Mercury Retrograde Alert

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Think of Mercury as the trickster. This little planet rules travel, conscious thought, communication, books, writing,  computers, facts, education, and a whole host of other things – lungs, liars, nerves, language, even keys. Three times a year, it turns retrograde – when it appears to be moving backward through the zodiac – but in 2010, we’ll have four retros for Mercury. The next one begins on December 10, just in time for holidays shopping, and doesn’t end until December 30.
Usually during these retro periods, it’s wise not to buy big ticket items – you know, like that plasma TV, that newest iPad, that wonderful laptop you’ve been eyeing. In other words, do your holiday shipping before December 10, at least for the big stuff. Otherwise, you may be in that return line on December 26. It’s also smart to avoid travel. It’s the holidays, of course, which makes not traveling unlikely. If you must travel, be sure to buy your ticket before December 10. Be prepared for snafus. Your flight gets delayed, your flight is cancelled, a snowstorm shuts down your airport, you arrive at your destination but your luggage doesn’t.  Best to nurture a sense of adventure before you get anywhere near the airport.
With the TSA situation in mind, this Mercury retro may prove problematic. It won’t be smooth sailing as it apparently was during the Thanksgiving travel. More people may be opting out of those body scanners or the pat downs by opting out of flying altogether.
Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo, so these retros can be particularly annoying for those two signs. On 12/10, it turns retro in Capricorn, then moves back into Sagittarius, so those two signs will be impacted as well. These retro periods are great for reflection, rewriting, re-thinking, re-evaluating.  Finish off old projects, try not to start something new.Be sure to communicate clearly and succinctly. Take nothing for granted.
Old friends sometimes surface. Issues you thought were resolved may crop up and you have to re-visit them. Capricorn rules government, so it’s probably not a stretch to predict rehashing of old issues, general chaos and confusion.
If you’re mailing holiday packages to friends and families, be sure the stuff is mailed before 12/10. Otherwise, the presents may not arrive until 2011!
Skeptics hear about Mercury retro and laugh – until they experience this trickster’s antics up close and very personally.  
Posted in astrology, mercury retro | 25 Comments

Forgiveness and synchonicity

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Trish and Rob

I was walking our dog Noah around the neighborhood the other day when I turned the corner to find a neighbor heading my way with her little Jack Russell terrier that always barks and snaps at Noah.  I groaned silently because I knew she would stop me and carry on about whatever was on her mind today.

I don’t mind talking to neighbors, but this one is particularly annoying because she bad-mouths people and their children while interjecting comments about God or Jesus, who she says guides her life. Once, I asked her if she thought Jesus channeled God when he was alive and that stumped her, at first. Finally, she replied. “Well, I’m not sure what you mean by channeling, but Jesus is God. Everyone knows that.”

So, here she was again. I couldn’t help smiling because a moment before I’d been studying the sky as a skywriting pilot finished one word and started on a second word. That first word was Jesus. As expected, Gloria stopped and told me she was glad to see me, because she had to tell somebody about ‘our crazy court system.’ She had just been dismissed from jury duty after two days and she was relieved, but also upset. “God did not want me serving on that jury, and I’m glad. I couldn’t believe those other people on the jury. So many of them were willing to act neutral and there was a child involved.”

By this time, she had me hooked. So I asked what it was about. “It was a terrible murder case. This guy shot his wife and six-year-old daughter, then tried to run away. Just terrible. The judge asked me if I could be fair and I told him the truth. Not for something like that. He killed a child. I told him I had five kids and what that man did was unforgivable. They sent me home after I said that. Thank God.”

I nodded.  “But don’t you think he deserved a fair trial?”

“No. What if he got off? They should put him in jail and throw away the key.”

Whew. While she had been talking, I watched the skywriter  finish the second word. I interrupted as she carried on, and pointed skyward. “Can you read it?” She stared up and read the two-word sentence. If she saw any connection between her story and what was written in the sky, she didn’t show it. The skywriting read: JESUS FORGIVES.

Trish loved this story when I told it to her, because she knows this woman all too well. Then she kept asking me when I was going to write it for the blog. I’d hesitated for a number of days, not knowing quite why. But now, as I read over what I wrote, it’s all too obvious. I’m acting just like Gloria: gossiping and talking about Jesus!
R

Posted in Jesus, Jury duty, skywriting | 23 Comments

Boomerang returns…after long trip

Posted on November 28, 2010 by Trish and Rob

This synchro story appeared on the web site of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Thanks to Gabe Carlson for alerting us to it.

MARYSVILLE, Wash.—Eleven-year-old Brenden Hale was playing with a boomerang along the Skagit River in Mount Vernon last June when it landed in the water and floated away. He thought it was gone forever, until he went duck hunting with his grandfather last month on family property at Skagit Bay. 

Brenden was taking a break on the beach when he saw a crusty-looking piece of wood that looked familiar. It was a boomerang. It was his boomerang —identified by a notch on the back. The Daily Herald of Everett reported it had floated 10 miles down the river and wound up on a beach at his family’s property. Brenden told his mom, “Boomerangs really do come back!” 

Posted in boomerang | 18 Comments

The Boss

Posted on November 27, 2010 by Trish and Rob

This synchro is small, one of those you experience in the course of a given day. But since I haven’t had a synchro for awhile, I was delighted  to experience it!
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 Last March, we had several Bruce Springsteen synchros. He has a home here and usually comes down in the winter because his daughter is involved in equestrian sports. So today I was at the gym and thinking, Well, it’s November, shouldn’t the Boss be back in town soon?  The radio was on in the gym, and suddenly the DJ says, “And that’s a cut from Bruce Springsteen’s new album.”

Synchro! I figure Bruce must be on his way back to South Florida.

Posted in Bruce Springsteen, music | 14 Comments

The Japanese Do TSA

Posted on November 27, 2010 by Trish and Rob

This one is just too funny to resist!

Posted in JAPANESE, TSA | 4 Comments

What’s with the Phoenix?

Posted on November 26, 2010 by Trish and Rob

HEY, TELL US WHY YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A PHOENIX IMAGE. YOU’RE ONE OF HUNDREDS EACH DAY!  HIT COMMENT BELOW, THANKS.

If you Google the word Phoenix,  931 million links come up, everything from Phoenix, Arizona to NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander to the phoenix bird. So it makes sense that on any given day, people may be searching for this word. If you have anything related to phoenix on your blog or website and allow Google to index your site, then chances are some people find their way to your blog through that word.

We use sitemeter here, a counter that provides various types of information about how people find our blog. On November 2, 2010, we posted this story  about the 2010 election results and used the above image of a phoenix. The image addressed the Republican party’s rebirth/victory in the Congress. Rising from the ashes and all that!
Within a few days, we noticed that our hits were soaring and that at least a third of the hits were coming with the search terms: phoenix or phoenix picture. Trish wrote to Mike Perry, who knows a lot about blogging and synchronicity, and asked if he had any ideas about why this particular word might be generating so many hits. He suggested they could be coming from Google images. Sure enough, when we checked the referring URL in sitemeter, nearly every phoenix hit was coming from Google images – not from a blog or website that had mentioned our blog.  In other words, people were entering the word phoenix in Google images, which Google claims is the most comprehensive image search tool on the Web.  
So now the question becomes: why are so many people searching for phoenix? These queries are coming from all over the world – from Brazil to Thailand, Canada to Malta, Istanbul to the Phillipines, Europe to the U.S. It’s the sort of pattern that may provide a glimpse into the collective unconscious.
The phoenix appears in the mythologies of the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Chinese and Phoenicians. According to the Britannica online, among the Egyptians, it was associated with the worship of the sun. Only one of these magnificent birds existed at any time. It was exceptionally long lived and as its final days approached, it was said to create a nest of various herbs and spices, then it set the nest on fire and immolated itself. A new phoenix was born from its ashes.
In China, the phoenix is considered to be one of the most important legendary creatures, second only to the dragon, and is considered to be the leader of birds. In Japan, the phoenix is called fushicho, which means immortal bird. Then, of course, there’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, dedicated to defeating Voldemort  – the darkest wizard in history – and protecting his targets.
Symbolically, the phoenix is associated with rebirth, immortality, renewal. So what could this word possibly be telling us? Since we believe in synchronicity, it’s ridiculous to write it off as random coincidence.
Posted in phoenix | 29 Comments

Weird Stuff in the Sky

Posted on November 25, 2010 by Trish and Rob

To our American friends, Happy Thanksgiving!
For everyone, here’s a video to ponder. 

Posted in UFOs | 11 Comments

Rescues at Sea

Posted on November 24, 2010 by Trish and Rob

We’ve all heard the stories about how dolphins and porpoises rescue humans who are in trouble. In late 1999, a young Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, and his mother escaped Cuba with 12 others, all of them crammed into a small aluminum boat. The boat capsized during the 90-mile crossing to the U.S. and Elian’s mother and eleven others drowned. Elian, who was in an inner tube, was reportedly rescued by a pod of dolphins. This story spread quickly through Miami’s Cuban community. He was revered, destined for great things. During the ensuing custody battle, a kind of cult grew up around the boy.  He was subsequently returned to Cuba to live with his father and is now a kind of mouthpiece for the Cuban government.

Elian is in good company, at least in the dolphin rescue sense. Apparently actor Dick van Dyke (Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) once fell asleep on his surfboard and awakened surrounded by fins. He thought the fins were sharks and was certain he was about to die. “They turned out to be porpoises,” he said in an article in The Guardian. “And they pushed me all the way to shore.”

Whenever I read stories like this, I wonder why these creatures rescue humans. The only answer that makes sense is altruism.

Posted in dick van dyke, dolphins, elian gonzalez, propoises, rescues | 25 Comments

Dreams and Shamans in the Florida Everglades

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Trish and Rob

A writer friend visited us earlier this month and one day I told her about D Page at mythic musings. Later that same day, I received an email from D Page detailing a dream she’d had. This dream led into a synchronicity that involved our guest. Here’s the dream.
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This past week I had 4 dreams relating to shamans. Though I have had an occasional  dream regarding shamans during my life, I’ve never had four in a row.  Nor have I ever been to the Florida Everglades. This is the first dream of the sequence:

Two shamans, an older man  and woman, came to take me on a journey.Suddenly,we are on a  swiftly moving boat. The boat has no sides. It is night, and the water is very dark. I can not see anything beyond the boat and the water moving past it.  Somehow I know I am in the Florida Everglades. 

We arrive at an isolated location. We are in an older, large home made from wood. The room we are in is decorated with bamboo, and red and gold fabrics. The other rooms in the house have begun to collapse. Somehow I know this has to do with worldly conditions. There is a woman named Nancy living there. She has acquired a lot of knowledge through education. She has a large folder representing the curriculum she has studied. In a flash, I see that this type of knowledge will now longer apply to circumstances that we are about to encounter. There is another older woman there, who is also a shaman. Nancy asks her when she has to leave to do shamanic work somewhere elsewhere. The woman replies, “Now.”

Nancy then asks,”Who will be shamanizing here [in the Everglades]?  I am very shocked when my left arm rises up on its own accord. I then know I am going to be shamanizing” [taking over for the woman who is leaving]. I woke up at this point.
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When I told our guest about this dream, she was impressed by the depth and detail and that it seemed to address something extremely important. I told Debra what our guest had said and who our guest is – Nancy Pickard. Debra immediately wrote back: “Synchronicity! The woman in the dream was named Nancy! In the dream, she needed to expand her perceptions to integrate unknown variables. To go beyond the limits of education. Just to be open to the unknown without preconceived ideas.”

When I related this to Nancy Pickard, she was astonished. Only the day before, she and I had driven through  the Everglades on our way back from Sarasota. That night, she’d been re-reading Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts and had encountered a passage that was nearly verbatim what Debra said in the email.”Tell her I’d be glad to work with her as a shaman!”

This is the sort of weird synchro that seems to be addressing something important. We’ll have to see how it all unfolds.

Posted in d page, dreams, n pickard | 13 Comments

Doolittle

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Trish and Rob
With this new book, we’ve divided the chapters according to our interests and expertise, and then trade chapters and edit and add to each other’s stuff. We haven’t reached the trade chapters segment of this process yet. Right now, I, Trish, am working on the Animals Attuned chapter, which is about how animals often act as vehicles for spirit contact. In some ways, writing this chapter is an excavation, where I uncover experiences that happened long ago, but which remain so vivid in my memory it’s as if they happened yesterday. And this memory is about a one-eyed Himalayan cat I adopted from the animal control center in Tallahassee, Florida, when I was in graduate school.
I named him Demian, after the Herman Hesse book. He moved all over Florida with me. He endured my prepublication rants, rejoiced the day my first short story was purchased, celebrated with Rob and me when my first novel was bought in 1983. He was my feline buddy, he always had my back. Even on our road trips, he perched on the top of my seat in the car, his body spread out so that at least one of his paws rested against my shoulder.
When Rob and I got married, he and Demian were the only males in our household. Demian would sit in Rob’s lap as he wrote, would sleep on Rob’s side of the bed at night, would settle in his lap whenever he could. Rob nicknamed his Doolittle. He loved having another male in the house.
Around the time Doolittle hit fourteen, he developed kidney problems. The vet said we could opt for dialysis until a kidney became available, and that the transplant would have to take place in Atlanta, at a facility that did them. We brought Doolittle home, babied him for a few days, discussed our options. In the end, we didn’t want to subject him to all these medical procures and returned to the vet’s for the final injection.
Anyone who has owned a pet they have had to put down knows what this is like. There’s a moment when your beloved pet looks at you, stretches a paw to touch your arm, licks the back of your hand, locks eyes with you, and you know that he knows. You feel his consciousness touching yours and you’re choked up and want to scream, Stop the IV, stop this, stop this. But you don’t say a word. The animal makes some small, final sound. Sometimes you see the soul as it leaves the body, a pale wisp like smoke. Sometimes you just feel the soul’s departure. That’s how it was with Doolittle.
We buried him on the condo property somewhere, in a little shoebox. And here’s where it gets strange and wonderful. About four months after his death, I dreamed that I went downstairs into the kitchen to find something to eat, and Doolittle was at his bowl, chowing down. “Doolittle,” I exclaimed in the dream. “What’re you doing here? You’re dead.”
He raised his head and regarded me with that single clear blue eye. “Not really. And I’m coming back. You’ll know me.”

He was telling me that he was moving on, returning, preparing himself for whatever would come next in his scheme of things.
The next day, I scoured the newspaper for a kitten for sale. I took the dream Demian at his word, figured the rebirth had happened immediately, and came home with a beautiful tabby female kitten who was with us for a decade. But she was not Demian.  He had lost his left eye before I adopted him, a cat fight, one vet said, where a claw had penetrated the retina and rendered him blind in that eye, which was there but covered with scar tissue that turned his eye a milky white.
Skip ahead several years. Megan is seven or eight. A friend has a Golden Retriever that needs a home. We adopt Jessie. I take her to the vet for her shots. The vet says, Your dog has scar tissue of some sort in her left eye. It doesn’t affect her vision, it’s just there and you should be aware of it. Physical evidence that goes from life to life is well documented in humans. There’s nothing about it in relation to animals. But I knew. I felt it. Jessie was Doolittle. We had her for eleven great years. In all, this animal soul was with us for 25 years. Every time I feed a stray cat or dog or bird, I ask, first, Hey, Doo, is it you?
I’m still waiting for a definitive answer. A bark, a meow, a tweet, a voice.
Posted in cats, reincarnation, spirit contact | 33 Comments