paradox. If there is an alien presence, the most important issue of our time is not only being ignored by mainstream science, but it’s taboo. Aliens and UFOs cannot be discussed in serious scientific circles.

Meanwhile, the Internet has enough stories about sightings, encounters and abductions to keep us reading and wondering. As they say on The H2 Channel’s Ancient Aliens, “What if it were true?”

 On January 6, I wrote up a synchro that will appear this month called The Dolphin Returns Home. It concerned one of our daughter’s dolphin paintings that was bought by fellow blogger and friend, Nancy Atkinson. It was shipped to her place in Hawaii during a Mercury retrograde.

Whenever Mercury is retrograde – which it is three times a year – there are travel and communication snafus. I felt uneasy about shipping the painting during this period, but Nancy really wanted the painting for her condo in Hawaii, so off it went. There were many screw-ups with this shipment.  

At any rate, I finished the post, copied a link into it – and the entire post vanished. I searched my computer, figuring it had to be somewhere, but I never found it and I hadn’t yet copied it to my backup drive. So on the morning of the 7^th, I set out to reconstruct the post and had to look up the astrology information again, find the links, stuff that takes time.  I got sidetracked with some other astrology stuff and finally went to work on my ghostwriting project.

That afternoon – law of attraction? – I received an email from a woman who is editor of a business website,  asking if I would be interested in writing a piece for the site about the financial outlook for the 12 signs for 2014.  I told her I was  interested and asked what she wanted in terms of word count. It turned out that she was looking for 50 to 100 words per sign.

Here’s where the trickster had a great belly laugh. I thought that since it was a business website, they had a budget in mind.  But the editor wrote back and said $500 was a bit out of their price range. Even though they have 30 million unique visitors a month, the website isn’t turning a profit yet. Did I know of any other astrologers who might be willing to do the piece in exchange for exposure for their book or website?

I told her that none of the astrologers I know work for free, that the info doesn’t come off the top of your head but is time intensive. To do this kind of forecast requires hours of erecting charts and studying transits etc. to each of the sun signs. She said she understood and would keep looking.

Yes, good luck with that search.

The lesson I took away from this odd interaction is that I can’t assume anything about these types of synchros. Just because I was immersed in some astrology stuff shortly before I heard from this woman doesn’t mean it would necessarily pan out. In this way, it’s a lot like this synchro, which involved Ecuador and time travel, where an option is presented, but it isn’t necessarily the path you should follow.

 One of our daughter’s jobs is as an artist with Paint Nite, a company that began in Boston. As an art major in college, this job is great for her. The concept of Paint Nites is brilliant and simple: anyone can learn to paint in a relaxed atmosphere (bar), when a “master artist” leads the class, step by step, in how to paint a particular image. Paintings are chosen by the corporate headquarters and artists are encouraged to submit their own paintings for consideration. They are well-compensated for these events and earn money on the images they’ve created when they are used by Paint Nites in other cities.

Since Megan first started with this company last year, Rob and I have been students in her practice classes here at the house.  So it was fun to actually attend a paint nite that she taught.

This one was held at a bar/restaurant called Grafitti Junction, in the college park area of Orlando. The event started at 5 and ran until 7, but we arrived at 4 so Megan could help with the set up.

When we walked into the back room of the restaurant, I was impressed at how well-organized everything was.  At each of the 25 or so spots that had been set up, there were: a small easel with a 16×20 canvas on it; 3 paint brushes  (small, medium, large),  a plastic glass filled with water for cleaning your brushes, paper towels for drying the brushes, and a paper plate with blobs of acrylic paint in the colors that would be used for the night’s particular painting (featured above).  Draped over the back of each chair was a lime green apron to put on so the paint didn’t get on your clothes.  The color matched the fabric draped over all the tables and bar.

While Megan helped with the setup, Rob and I found a table outside and got a bite to eat. The weather was gorgeous – mid-60s, sunny. At 4:45, we went inside, took the chairs we’d claimed earlier, and the event started promptly at five. The painting we did was called Lily Pads.

I was thinking that the night before, when Megan had been practicing this painting, she’d gone through three canvasses (artist meltdown!) before she figured out how to teach it. But as she took her spot at the front of the room the evening of the event, and started talking, there was no trace at all of that angst. She had figured it out. And wow, did it ever work.

The class was small – 16 – four men, a dozen women – and Megan, her assistant, and the bartender. She took us through the process – background color is apparently key to everything else  – and  these people had fun as their creativity was released. It’s amazing to me that a group of people come together for a creative purpose and that within a few hours, they can take home something to hang on their walls.

How can writers do something like this? How would you even know where to start with the written language?

One of the most interesting participants was a man with a bald head festooned with an elaborate tattoo. He’s a tattoo artist, but has never painted. I snapped a picture of his head:

Before the end of the event, I understood a synchro that had occurred before we’d left Megan’s apartment that afternoon. She has a new roommate and one of the things Caitlan brought with her was a cool coffee table with a chalkboard surface. Using a piece of yellow chalk, Rob had written: Wherever you go, there you are. He pointed it out to Megan and she burst out laughing.

“Wow, this is a synchro. My friend Ryan wrote exactly same thing the other night.” She moved some papers around and showed us the faded writing. Sure enough, same words, and strangely similar handwriting (which didn’t show up in the picture I took).

In an odd way, these words fit everything Paint Nites is about.  In spite of the issues we human beings have, in spite of the state of the world or the universe or whatever, we are where we are and let’s enjoy it. Even if you’ve never painted anything in your entire life, you enter into this venue and your creative passions take over. Your muse rules the roost.

Wherever you go, there you are. A wise code to live by.

  These 3 friends are Noah – in the middle – Kilt to his left, and Willow to his right. Kilt and Willow are border collies who belong to our friend Cassie.

Cassie has worked in the horse industry for more than 20 years – as a groom, barn manager, the person who prepares the horses for competitions, travels with them overseas for competitions, sits in quarantine with them. In her business, the people/family who hire you usually pay – in addition to a salary – for your rent, car, phone,  travel expenses and so on. You must be mobile for this kind of work, nomadic, because competitive horse people spend the worst part of the winter in South Florida and the rest of the year elsewhere.

For the last 6 years, Cassie has worked for novelist Tami Hoag, who hired her to work with her horses on international competitions. But Tami decided she didn’t want to compete internationally and had to let Cassie go. So now Cassie works for the family who owns the Biltmore estate – the Vanderbilts – and had to move into a new apartment by January 1. But during the season in our area,  apartments are impossible to find, everything is leased, wrapped up, taken. So she and her two border collies moved in with us on January 1.

The first day was totally wild. Kilt and Willow were disoriented by the move. Kilt has more energy than several dozen humans and couldn’t quite believe that she had a pool and a yard that was visited by squirrels. She’s two. Her bro, Willow, is ten, more mellow, a kind of Downton Abbey dog, always reserved, as Cassie says, always in a tux. Willow is also interested in squirrels, but is quite pleased to stalk our two cats relentlessly. We had to set up boundaries, shut off certain rooms so that the dog and cat quarters are separate, at least until the critters all became accustomed to the living situation.

And now, into the second week, I’m happy to report that Noah is beside him with joy. He has other dogs to play with, to chase around the pool, through the jungle of our yard. He showed Kilt and Willow how to step into the pool on the shallow side, with the easy steps, and Kilt mastered the task in minutes, bounding in and out of the water with wild abandon. Willow is more cautious by nature and since his hips are ailing, he doesn’t leap in the way Kilt does. He does everything more slowly, but with the same degree of joy.

Kilt and Nika, who is part border collie, are the same age and share many of the same attributes. Both are affectionate, are happiest when they have a task, a mission, a goal, and they don’t bother the cats. Willow is just as sharp, but is really tempted by the presence of cats. Are you gonna run, huh? If you do, I’ll chase you…  That sort of interest.

Powder, our snow white cat, is probably the most tolerant cat I’ve ever met. She’s fine with more dogs in the house as long as they understand the rules – that if they get too close, they’ll be swatted, and she still has her claws. Simba, our male orange tabby, doesn’t want anything to do with any of them. He goes outside or hides out in our bedroom, but if he’s cornered, he’ll hiss and howl the way only a male cat can and fight. But when the dogs go into Cassie’s room at night, he struts out, wary yet fearless. Where are they, huh? Huh?

Somehow, these 5 animals have arrived at a living arrangement that works for all of them. And meanwhile, the tres amigos – two border collies and a golden retriever – gang up on us humans at dinner, in the yard, when we least expect it. Hey, humans, see how we do this?

Always, they are our teachers.

Synchros? I can’t find any right this second. It’s just about  life and big changes for humans and their animal buddies.