Along the ET Highway

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Nevada State Highway 375 extends for 98 miles, through some of the most desolate country in the U.S. It crosses three high desert valleys in south central Nevada – Tikaboo Valley, Sand Spring Valley, and Railroad Valley.  Other than a scattering of ranches, the town of Rachel, Nevada is the only settlement, but you won’t find much there. The only gas station closed some time ago, a few mobile homes are visible here and there. Yet, tourists flock  to Rachel. Why?

It’s less than 40 miles from Area 51. In fact, in 1996, the Nevada State Highway 375 was officially renamed The Extraterrestrial Highway.

The most famous spot in Rachel is out in the middle of nowhere – the Little A Le Inn,  It’s a restaurant and an inn, where a room costs between $45-55 a night and if you bring along your pet, an additional $35 deposit is required.  It also provides an RV hookup.

The area looks so desolate that I couldn’t imagine why anyone would decide to settle in Rachel, Nevada – except, of course, for its proximity to Area 51. However, 40 miles of open desert isn’t all that close, and if you’re crazy enough to hike in, you probably have to be a desert survivalist to do it.

But a visit could be interesting, all that open sky, no city lights to obscure the view at night. I wouldn’t mind a crazy trip like this, a journey through a mythic landscape that exists because of what supposedly happened at Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947.

The Little A Le Inn seems to be a kind of cultural icon, with everything a tribute to ETs. Here’s the menu:

53 miles from Rachel is the Alien Research Center in Hiko, Nevada. You sure couldn’t miss it!

And here’s a photo of the Black Mailbox, one of the landmarks, a spot from which to watch for UFOs.

And here’s a map showing the layout of Rachel and Groom Lake, where Area 51 is located.

Any takers for a trip like this?

 

 

Posted in aliens, area 51, synchronicity | 20 Comments

Mysterious object

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Trish and Rob

This object, photographed by an amateur astronomer, is truly strange.

Posted in synchronicity | 18 Comments

Writers Take Heed

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Trish and Rob

That image represents us, imprisoned by our perceptions. Our daughter, Megan, painted this beauty.

++

Tonight on the Huffington Post, I ran across an article on literary agents that sounded helpful.I was surprised to find it on HP. Both Rob and I have literary agents, so I read through it because I was curious about the advice an organization I’d never heard of was offering on agents.

It was about shady literary agents who are “looking for a quick buck.” These shady agents charge fees for reading editing, evaluations, or marketing. Okay, good advice so far. Although I’m sure there are shady agents, just as there are shady characters in every industry, I’ve met only two in my nearly thirty years as a published writer. Most agents are honest individuals who love books, love a good story, hope to sell them, and hope that one or more of them will exceed all expectations and hit the NY Times bestseller list.

The shady part in the industry is what’s cropping up now that ebooks are changing the face of publishing:

Third parties:  these guys are like the opportunistic uncle everyone shuns at the wedding. They are the parasites. The offer to scan your book, format it, create a cover and get it into all the outlets for a   steep upfront price. They also take 15% of the ebook price for their efforts and, usually, have a clause about exclusivity. Who are they?

The worst offender we’ve found so far is Argo Navis,  a “boutique” agency that is, unfortunately, signing up a number of literary agencies who have been around for decades and have bestselling authors with large back list titles – books that are out of print. By their calculation, it would cost me nearly seven grand to bring my back list titles into digital format. I can do this task myself for much, much less.

And oh, by the way, they only take agented writers – i.e., writers with extensive back lists who don’t have the time to figure this stuff out on their own and are happy to pay someone else to figure it out for them. Argo Navis will take you to the cleaners, as my dad used to say.

Writers Relief,  whose staff wrote the article for Huffington Post, is the second biggest offender in the third party category. Their site is friendly – we do this and that for you, the writer. We have this and that free service. We support the writer. Yada, yada. We help you get published. Really? How? Oh, they evaluate your manuscript, help you hone your characters, your plot, and send out query letters to editors, but of course they must be paid. They emphasize that they are not literary agents – who take no fees up front – and because they aren’t agents, they must be paid for their work.  Up front. Avoid this outfit. Like Argo-Navis, they’re a plague and are hoping to cash in for doing…what, exactly?

A third offender is the Curtis Agency, which some years ago,  started a branch to the company called e-reads. Rob signed up with his book, Crystal Skull, but first had to work off the $400 fee for formatting and cover design. He has yet to see a penny and it’s been about five years. Here’s the hideous cover they gave the book:

So Rob wrote e-reads to get the rights reversion to the novel. He received a note from Richard Curtis, the president of the agency,  telling him his contract (5 years) with e-reads had expired and if he would like to renew, they would give the book a new cover. BUT it would cost $195 up front and the renewal contract would be for 5 years. Rob told him no thanks, and sent him both an email and a letter in snail mail, requesting the rights reversion. Weeks later, they reverted the rights.

The fourth offender in this muddled picture is that publishers are loathe to revert rights, even when the book has been out of print for years. Kensington, my former publisher, has reverted rights to just 3 or the 12 books I did for them. Contractually, they are allowed to hold onto rights for SEVEN years after the book goes out of print. Hyperion, with whom I wrote three books, hasn’t even bothered responding to the request from Writers’ House (my agency) about rights’ reversions. I had to go through my present agent, who didn’t sell these books, in the hopes the request wouldn’t be ignored, as it was when I wrote them.

The bottom line is really fairly simple: as a writer, you now have many options that didn’t exist when Rob and I started out in the early 1980s.  If you’re a published writer with a back list to which you have the rights, your best bet is Crossroad Press.   Why?

Crossroad: First, there’s the split. Everything Crossroad earns on your books is split 80/20, with the 80% for the writer.  Even Amazon’s publishing program – 70/30 split – can’t beat that.  And with transmission fees for downloads, Amazon’s split actually comes out to about 67%. When you consider that the split for traditional publishers is 8-15% for the author, and the rest for the publisher, the Crossroad split is astounding.

Second: Crossroad doesn’t charge the author any upfront fees. Nothing. Nada. Zero.  They do it all – scanning, formatting for various markets, cover design. And they work with you. If the cover doesn’t suit you, then work with the designer until you’re satisfied.  They don’t create some totally despicable cover and never tell you about it. They do print on demand and audio books, where the split is 65/35.

Third: David Wilson has a vision for his company and it begins with the writers. As a writer himself, he understands the dynamics.

Smashwords: This organization is about writers. Got a book? Publish here. Yes, it’s difficult to wade through their 80 plus pages about formatting your book. And if you don’t want to slog through all that they maintain a list of people who will do it for you and design a cover, for a modest fee. That fee usually runs around $175 for back list titles that need to be scanned, and far less for books that simply need to be formatted and given a compelling cover. Smashwords takes 15% of the cover price you set for your ebooks, for books sold from their site. They also get your book into the various e-reader stores – Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Apple.

Amazon: Like its name, Amazon is the big guy in all of this. Their KDP Kindle publishing program is good. Yes, you can pay for the formatting and cover and all that, you can go through their createspace and put out some bucks to get your book in their store. But you can also do this for less money by hiring one of the smashwords people to format your book specifically for Amazon and their exclusive 90-day program.  We’re about to try out this exclusivity thing and will report back. One thing I love about Amazon: they have a free app that enables you to download a book for any kind of reading device. So even though I have an iPad, I don’t have to buy my books from Apple. I downloaded the kindle app for free and can read the books I buy from Amazon on that app.

Barnes and Noble: Their Pubit publishing program is good. But Barnes and Noble doesn’t sell anywhere near the number of books that Amazon does. Their accounting sheet is easier to read, but as far as I know there’s no app that allows you to buy a book from their store that can be read on any device.

What I Wish: That traditional publishing will survive. The benefits? They pay advances. The detractions? Just about everything else.  Why should any publisher get 90-92% of retail price on any book? Why is it that publishers occupy offices on Fifth Avenue, while most of their writers live in the suburbs and worry about meeting their mortgage payments? About getting their kids through college? What would happen to the industry if writers like King and Patterson,  Nora Roberts and Dan Brown suddenly decided to go it alone?

As my agent mentioned the other day, there are now at least 1,000 fewer bookstores today than there were last year. That number is staggering.

You get the idea here. Publishing as it exists now, publishing -like so many other businesses and industries-  is headed for Armageddon if it doesn’t change its current business model. Writers have a clearer sense of their own power: without them, publishers and bookstore and ebooks would not exist. It begins with the writers, it ends with the writers. If you screw your writers, you ultimately screw yourself.

 

Posted in publishing, synchronicity, writers | 8 Comments

Another Teapot synchro

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Here’s a synchro from Gabe Carlson (aka Max) of Minneapolis that adds to his earlier mind-boggling synchronicity that involved  a pair of identical teapots that mysteriously came together in his life. Apparently, the nature of reality is still steeping in Gabe’s unconscious mind.

***

Today four of us went to the thrift store for the first time in many months. On the way there, discussing the pros and cons of different store options,  I loudly declared that I was going to find another magic teapot. I guess I had no expectation that I really was going to find a teapot, but maybe was hoping that I’d find something serendipitous and synchronistic – thrift stores are often good for that, with their dense assortment of randomness.

I’d already forgotten my pronouncement by the time we arrived, but still headed to the kitchen section first, thinking that my girlfriend Kristin might want to browse for something useful for her canning/cooking/pickling.

Of course, that was the section were teapots are found, and where I’d bought one of the original two.

Before I could even start down the kitchen aisle, Kristin suggested that we head down further to look at the furniture. So we did. We ‘d been in the store for maybe three minutes when she pointed out the first item of interest – a series of square boards connected by strapping, to be used as some kind of hanging shelf unit.

When Kristin pulled it off the shelf to examine it, letting it hang down to the floor, I happened to notice the back of a pin on one of the straps. There was just one – somebody had once stuck a single decorative pin into the strapping. But the way it was hanging, I couldn’t see the front of it.

After asking her a few times what it was (she had no idea what I was referring to) I managed to get hold of the strap, and twist it around so we could both see … the silvery teapot shining there.

We both started laughing, mores o when we remembered that I’d actually announced that I was going to find a magic teapot today.

Needless to say, that alone made the entire trip more than worthwhile. I didn’t even look very hard for anything else, since I’d found what I’d been looking for, right off the bat – yet another wink, another nudge, another confirmation of all the weird and seemingly irrational things I’ve found myself increasingly daring to believe since my mystical experience 7 years ago.

I’m still not sure what it means … but it certainly makes things a lot more interesting. Gabe’s blog is called Teapots Happen.

A post-script: Gabe followed up a few days later with this comment.

Oh! and I forgot to mention something cool about the teapot pin.

My girlfriend Kristin was one of the friends I was with at the thrift store when I found the first of my two teapots in 2006. In fact, she was the main person I kept coming up to, trying to understand why I was so compelled to buy the rather utilitarian-looking but nonfunctional teapot.

Unique Thrift - teapot synchronicity HQ

She’d quite sensibly advised me not to buy it, but I did anyway. So, it was an extra awesome synchronicity to not only accidentally find a teapot after declaring my intention to do so – but to find it with her, stuck onto an object she’d chosen … and at a Unique Thrift Store, just like 2006.


Posted in synchronicity | 13 Comments

A WIN!

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Fantastic! The astrologers were wrong about the long term repercussions – Obama won tonight – not weeks from now.It was a dicier election, a tougher route to re-eleciton, but…

…the astrologers, I think, were right about the long lines, attempts at voter suppression, voter purging, and attempts by republican governors like Rick Scott of Florida to shorten early voting days. It’s an instance where the collective will of the people overcame everything else.

Onward….

 

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 24 Comments

What’s at Stake?

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Yesterday at the gym, a blowhard with a booming voice ambled over to a couple who were on a pair of leg machines. I was nearby and groaned inwardly. I had heard this guy’s rants before, when he was touting Newt Gingrich. “One more day,” he said, throwing his arm out at his sides. “And then it’s paradise.”

(DON’T MISS THE UPDATE AT THE END OF THE POST FOR AN INCREDIBLE SYNCHRO!)

“You bet,” said the woman, nodding.

“Good-bye, Obama,” blowhard laughed.

The woman’s husband grinned, then said, “But suppose Romney loses?”

Blowhard said, “I’ll be on the first plane to Brazil.”

Great, I thought, getting up quickly so I wouldn’t blurt anything.

But in this community, I suspect the majority of residents feel like blowhard do.

Every election in the U.S. is called “the most important election of our lifetimes.”  So is that true about today’s election? Let’s look at what’s at stake. But first, click here for a list of Obama’s accomplishments in just four years, in spite of an intractable Congress.

Health care, Taxes, social safety net programs

Romney has vowed to get rid of ObamaCare his first day in office. This means we would revert to the way things had been for years:

–       that insurance companies could deny you coverage based on a pre-existing condition

–       that children 26 and under wouldn’t be covered under their parents’ health care plans

–        that health care screenings for cancer, mammograms, would once again cost you  an arm and a leg

–       Reverse Roe v Wade, without any exception for rape and incest. Any woman who obtains an abortion or any physician who performs one would be committing a felony

–       Would confer personhood upon a fertilized egg

–       Allow employers to decide whether contraception can be included in health care plans

–       Get rid of Planned Parenthood, which provides health care for millions of women at nominal fees

–     Turn Medicare into a voucher system

Under Romney, the Bush era tax cuts would continue, with the rich paying less in many cases than the middle class and the poor.  Romney – a zillionaire –  paid less than 15 percent taxes in the last two years. We don’t know about the other years because he refused to release more than two years of his returns.

Under Romney and Ryan, Social Security would be privatized. Can you imagine the repercussions of that one in the financial meltdown of 2008?

Under Romney/Ryan, a program like Medicaid – health care for the poor – would be turned over to the states, which are already struggling with budget shortfalls. You’re poor and sick? Elderly and sick? Sorry, go to the emergency room.

So, shrink the middle class until it strangles and dies so that we are left with the very rich and the indentured servants. Isn’t this kind of system what the American Revolution was about?

War and the Pentagon

During the Republican primary, Romney mentioned Russia (the Cold War ended decades ago, but he doesn’t seem to know that), China, Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq and Afghanistan. Sabre rattling with all those countries? Really? More war? Endless war?

Obama essentially ended the war in Iraq and promises withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014.  I don’t understand why we can’t get out now, but even 2014 is better than the no-end-in-sight that Romney would put forth.

Romney, whose two dozen advisors include 19 from George W. Bush’s cadre of advisors, would pour millions into the Pentagon budget that the Pentagon hasn’t even requested.

FEMA

The Federal Emergency Management Administration is the government entity that sweeps in after national disasters and helps people put their lives back together. Under Bush, FEMA was as severe a disaster as the disasters themselves. It was headed by the infamous Michael Brown, whose handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was viewed as completely incompetent, even though at a photo op Bush told him, “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie.” He resigned in disgrace after he was widely criticized for NOT handling the relief efforts.

Romney wants to abolish FEMA. Leave it up to the states. Can you imagine New Jersey, for instance, have to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy without federal help?

Under Obama, FEMA is headed by Craig Fugate, a man who actually knows something about emergency management. He’s a Florida guy who was emergency manager for Alachua County for ten years, then Bureau Chief for Preparedness and Response for Florida Divisions of Emergency Management from 1997-2001. Between 2001 and 2009, Fugate was Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. All of this means he understands what’s going on.

The Supreme Court

During the next four years, the president will have an opportunity to appoint one, two, maybe even three   supreme court justices. Given the anti-woman stance of Romney/Ryan, this is a terrifying possibility.  Think of it: one or two more Scalias (Opus Dei folks) or another Clarence Thomas who could be on the supreme court for decades. Roe v Wade would  undoubtedly be overturned. As Obama put it during one of the debates, Romney’s social platform for the country is straight out of the 1950s.

Then there’s education, unions, fire fighters, police: bust all the unions, privatize schools and all services to local communities.

So, what’s at stake is nothing less than two paradigms – the old (Romney) and the new (Obama).  The old paradigm (war, greed, every man for himself) is not going out with a whimper, but is using its familiar tricks to suppress votes, intimidate voters, shorten early voting, purge voter roles, changing voter laws in terms of I.D. There’s was a short news piece about how in some heavily leaning Democratic counties in Ohio, a Romney-affiliated company owns the voting machines. And, of course, ever since the supreme court declared that corporations are people, untold millions have been bundled into super-pacs and gone straight into Republican coffers.

So today, if there’s a decisive victory,  we’ll see exactly what’s inside the American psyche.

UPDATE

This is incredible. I just got back from voting. Typical Palm Beach County election snafu to start out the day. But also an outrageous synchronicity.

This post starts with Trish complaining about the blowhard. I know that guy from the gym. He’s always walking around looking for someone who will talk politics with him. I always avoid him, especially after I heard him saying months ago that he wanted Newt Gingrich as the GOP candidate. Yuck!

So when I get to the end of the long line, who is directly in front of me – Mr. Blowhard! Fortunately, Trish had already voted or there would’ve been trouble! I had a copy of Rolling Stone Magazine with me and kept my head down reading: “Mitt Romney & the Ghosts of Mormon History.” Meanwhile, Blowhard is looking around for someone to talk to, moving from one foot to the other. He’s got a black couple in front of him and me behind him reading about Mitt’s heritage.

Half an hour goes by that way. Then an election official comes out and asks who is from precinct 6140. It turns out Blowhard is, and so am I. The official tells us we’re at the wrong place, but he doesn’t know where we’re supposed to go. He walks off after telling us he’ll be back. So I’m thinking ‘what else is new.’ This is Palm Beach County after all where the 2000 election was flipped to Bush by the hanging chad fiasco.

Now Blowhard and I are in the same boat and talking to each other, wondering what’s going on. He says this is a very important election, but fortunately he stops there. The official returns a few minutes later and tells us to go to Wellington High School to vote. So we leave. But I don’t want to stand in line behind him again so I go home and have a cup of coffee, then ride my bike to the nearby high school. There’s no line at all. Blowhard has already come and gone. I’m in and out in five minutes.

As I ride home, I can’t help thinking the reason the place is so empty is because voters are heading to the community center and the long line.

 

 

Posted in elections, politics, synchronicity | 16 Comments

Book Covers

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Trish and Rob

I wrote this book during my pregnancy in 1989. Ballantine gave it the absolutely most grotesque cover ever. The premise of the story is based on Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Presence of the Past, in which he introduced his theory of morphic resonance – that nature has a memory.

Ballantine labeled the novel “horror,” and while there are certainly elements of that, it’s actually  a story about what happens to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The cover didn’t do much for the sales of the book, which was published in 1990 and went out of print a few years later.

When I got the rights back to the book some years ago, the rights reversion letter sat in a file. There are 20 or so back list titles in that reversion letter and now, with the advent of ebooks and e-readers, I’m bringing those titles into digital form, one by one, and I’m using my own name. What a concept! Talented Katrina Joyner did the superb cover:

With this one, I’m trying Amazon’s Kindle select program, where the book is available exclusively on Amazon for 90 days and is included in Amazon’s lending library.  In this program, the author earns according to how many times the book is borrowed.  It’s also available for a traditional sale, at $3.99.

An article in Forbes Magazine talks about the impact of this program on traditional publishing. Two weeks earlier, the author of the Forbes article wrote this piece on how traditional publishing is broken and quoted author Sue Grafton, who has had 32 bestsellers, from an interview she did for LouisevilleKY.com:

“To me, it seems disrespectful…that a ‘wannabe’ assumes it’s all so easy s/he can put out a ‘published novel’ without bothering to read, study, or do the research. … Self-publishing is a short cut and I don’t believe in short cuts when it comes to the arts. I compare self-publishing to a student managing to conquer Five Easy Pieces on the piano and then wondering if s/he’s ready to be booked into Carnegie Hall.”

Personally, I think the explosion of ebooks and indie books is fantastic. Writers suddenly have multiple venues that didn’t exist before and readers have more books to choose from. How can that be a bad thing? It’s all a huge, exciting experiment now.  It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 12 Comments

No Giant Pigs…

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Christopher Lutz is a man who spent decades trying to escape the ghosts of his past. In his case, those ghosts were really ghosts…or at least some of them were, he says.

Lutz lived as a child in one of America’s most famous haunted houses — the ‘Amityville Horror’ House. It’s also the most commercially exploited haunted house of all time – several movies, documentaries and books.

Christopher Lutz changed his last name years ago to escape his past. But now he’s talking publicly–at least to FOX News–(using his former name) and separating his real home from the public image of the infamous haunted house. In other words, he’s separating fact from fiction, and says that much of what was depicted in film and in books was not real.

After 37 years, he remains haunted by chilling events that broke out in his home in 1975. But he’s also annoyed by the way Hollywood spun the story out of control.

“What the public was sold is not what happened. What really happened in that house is quite different from what people have been told all these years,” Lutz said.

Lutz said the book — billed as a true story — exaggerated the facts. By the time Hollywood dealt with the story, the story became ‘based on a true story’–in other much of it was fabricated. For example, there was no demon that took the form of a giant squealing pig.

 

Lutz maintains that the haunting was genuine. The story was not a hoax, as some have maintained. But it was nothing like the Hollywood version.He said unexplained phenomena in the house terrified him. “An apparition manifested just outside my bedroom door. It scared the crap out of me as a little kid,” Lutz said.

“This is something that happened to me as a kid that I would rather have forgotten about. Unfortunately, the way this was made public, I haven’t had the opportunity to leave it behind.”

Some blame the haunting on a mass murder in that home before his family moved there. But Lutz said his stepfather, George Lutz, was dabbling in the occult — reciting the names of demons after the family moved into the home.

“Had he done that in any other house — that wouldn’t have been an issue. But to do it in that house, that to me is what triggered events there,” Lutz said.

“There’s a lot of people that deal with the paranormal in their own homes. I believe this may provide answers for them as they search to find out what’s on the other side.”

Posted in synchronicity | 5 Comments

Feet Synchros, Astrology, the Election

Posted on November 3, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Megan’s broken foot in 2011

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Sometimes, statcounter – a free, invisible counter that yields a wealth of information about visitors to your blog or website -can be a personal synchro indicator. On August 31, our daughter’s 23rd birthday, I noticed that someone who periodically stalked our blog had been on numerous times and had downloaded a photo of Megan’s left foot – a picture I used  for a synchro last year that involved her breaking her left foot while sailing.

I thought, Okay, weird. You want to download pics of Megan’s foot? Be my guest. But the picture triggered memories of that whole episode and the particular astrological configurations that were involved – namely a Uranus conjunction to her ascendant. In astro speak, Uranus is the planet that symbolizes sudden, unexpected events, the stuff that comes at you out of the blue and spins things around. Your ascendant is the doorway to your chart, the place where you enter life. Her ascendant is Pisces, a water sign. She was sailing in a bay when that break happened.

On August 31, we had our second full moon in that month, a Blue Moon, in Pisces, that water sign again. It was a gorgeous moon here. We got a check, completed some projects, and the dog park  was actually dry in spite of the 16 inches of rain we got during Isaac.

But while I was feeling pretty grand about the full moon for Rob and me, I knew Megan and her friends were renting a pontoon boat on September 1 and would be out in the Atlantic celebrating.  I felt uneasy about this.

By tracking events in her chart over the years, I’ve discovered that she’s sensitive to certain aspects involving her Pisces ascendant.  I realize that people who dismiss astrology as nonsense will also think it’s pretty silly to follow anyone’s chart over the course of years. But that’s what I do with her chart. And Rob’s. And my own. Astrological patterns are archetypes that usually speak in broad terms. Love. Wealth. Tragedy. Sickness. Birth. Expansion. Parents. Children. Creativity. Like that. When you grasp how these large patterns in a chart unfold in real time,  you begin to intuitively connect the smaller details.

Around 11:30 PM on September 1, we got a call from Megan. She was sobbing. She thought  she had broken her right foot. While out on the pontoon boat, she jumped – and hit the shallows. But her foot didn’t start bothering her until hours later, when she was dancing. Okay, ice it, take some Advil, elevate your leg, we advised. Then, tomorrow, we’ll see what the clinic or ER docs say.

Water, boats, aspects to Pisces ascendants. I immediately fired up my aging windows laptop, the only computer I own where my wonderful astrology software still functions. I calculated her solar return chart – the chart for her birthday this year, at the exact moment the sun returns to the degree where it was when she was born. A solar return is considered to be your chart for the year – birthday to birthday. When you do a biwheel, you use the solar return chart inside, as though it’s the chart you were born with, and your natal chart on the outside. Then patterns become quite clear.

Megan had stuff going on in the  6th and 12th houses of her horoscope. The sixth house is daily health and work; the 12th house is what’s hidden, the power you have disowned over the years. It’s where you enter therapy, start meditating, go within. Not exactly the best houses to be activated if you think you’ve broken anything, especiallly your foot, since Pisces rules the feet. On the other hand, Venus was doing nice things in her chart; the planet of love, money, beauty, could do wonders. The part of fortune – your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, symbolic of how you are fortunate in life – was conferring protection. It looked hopeful.

The next morning, she called to say her foot felt better. It was still somewhat swollen, as though it was sprained, but no longer throbbed as it had the night before. As of September 4, her foot was fine.

So, this is an instance where I read the astrological stuff correctly, not an easy thing to do when it involves a family member.

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An aside about astrology: Mercury, the planet of communication, turns retrograde on November 6, the day of the presidential election, not a particularly auspicious sign for a smooth election. Given the devastation in the northeast from Hurircane Sandy,  it’s hard to imagine how some polling areas will even be able to open.

As a means of comparison, on election day in 2000,  Mercury turned direct shortly after Tom Brokaw had announced that Gore had won Florida. A few minutes later, Brokaw amended his statement and said that Florida was too close to call, there were problems with the ballots. Well, that election went all the way to the Supreme Court.I hope we know who the president is on November 7.

I voted early. The other day, I drove past our local library, saw the line reached for a block, so I drove north to a library in a nearby town. My wait was just ten minutes. The ballot is ridiculous: three double sided pages, most of them amendments that restricts rights of one kind or another. A cop was there, I didn’t see any evidence of voter suppression or intimidation, but there have been reports of such in the news, particularly for Florida, which can’t seem to get its act together for any election, especially when the Republican governor limits early voting (when a good percentage of dems vote) or engages in voter purging.

Regardless of the situation in your state, go vote. Even if a Mercury retro denies us a definitive winner on November 7, uncertainly doesn’t last forever.  The retro period is over by November 26. I’m hopeful we will have an answer, at the latest, around then.

Posted in feet, foot, Megan, synchronicity | 8 Comments

The Locked Door Opens – Spirit Contact

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Trish and Rob

orbs photographed behind Lauren’s home

One of the blogs I frequent regularly is Lauren Raines Threads of the Spiderwoman.  We’ve used some of her stories on our blog before. This one struck me as genuine spirit  contact.

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Towards the end of her life, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, the author of  “On Death And Dying”, believed there was no death, only transformation from the physical to other states of being.  As a member of IANDS (International Association of Near Death Studies) and having heard quite a few speakers discuss their experiences, I have come to agree.  That, and the many personal experiences I’ve had (not an NDE, however).

This is a time to remember those we’ve lost, and times that have passed, and this is a journal, so I felt like telling a “ghost story” of my own.  It’s sad that the people who  most need to hear  are  closed to it.

In 2008 my brother, Glenn, had a massive brain stem stroke.  He is brain dead, and because he left no living will, he is sustained entirely by life support – a machine breathes for him, another one drips nutrients.  He’s not there.  But because my mother and other brother will not allow it,  I am unable to remove life support and allow him to die with dignity. And so it continues, and they visit him, continually grieving, and of course, any discussion about my “metaphysical ideas” is out of the question.  So I’ve had to accept the situation, and I have also consulted a medium, whose reading seemed both accurate and comforting in that she said he had “crossed over” and was at peace.

So here’s my story.  Last year I renovated my mother’s house, because I needed to rent rooms, as my mother is now in assisted living.  Glenn’s room had a closet where he kept his gun collection, and I didn’t have a key for it because my other brother, David, who lives in California, insisted on keeping them in the house for sentimental reasons.  To me, Glenn’s guns represented the unhappiness and fearfulness he lived with the last years of his life, and getting rid of them seemed like a way to transform that negativity for his spirit.   I didn’t have the key (but I tried the lock numerous times) – so I figured I’d put off the issue for the time being.  But I did renovate his room, replacing the floor, and purposefully painted it sky blue, which symbolized spiritual freedom and expansion.

As I was painting sky blue around the closet door it very gently opened!  I stood there with my mouth open as well. Then I took out the guns in the closet, went to a local gun shop, sold them, and sent the money to several charities for children. I also  sponsored a little girl in Nepal with PLAN International for my brother, transforming all that sad energy into helping children.  Which I think he knew I would do, and I am certain that’s why the closet opened…………his way of letting me know it was fine.  And I believe he is fine too – not his body, but his spirit.

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I’m intrigued by the metaphor of a door, locked so long, suddenly opening. Maybe it augurs an opening of closed minds?

Posted in spirit contact, synchronicity | 10 Comments