The Emotional Lives of Animals

There’s something so magnificent about these creatures and I think Megan’s painting captures that mystique in the animal’s eyes.

Years ago, I remember reading When Elephants Weep: the Emotional Lives of Animals.   Published in 1996, the book became a national bestseller and parts of it stick with me even today, more than two decades later. For instance, when an elephant is injured or sick and dying, the herd forms a circle around it, all of them facing outward, as if to say, We’re with you, we have your back.

Any pet owner will tell you about incidents when their dog or cat or bird does something that underscores the premise of this book: that animals feel  that they have emotions.  They mourn, feel happiness, disappointment, triumph, sadness, joy. They aren’t living separately from these emotions; they are immersed in their emotions. Feelings are a sea in which they swim, float, drown, and flourish.

Some years ago when our Golden Retriever, Jessie, was on her last legs, our cat, Powder, curled up next to her and spent that night – Jessie’s last – next to her, cuddling with her, comforting her. And when we left the next day to have Jessie put down, Powder seemed to understand what had happened when we returned.

In the late 1980s, Rob and I led tours for writers to the Amazon between Leticia, Colombia, and Iquitos, Peru. On one of those trips, we pulled in at an Indian village and I traded several tubes of lipstick and insect repellent for this beautiful Amazonian owl tethered to a young man’s shoulder.

The owl spent the next two days perched on a wooden bar on the main deck of our boat, watching all of us, eating the tidbits of fish we fed him. I was fascinated with this owl, talked to him, and made sure that when we arrived at our destination he would be set free on the animal preserve that was part of where we were staying. I remember that one of the writers, a young guy from New York, laughed at my preoccupation with the owl, and told me I was anthropomorphizing.

“It’s just an owl, Trish. It doesn’t feel anything. No soul there. No comprehension of anything other than anticipation of its next meal.”

“Dude, go live in Central Park. Or in the middle of this jungle.”

Elephants, owls, dogs, cats, birds, any creature great or small, possesses an emotional life. And people who tell you otherwise, who dismiss animals as incapable of anything other than their roles as cogs in a food chain, are to be avoided.

 

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Trish MacGregor: Star Power For February 2024


Join Trish for the February 2024 astrological forecast!

In the masthead you’ll find  the written version.

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Freelance Pay

 

Every so often, I check to see what kinds of freelance writing jobs are available for remote writers. I check linkedin, upwork, indeed, and other sites. And frankly, I’m shocked by what some of these job listings pay content writers.

Just the other day, I ran across a listing for a blog content writer that paid $5 for 1000 words. How much does this equal per word? Well, not much. Divide $5 by 1000 and you get .005. That’s one tenth of 5 cents! I don’t know any writer who would write for that pay.

In the late 1980s, Rob and I started as freelance magazine writers. This meant sending out a number of queries each month  to various publications (in the days before the Internet). Even back then, most of these magazines paid AT LEAST 5 cents a word, many paid 10 and 15 cents a word.  Magazines like OMNI paid a buck a word.

Writing anything isn’t just about putting one word after another onto a page. If it’s fiction, there are characters to consider, plot, motives, emotions, descriptions, conflict, you know, the stuff of  ordinary life. If it’s non-fiction, what’s the hook? The purpose?

Writers are like architects. But instead of brick and mortar,  wood and nails, they build with words, sentences, paragraphs that convey ideas, emotions, experience, humanity in all its complexities.

Stephen King, for his first book – Carrie  – was paid only $2,500. Not much in any era. Not enough for him to quit his job teaching. But up until them, it was the most he’d made from writing.

JK Rowling, for her first Harry Potter book, was paid about $2000- 1500 pounds, along with a grant of 8000 pounds from the Scottish Arts Council. With both her and King, passion for stories kept them writing. That’s true for the  writers I know personally and it doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or non-fiction.

So, is that passion worth half a cent a word?

That depends on the writer.

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Is There a Doctor in the House?

 

Megan and her friends are attuned to synchronicities and this evening, Megan texted that she had one to report. So we called her.

It turned out that her friend Denise is at a  wedding in Tampa  this evening (Jan 20). When she walked into the reception place, a woman and man walked in with her. The woman told Denise she was a doctor and was going to be needed that evening. She said she’d dreamed about it.

Sure enough, as soon as they were in the lobby, an employee comes racing up the hall, shouting, “Is there a doctor in the house?”

The woman next to Denise sprang into action and followed the employee into the kitchen. One of the cooks had collapsed and when the doctor reached him, he didn’t have a heartbeat. She performed CPR but couldn’t save him.

The doctor’s precognitive dream proved to be correct.

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TMU Time Machine: Preston Dennett And Dolly Safran: Orions Belt


Join Trish and Rob in the TMU Time Machine as they revisit their September 2022 conversation with…

Preston Dennett first began investigating UFOs in 1986 after learning that his family, friends, and co-workers had encounters. Since then, he has interviewed hundreds of people and investigated various cases. He has written 29 books and over 100 articles about UFOs and the paranormal. He is a frequent guest on radio and TV and speaks to audiences across the United States.
His latest book is SYMMETRY: A True UFO Adventure. It features the incredible story of UFO/alien contact by a woman named Dolly Safran.

And we’re pleased that Dolly is here with us today, too…

Dolly Safran has worked as a limo driver, assistant manager at Wendy’s, a zookeeper, a bus driver, a security guard, a nurse, and more. She has also worked for the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Department of Defense.

Dolly has had life-long experiences with extraterrestrials that began around the age of two and are ongoing. She has an astonishing story that she told Preston about her varied experiences among the Grays. What makes Dolly’s story particularly interesting is that she has had total recall of her experiences since age 14 and even remembers the earlier ones that were blocked. Besides that, while many abductees have fearful experiences, Dolly considers the Grays more like family than frightful aliens and doesn’t consider herself an abductee.

Here’s the You Tube

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Pluto & Jan 20 2024

Mark your calendar. On Jan 20 at 7:50 pm ET and 4:50 pm PT, Pluto enters Aquarius, where it hasn’t been in 248 years. It will be there for the next 20 years – until 2044. It will retrograde periodically, slipping back into Capricorn, but when it’s in Aquarius, the tenor of your life and your experiences will be vastly different than Pluto’s movement through Capricorn.

Most of the Revolutionary War took place when Pluto was in Aquarius. It was a time when people around the globe rebelled against unfair regimes under which they lived. The French revolution overthrew the country’s monarchy.

During Pluto’s 15-year transit through Capricorn, we saw a rise of big tech, big pharma, big government, a financial crisis, the Covid pandemic. It was a time when global institutions set the policies for the world. The supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and we’ve seen how women have reacted in several state elections – Kansas, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia. The republican party continues to embrace repressive, authoritarian policies and candidates and it should prove to be their downfall during Pluto’s transit.

That said, since Pluto turns retrograde just like every other planet except the moon, it will be in Capricorn at the time of the election, but on inauguration day, it will be in Aquarius. Until 2044, that will be the trend – Pluto moving like a snail through Aquarius but retrograding back into Capricorn through those 20 years.

Astrologers have different ideas about how this transit will shake out. It can be helpful to look at the past for what happened when it was last in that sign. But let’s face it. The world is a much different place than it was during the French Revolution between 1777-1798. Also, Pluto has been demoted as a planet so why should we care?

Astrologers who no longer factor Pluto into their readings do so at their own peril. This planet is about how we transform and regenerate our lives. Think transcendence, redemption, power, afterlife, good and evil, the hidden and unseen, our personal unconscious. Its two extremes are best symbolized by Hitler and Gandhi. Each man possessed a vision that that he manifested in physical reality. Both had a vision, a sense of destiny. But Hitler’s vision resulted in massive destruction, horror, autocracy and Gandhi’s vision elevated mass consciousness.

Pluto  rules Scorpio and transited that sign from 1983-1995, the era when AIDS became a terrible reality, when global warming became more than just buzz words, when alternative medicine became the popular kid on the block. I have Scorpio rising.The rising or ascendant is considered the doorway to your chart, the point where you entered into your current life. During those years, Rob and I met, got married, started a family.  I sold my first novel and numerous subsequent books, we moved, we freelanced for OMNI and met Betty Hill, Budd Hopkins, and a number of psychics in South Florida. This transit into Aquarius will begin in my 4th house – home, family, personal environment – and end up in my 5th house, creativity, kids, romance, what I do for fun and enjoyment.

For Rob, this transit will begin in his 10th and end up in his 11th – career and wishes & dreams. For our daughter, Meg, the houses are the 11th and 12th- her colleagues, her network, her wishes and dreams & her personal unconscious. Wherever Pluto moves, that’s the area of your life that will be  transformed.

What about you? Go here for a free copy of your birth chart.   It’s most accurate if you know your time of birth. But if you don’t know the time, enter 12 noon and you’ll get a sense of the aspects Pluto will make to other planets in your chart. Questions? Email me through the contact form on the blog.

Keep in mind: this may be the year of disclosure. It would certainly fit Pluto’s entrance into Aquarius.

 

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Immunity?

 

Should anyone who has been a US president be granted immunity for life?

That’s what trump’s attorneys are arguing.

So think about that. Lifelong immunity from prosecution means you can do any damn thing you want without fear of ever being held accountable for it. You can shoot someone on 5th Avenue, trigger an insurrection, try to convince your VP not to certify election result, make a frantic call to the Georgia Secretary of State and instruct him to hold a new election or find those 11,600 votes he needs to win your state.

In watching trump’s legal nightmares unfold, in a judicial system that’s supposed to be equal for everyone, I’m shocked by the preferential treatment he gets. Any other person would have been jailed at the first violation of the gag order.

Just how is all this going to play out, anyway? Unprecedented territory: that’s what the news says constantly. But they’re right. Nixon brought us to that place. From Wikipedia:

Proclamation 4311 was a presidential proclamation issued by President of the United States Gerald Ford on September 8, 1974, granting a full and unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon, his predecessor, for any crimes that he might have committed against the United States as president. In particular, the pardon covered Nixon’s actions during the Watergate scandal. In a televised broadcast to the nation, Ford, who had succeeded to the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation, explained that he felt the pardon was in the best interests of the country and that the Nixon family’s situation was “a tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”

I remember that day, remember watching it on TV, Nixon doing his silly salute and then disappearing into a plane.

The difference here is that trump hopes that by playing the victim being persecuted by “the radical left” he’s doing it so that we, the voting public out here, won’t have to. Odd, coming from a man known mostly for his orange hair and his narcissism and oh, drink some bleach, it will take care of Covid.

As Trump’s dictatorial rhetoric becomes more frequent and vile, I get texts and emails from friends who are freaked out and depressed about this. The men who wrote the constitution, those founding fathers, never anticipated someone like trump. And that left huge holes in the laws that govern this democracy. That’s the kind of territory we’re in. Democracy is on the line.

I’ve never understood Americans who support this bozo, especially now. Do they all have daddy issues? Do they all need a father figure who dictates what they can do, say, how they can live? One woman with whom I grew up in Venezuela chastised me for criticizing trump. So I asked her, Do you prefer to live under a Trump dictatorship?

Her answer? Yes.

We haven’t spoken since.

What am I missing here about the human psyche?

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TMU Time Machine: Sharon Elizabeth James: The Divine Goddess


Join Trish and Rob in the Time Machine for their May 2022 conversation with…

Reverend Sharon-Elizabeth James founded the Cosmic Center of Spiritual Light in Sarasota, Florida, ten years ago. She underwent four years of intense metaphysical and spiritual training in Theosophy, New Thought, Spiritualism, and Ancient and Contemporary Religious Beliefs at the Spiritual Science Center of New York. She was ordained in June 1989, the same year she made Florida her new home.

https://www.ccosl.com

And here is the you tube version.

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2024 Is…

 

2024 is a year of revelations and abundance. Its numbers add up to 8, one of my favorites. It looks like the sign for infinity and means abundance and prosperity.

From Google: In numerology, the number 8 is associated with power, strength, ambition, efficiency, discipline, reality, money, finances, truth, integrity, abundance and prosperity. In Chinese culture, the number 8 is the luckiest number.

Along with this, we have a couple of major transits this year that bode well, I think, and support #8. On Jan 20, Pluto enters Aquarius for the first time in 248 years and on May 25, Jupiter enters Gemini, where it will be for about a year. These two transits impact everyone, but both are air signs. Aquarius, Gemini, Libra. These 3 signs will feel the transits most strongly. Pluto urges us to delve deeply and is transformative. Jupiter is all about luck, expansion, and synchronicity.

As I was writing this post,  I walked out into the kitchen to get some wtater and noticed the AARP bulletin on the table . As you can see, this issue is all about money. What a weird synchronicity!

 

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The 5 of Cups

Someone emailed me a clip from Fox News- where the host is talking  with a psychic.You’ll see it on this clip.

“I’d like you to draw a card on President Trump,” says host Jesse Watters.

So Paula Roberts does.  It’s the 5 of cups, the image at the beginning of this post. “Uh-oh,” she says.

Watters sort of laughs and asks for her interpretation. Listen to it.

But here’s the thing. Her initial reaction, Uh-oh is absolutely correct. This card is about LOSS. In Power Tarot, my co-author, Phyllis Vega, and I wrote:

“There’s no way around it. This card is about disappointment, regret, and loss. It sometimes refers to an individual who has trouble releasing the past  or has experienced an emotional loss that led to complete absorption in sorrow

“There may be an obsession over past wrongs. The bottom line is that it’s time to pick up the pieces and go forward.”

Sounds like Trump, doesn’t it?

 

 

 

 

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