Murdoch’s Watergate?

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Trish and Rob

If you’ve been following the phone-hacking scandal that began in Britain and which seems to be burgeoning like a crop of mushrooms after a hard rain, then you know who Murdoch is. Let’s take a closer look at this guy. There’s a synchro here. I promise.

In 1986, an Australian born, naturalized American citizen named Keith Rupert Murdoch created Fox Broadcasting Company. He became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only  U.S. citizens could own American T.V. stations.  Before this, he had extensive media holdings in Britain, Australia, and in the U.S. Tabloids like The Star were owned by Murdoch – you know, those cheesy papers in the checkout line at your local supermarket that feature the latest celebrity sex scandal.

In 1996, Murdoch got into the cable news market with  the Fox News Channel, a  24/7 cable news network.  As progressives learned during the Bush years, Fox News became the mouthpiece for the Republicans and Murdoch’s power to influence – i.e. brainwash –  the public’s attitude about politics grew exponentially.

I remember being at the gym in the aftermath of 9-11 and looking around at all the televisions and every single one of them had Fox News on. A friend told me that her husband became so disgusted with seeing Fox News on at his gym that he quit the gym and found some other place to work out. I didn’t quit my gym (which later folded), but I started bringing a book with me for when I was on the treadmill.

After the U.S. invaded Iraq, the patriotic fervor on Fox News became a kind of grotesque and horrifying cheerleading squad for war – the war in Iraq, then on Afghanistan, and always, of course, for the war on terror. Through its mouthpieces like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, and the chorus line of  blond bimbo Barbies, the network thrived on spewing hatred, racism, and any sort of divisiveness they could cook up.

During this period, when driving Megan to and from school, I would find solace in Air America, where  Stephanie Miller, Al Franken, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Thomas Hartman and other progressives provided a window of sanity. After Air American declared bankruptcy, Franken went on to become a senator and Maddow and Schultz, thanks to Keith Olbermann,  found a home at MSNBC. There,  they continue to present a more fair – if not exactly balanced – reportsa and opinions of the news, a counter to every major talking point the Fox News people have for a given day. And, let’s face it, if there was no Fox News, MSNBC would still be treading water in the middle-of-road CNN realm.

In 2008, when Obama really started gaining ground in the polls, Fox News pulled out the stops. The dark, reptilian brains in the newsroom were slammed into overdrive, cooking up bogus issues at the speed of light. The birther issue. The pastor issue. The socialist issue. But at the heart of it all was the race issue.

Meanwhile, Glen Beck was pulling in millions a year for spewing hatred and racism, people like Greta van Sustern who ran a respectable show on CNN, jumped ship for a million bucks, had a facelift, and became unrecognizable physically – and politically. She was now a Fox News mouthpiece. When McCain picked Palin as his running mate, Fox News was ecstatic about the cutie from Wasilla – wink, wink – and made valiant attempts to ignore the fact that she was so stupid and ill-informed about the basics that she could barely complete an interview with Katie Couric on September 24, 2008, weeks before the election. If McCain still wonders why he didn’t win, he can start by looking at a re-run of the interview in which Palin was baffled by a simple question about what newspapers she read.

Now here we are in July 2011. Fox News has been on the air for a mere 15 years and Murdoch’s personal fortune is now estimated to be nearly $8 billion. In the 2000s, he expanded his holdings to satellite TV, the Internet and film industry  and bought the Wall Street Journal. In 2010, On the Forbes list of the most powerful people in the world, he was ranked 13th (how’s that for a number ranking!).

One of Murdoch’s holdings in the UK is (or was) News of the World, a tabloid that had existed for 168 years before folding this week.  The newspaper has been accused of hacking into cell phones of everyone from royalty and the former prime minister to crime victims to get the scoop on stories.

And, because it’s always interesting to see what other countries think, here’s something from Times of India.

Princes Charles and Camilla, even the queen herself, may have been targeted. Then there’s the hacked phones of families of the 7-7 bombing victims in London, attempted bribery of NYC cops to release the phone numbers of families who lost loved ones in the 9-11 attacks, and the hacking of a  kidnapped teenager’s cell phone, which set off this furor.

The synchro, at least for us, seems to lie in the parallels to Watergate. From Wikipedia: “On September 29, 1972 it was revealed that John Mitchell, while serving as Attorney General, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance intelligence-gathering against the Democrats. On October 10, the FBI reported that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the officials and heads of the Nixon re-election campaign.” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for the Washington Post,  suggested “that knowledge of the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deep into the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and even the White House.”

On August 9, 1974, Nixon – facing possible impeachment in Congress – resigned, the only resignation of a U.S president.

Back in 1974, cell phones didn’t exist. Neither did any brand of personal computers. So what’s the 21st century equivalent of a break-in? Getting hacked. Hacking is the nefarious shadow that slips into your life through your computer or your phone and steals parts of your personal life – your identity, your money, your soul. A hacker invades, like a virus, like cancer, like some alien life form.

Richard Nixon resigned, Murdoch probably will be forced out of his own company. Well, he’s also 80-years old and a billionaire. Very few will shed tears the day he steps down.

So does Fox News hack phones to get scoops as at least three of its sister newspapers have done? We don’t know yet, but we’ll probably find out a lot more in coming days and weeks as the scandal spreads across the Atlantic.

We’ll let Howard Kurtz, of the Daily Beast and former Washington Post media reporter, have the final word here:

“Mr. Murdoch, whose empire stretches from Fox News to The Wall Stdreet Journal to the Times of London, is engaging in corporate damage control by shuttering Britain’s bestselling newspaper. If media ethics were his prmary concern, he would have fired his top London executive who ran the paper during the phone hacking. Maybe someone should put up a statue of the media mogul outside the News of the World buidling, to remind us of the dangers of corrupt journalism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Fox News, media, politicians | 14 Comments

The Ultimate Sweat Lodge Experience

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Trish and Rob

A  survivor

James Arthur Ray promised his sweat lodge experience would be transformational and he was right. In his last sweat lodge experience, three people died.

What are we to make of this over-the-top New Age guru and his kind? This article lays out the story well, but leaves us with a lot of questions about New Age entrepreneurs like Ray.

“Start living in harmony right now, and know that everything you want is within your reach.” That was a key message Ray offered. But who was he offering it to?

Mainly rich folks. His retreats cost between $10,000 and $20,000. You have to already possess quite a bit prosperity before you could take a trip with James Ray. So why did people do it? For self-improvement or a need to become even more prosperous? Maybe some were spending their life savings for a chance to be close to a New Age guru.

Ray told followers he planned to become the first new-age billionaire. In March 2009, Ray bought a 7,234 sq ft house in Beverly Hills for $4m.  But it seems that the dark trickster caught up with the proposal: How about a small concrete cell to work off some karma?

We’re not against wealth or even opposed to obtaining a prosperous life through writing New Age self-help books. We’d be hypocrites to say otherwise. Yet, it seems that Ray’s life was not so different from born-again Christian evangelists who promise the world and the beyond as long as you can pay.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Dust Storm

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

 

 

It’s a dust storm moving into Phoenix and reminds me of scenes from every disaster movie I’ve ever watched. Is this normal? I found it bizarre.

 

Posted in weather | 12 Comments

The Three Crows and Sins of the Sinnin’

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This synchro comes from Gypsy. Her stories are usually layered and complex – not just one synchro, but several. This one is particularly strange!

Gypsy has been traveling lately and was in Delaware when this one happened.

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A few days ago I went out to get a bit of sun and decided to run through the nearest drive through to grab a breakfast sandwich on the way home. I got there and decided to stop to eat for a moment and pulled over to the next parking area.

I’d been playing with some words on a piece in my head and decided to just jot them down while I nibbled, so I pulled out my notebook and began. One word ran into more and more and then into line after line and into page after page. It was like an exorcism of sorts, a very dark and heavy piece from something many moons ago that I’d not thought of in years.

The initial words took on a life of their own and so several pages later, I sat and looked at what I’d written.  I guess I was shocked as to where the piece had gone and was sitting there mentally debating as to whether or not I would ever post it.  It was a bit overwhelming that I still carried such vehemence over the incident so many years later,I just leaned back to soak up the sun and close my eyes to it all.

Now, it was a hot day here,  not a breath of breeze at all. My windows and sun roof were all open and the sun was blazing down, and then suddenly  a wisp of wind came through the car and literally pulled one sheet from my hands, just one of the 4 pages I was holding. So I’m sitting there holding the other three and watching the single page blowing out into the parking lot.

I was so shocked to have a single sheet of 4 blown out of my hand by a non-existing breeze that I’m immobilized and just sit there, looking at the sheet of paper on the ground beside my car. I debated whether or not to pick it up. Maybe it was a sign to just “let it go” in the most literal sense, blow it off, let the writing be the act of exorcism and let it be gone.  One of my little voices tells me to get out and pick it up as I didn’t want it to fall into other hands even though there are no names in it.

I open the door to get out to pick it up and just as I bend over to get it, I hear a loud bird call. It’s different than all of the seagulls who live here, different from any of the other many birds around this area. I’m  trying to remember what kind of call it is and realize there are no other birds at all around. Where were all the seagulls that usually flock over to my car? That area is a behind a busy restaurant and usually packed with seagulls looking for free meals.

Just as I’m realizing which kind of bird this call is from, I look over to see not one but three black crows land just a few feet away. Three black crows.  I’m trying to assimilate what it all is, what it means, then get back into my car to grab my phone and snap a photo.  By the time I turn around to snap, two sea gulls have landed there with the crows.

The piece I was writing is called “the sins of sinnin’.

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What I find intriguing about this story is that Gypsy still held three pages of what she’d written and just as she’s about to get out and chase down the flyaway page, three crows land. Do three crows qualify as a “murder of crows?”

That phrase may have originated from a fallacious folk tale that crows form tribunals to judge and punish the bad behavior of a member of the flock. If the verdict goes against the defendant, that bird is killed – murdered – by the flock. The basis in fact is probably that crows sometimes will kill a dying crow who doesn’t belong in their territory or much more commonly feed on carcasses of dead crows.

Esoterically, crows are associated with battlefields, medieval hospitals, execution sites and cemeteries. So perhaps the meaning of the crows in Gypsy’s experience is that these feelings have been buried too long and through the writing, Gypsy has exorcised them, executed them, severed their power over her.

 

Posted in birds, birds as messengers, creativity, crows, gypsy | 24 Comments

More Dog Park Politics

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Ty, American Bulldog, and Noah, Golden Retriever, at dog park

She wears stylish, expensive glasses. Her cheekbones are admirable. She’s skinny and actually treks around in three-inch heels that would murder my feet. She has five children, a husband who is allegedly her manager, her adversary, her partner – who knows for sure? – and John McCain picked her as his running mate in 2008 and probably damns the day he did so.

Never mind that she is the half governor of Alaska who surrendered her job when she realized she could make more money doing what she does now, zipping around the country in a bus to maintain her media visibility. Never mind that she is, well, stupid, and doesn’t have a clue about foreign policy, domestic policy, the constitution, or anything else that it takes to be president. She’s cute, she winks, she grins, she’s a Barbie doll on steroids. And she has a clone named Michelle Bachman, congresswoman from Minnesota, the shame of every Democrat in the state.

For some perspective, I return to the dog park where we take our Golden Retriever most afternoons. It’s a perfect spot for political commentary. And we have our Sarah Palin, our Barack Obama, our Osama Bin Laden,  our Michelle Bachman, John McCain, our floozy like John Ensign, and that Congressman – I forget his name – who showed his abs on craig’s list. We have all those archetypes at the dog park.

It starts with Lily, a black pug, five years old or thereabouts, whose obsession is a small red ball that her human hurls across the park with a lime green ball thrower. This is Lily’s  thing, her passion, her total obsession. Every toss, every race to the ball, is Lilly’s Sarah Palin moment – or her Michelle Bachman moment –  when she reveals just how resolute and stupid she is. Don’t get me wrong. There are things I admire about Lily – her resoluteness, for instance. Once she catches that ball, she hurries back to her human – or some other human – and drops it to the ground at the human’s feet, and retains her grip on that ball. Our dog, Noah, eighty times her size, stands over her, barking –give me that stupid ball – but Lily just bites down harder on the little red ball. Like Palin, like Bachman, Lilly knows what she wants.

At some point, Lily’s human – Todd Palin, some anonymous advisor – tells Lily to release the ball and it gets thrown again by him or Rob or me or someone else who is willing. Then the race is on again and the Palin/Bachman media machine is in motion. In the dog park scheme of things, this motion comes from the human bystanders, cheering Lilly or Noah or both or simply laughing at how dogs interact.

Then there’s Lou, a Doberman, beautiful, sleek, fast  and so focused on Frisbees that she’s a Frisbee thief. I think she’s a bit like Hilary Clinton was during the 2008 presidential campaign, smart and determined and fixated on the goal. Sometimes Lou loses -Noah beats her to the Frisbee – but she’s remarkably determined. She lets Noah enjoy his triumph, tagging after him as he trots back to Rob or me, but instantly ready for the next throw.

Diesel, an American bulldog who hasn’t been fixed, is Mr. Macho Man. Most afternoons, he and Ty, another bulldog who HAS been fixed, race along opposite sides of a fence, barking fiercely at each other, but neither of them has an opportunity to act on his aggression. In fact, some days when the fences between the different sections of the dog park are opened and Diesel and Ty meet face to face, they aren’t sure how to act. It’s like, Huh? Who’re you? How am I supposed to act now?

Diesel and Ty are like any two politicians on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They recognize they’re both American bulldogs – politicians – but beyond that, they have zip in common. When the fence is no longer an impediment – like when Obama invites the Repubs to dinner or whatever at the white house – they aren’t quite sure what the protocol is.

The poop at the park is a big deal. There are poop bag dispensers at various locations in the park (four sections for various sizes of dogs) and whenever you see your dog doing the deed, you’re supposed to pick it up.  But there are people who come to the park daily, sometimes twice a day, who don’t bother.

So one day this guy from NY who owns a golden (Charlie, female, like Stephen King’s Charlie in Firestarter) sees this woman’s dog pooping and tells her about it. Minutes tick by, she doesn’t pick it up. No surprise, really, since she never scoops up her dog’s stuff. But Charlie’s human gets pissed off about it, scoops up the poop, and shouts, “Here’s your dog’s poop!” and hurls it at her.

She files assault  charges against him.

To me, this speaks of the accusations  that Repubs and Dems hurl at each other about Medicare, Social Security, the debt ceiling, you name it. Neither party has a clue what the other party is about.  Neither party has a clue what ordinary Americans are about, either. There are only talking points – the poop bag and what’s supposed to happen with it. So the rest of us – the middle class folks spread through four dog parks of different sizes – are left in a bind. What’re we doing here, anyway? Who’re we supposed to vote for? Does our vote even matter?

Some days, the quandary is resolved in unexpected ways. Today, for instance, we went to the eye doctor for our annual checkup. This is where you get those drops that cause your pupil to open so wide you feel you’ve died and been reborn.  Even wearing sunglasses, it hurt to be outside on a bright South Florida day. We were still feeling the effects when we took Noah to the park – and immediately sought shade.

Not too many dogs around, and after sniffing out the territory, Noah seemed bored. The collies arrived – three of them, lazy dogs, no fun, everyone  knows it. They’re kind of like Fox News, giving off erroneous impressions on what it means to be a dog. Human Jamie was around with mutt Sephera, who loves people but can’t abide other dogs – and Noah trotted over to Jamie, looking for the treats she usually brings into the park with her. No treats today, so he withdraws.

Noah glances around for some small dogs to chase down, but no one is up to the game. Too hot. Even the Australian guys, Frisbee freaks, are panting hard and fast. He starts digging a hole, to cool off, and refuses to chase the battered Frisbee Rob tosses. Even Lou is too hot to cross the vast expanse of two parks to catch this one.  There’s a message in all this. We just have to figure it out. Maybe the message is total silliness, that dogs care about dog stuff and humans care about human stuff and that border is never breached.

But. What I love about the dog park is the honesty I see, the sniff that says you’re cool or the obvious shunning because you’re a big, fat yawn with no chance of winning.

I think that for the 2012 election season, I’ll be looking at the dogs in the park for my insights into who will be president.Hey, it’s as good as what the bookies predict.

 

 

 

Posted in dogs, politics | 12 Comments

Identical Twins

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

Rob and Jessie

Noah, looking for Rob

On the evening of July 4, we were all outside, tossing Frisbees for Noah. Some of Megan’s friends had dropped by to watch the fireworks next door, to hang out, to do whatever twenty somethings do these days.  They were sitting around in the driveway, on the hoods of their cars, in chairs we’d brought out of the garage. Our neighbors’ kids were in their yard, too, and as Rob and Megan tossed the Frisbee for Noah, the neighbor kids got into the act and pretty soon, it was a Frisbee toss between humans.

One of the next door kids was Zack – we call him Zackie. He learned to toss Frisbee at the park in our neighborhood, when Rob and Jessie, the Golden Retriever we had before Noah, used to go down there in the afternoons. Jessie loved her Frisbee  and she would catch it from anyone willing to toss it, even Zackie, who was four or five at the time. Zackie has a powerful spin on his Frisbee. So when he tossed one toward Noah, it whipped up toward the dusk, sailed down toward the driveway and struck one of the Dewar twins so hard that his glasses were knocked off – but his drink didn’t spill – and a lens popped out.

The Dewars are male identical twins with whom Megan went to high school, a couple of pretty good musicians who now have their own band. Even people who have known the Dewars for years sometimes can’t tell them apart. Rob said, “Hey, did that Frisbee hit Anthony or Zack?”

“Anthony,” Megan said without hesitation. “It was definitely Anthony.”

Too bad, I thought. It would’ve made a good synchro, the start of a cluster, perhaps.  Five minutes after Rob and I had retreated inside the house, Megan hurried in, laughing. “Hey, you guys,” she called. “It was Zack, not Anthony, who got hit. That’s a synchro, right?”

Bingo, I thought, then immediately started chewing away at the thing. What’s the message? Well, we live next door to identical twin sisters. Zackie hit Zack with the Frisbee and although they aren’t twins, they share the same names, and Zack and his brother, Anthony, are identical twins. Then there’s Michelle, who was also visiting, and has an identical twin. She noted:  “Noah looks so much like Jessie they could be identical twins.”

So the cluster is about twins – two dogs, two brothers, two pairs of identical twin sisters, two guys who share the same name, connected by, oh well, a Frisbee.  But what’s the deeper message? I don’t have a clue. But the intriguing thing about synchros is that once you recognize one of them, and start breaking down the components, other factors became apparent.

Initially, the synchro was superficial – two Zacks, connected by a Frisbee. But then I chewed away at it and realized it was much more layered than it appeared to be initially. Perhaps something is headed this way, in twos, identical twos?

Posted in twins | 17 Comments

The Green Bowl

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This synchro comes from Gabe, who way back when we first started this blog, sent us one of the most powerful synchros we’ve ever read, The Magic Teapots.

His teapot story was followed by another powerful synchro.

And another.

When we transferred the blog from blogger to wordpress, we lost several posts, including Gabe’s Chincago Breakfast Bums, which I think was included in 7 Secrets.  Regardless, all these stories are included on his blog.

In this synchro, Erin is Gabe’s roommate. Ginny is his mother, who gave him the green bowl.  The post is written as an email to his mom.

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Two nights ago Erin was making rhubarb pie in the kitchen, while I sat in the armchair in the living room. She came into the doorway, holding that large green glass bowl you gave me.

Although she has never broken any of my kitchenware and was not doing anything threatening toward the bowl, for some reason I said, “Don’t break my bowl!”

She laughed and looked at it, saying, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to break your green bowl.”

Then she walked out of sight toward the sink. The sink ran for a moment, and then I heard her curse in surprise. I jokingly yelled something like, “What have  you ruined in there?!”

Although I’d just made the comment about the bowl, I’d already put it out of my mind – it was just a random comment – and besides, I’d heard no breaking glass.

Erin returned to the doorway, still holding the green glass bowl, a shocked look on her face. She held up the bowl, which looked intact – at first. Then I noticed that three cracks ran through it. No pieces had come apart yet- it had cracked when she’d put the frozen pieces of rhubarb in it.

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So is this synchro precognition?  It sure looks that way to me.  I always wonder how often random thoughts we have throughout the course of a day are actually precognitive. They may not unfold as rapidly as this one did, but perhaps occur over the next few hours or days. For Gabe, this one was practically instantaneous.

 

Posted in Gabe, max, precognition | 8 Comments

Stephanie, the Macaw

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 


Sometimes you travel to a place and something happens that defines the core of your journey.  It might be anything – a conversation with a stranger, a view that captures your soul,  an animal that shadows you on the way back to your lodging, a particular food you sample, a dream, a vision,  people you meet.  For me and my introduction to Costa Rica, that special something was Stephanie, the macaw.

I think we first saw her when we were several miles from Arenal Lodge. We had stopped to take photos, each of us heading off in different directions – into trees, to the lip of a cliff – and a light rain was falling. Megan and I ended up in the same spot at some point and we heard the bird’s cries and looked up.

Up high in the trees, sixty or seventy feet up – a bird with a long tail circled through the mist, its cries hauntingly eerie. “It’s a Quetzl bird,” I shrieked.

“What’s that?” Megan asked.

Well, okay, where did that conclusion come from? Something I’d read, no doubt about the rare Quetzl bird sighted in certain parts of Costa Rica.

Megan got out her camera with its zoom lens, but the bird was simply too high to see clearly. When Rob joined us, he took a look and shook his head. “I can’t see it well enough to tell what it is,” he said.

We drove on through the mist, reached the lodge, checked in. That evening before dinner, we stopped by the bar for a drink. It was dusk, the bar was as open as the rest of the lodge, the cool mountain air flowing in. And then we saw it, the Quetzl, shrieking, crying out, making a wide sweep again the hallucinogenic sky. The bird finally settled at the edge of the bar and the bartender quickly cut up some fruit, put it on a plate, and set it on the window for the most beautiful blue and green macaw I’ve ever seen – and I’d never seen one outside of a zoo.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Stephanie,” he replied.

Uh-oh. He had named the bird. When you name a creature in the wild, it means there’s some anthropomorphic stuff going on. You know, the same sort of exchange that occurs daily with the animal companions who share your life. Except that Stephanie was wild. The bartender, who fed her daily, couldn’t touch her. No one could touch her.  But she knew where to come for her fruit plate, her sugar water, to pose for photos. Then I remembered that the only macaw native to Costa Rica are the red variety, not the blue.

“She’s not doing too well,” the bartender said.  “Her mate was killed a few weeks ago. They mate for life, you know.”

For the next three days, every staff member we talked to about Stephanie repeated the same story. Apparently Stephanie and her partner were brought to Costa Rica from Brazil, by the woman who owns the lodge. The owner is Canadian, was married to a Brazilian, and when he died, she inherited the lodge and its 2,000 acres. From what we understand, Stephanie and her partner arrived about six years ago and were set free on the property.

The male was apparently the friendlier of the two, the more trusting, the one who allowed humans to stroke his feathers and who would eat from your hand if you offered something delectable.  One day, he was in or near the closest town of La Fortuna and pecking at some shiny stuff on a car. The owner freaked and hurled something at the male. In Spanish, the word for this is golpear –  a violent blow–  and that blow killed him.

I was so horrified by this story that I plied the bartender with questions. Was this person male or female? A tourist or a local? How did the lodge find out about it? The person who did it was apparently a male tourist. The macaws were well known in the area and a local brought the bird’s body to the lodge and explained what had happened.

“She mourns,” one waiter told us.

“She isn’t like she used to be,” another employee confided.

Megan, of course, kept trying to get Stephanie to take a piece of fruit from her hand, but Stephanie wasn’t having any of it.  Megan did get close enough to run her fingers across Stephanie’s tail feathers.

Every evening after Stephanie had sampled the delicious fruits and sipped from her glass of sugar water, she would flutter over to the railing and gaze out at the volcano, at the utter lushness of this place.  She was listening, watching, alert. You could see something in the way she held herself, body tense, vigilant. I always had the feeling she was waiting for her mate to return.

Rob asked what the synchro is and I can’t find one. But there’s a deeper meaning here. Really, look at that photo, the bird alone on the railing, the only one of her kind in the entire country (so the employees said), facing the dusk and the impending darkness by herself. Stephanie’s story  resonates with the more profound elements in human life, that of loss and redemption, and a hope that perseveres.

Posted in birds, birds as messengers, Costa Rica | 26 Comments

It’s National Synchro Day in the USA

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

No doubt the most patriotic of all American holidays is Independence Day, aka the Fourth of July. Lots of fireworks and barbecues. It was the day the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, hence creating the USA.

Most people don’t realize that the Fourth of July is also a National Synchro Day. Here’s why.

One of the founding fathers and second President of the United States,  John Adams, died on July 4, 1826. That was 50 years to the day after America was born. Just before PresidentAdams died, he muttered, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” The two elder statesman had regularly corresponded with each other in their twilight years.

However, Adams didn’t know that  Jefferson, the third president, actually had died a few hours earlier, also on July 4.

What are the chances that two presidents would die on Independence Day? Before making any calculations, the story isn’t over. The fifth President, James Monroe, also died on July 4 of 1831. So, three of the first five commanders-in-chiefs died on Independence Day.

Clearly, early America was shrouded in mysticism that spanned from the mysterious Freemason pyramid with the eye on the back to one-dollar bill to the mystical elements of architecture of Washington D.C. to the deaths of those three presidents on Independence Day.

 


 

Posted in death, global synchro | 7 Comments

The Kids Are All Right

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

With Megan home this summer, the TV is on more frequently than usual. She’s a true movie buff, this one, who attended an acting school during her high school years and perhaps still entertains this dream of doing movies. At any rate, one of the movies she recorded today was The Kids Are All Right, starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo.

The premise? Two kids of a gay couple, a boy and a girl  conceived by artificial insemination, bring their sperm donor birth father into their family life. Okay, the tag line suggests the movie could be a real joke. But I remembered seeing the trailer and laughing, so we gave it a whirl.

Given the recent turn of events in New York state, where gay couples are now allowed to legally wed and receive the same benefits as heterosexual married couples, this movie couldn’t be more timely. And Bening and Moore are such terrific actresses that you feel as though you are inside these people’s lives, living their angst, uncertainties, doubts. The kids, played by Mia Wasikowska, (Alice in Wonderland) and Joshua Ryan Hutcherson, a pair of Libras born two days and a couple of years apart, are perfectly cast.

So imagine it: you’re a teenager with two moms and you and your brother  are actually half-siblings because you share the same sperm donor. High school is weird enough without having this added complication, right?   One of your moms is a physician (Bening, a control freak) and the other one is still trying to figure out what she’s going to be when she grows up. Julianne Moore studied architecture, but didn’t finish her degree, and is now starting a landscape business. When they meet the sperm Ruffalo (Shutter Island, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) all bets are off.

The movie was nominated for four Oscars and won two Golden Globes. When you watch, you understand why. The raw emotional impact in this movie is shocking. At some point, you forget you’re  watching a movie. When Bening discovers that Moore has been sleeping with Ruffalo, her pain is your pain, the anguish of anyone – male or female – who feels betrayed in a relationship. Her face squishes up in a way that communicates a soul torn open, shredded, beyond salvation.  When Moore apologizes to her family, she does so by muting the TV and announcing she has something to say. Bening is sitting between their son and daughter and her face crumples like  crepe paper as Moore makes her apology.

There are synchronous moments in this movie, but not in the way you expect. A clump of hair in a drain addresses the intimacies of living with  a partner and is the dead giveaway for  Bening’s discovery that Moore is sleeping with Ruffalo.

The teenagers are perfectly cast and communicate what it’s like to be a kid raised by two mothers. One of Megan’s male friends from college had two moms as he was growing up. It sure didn’t hurt his SAT scores, his IQ scores, or anything else about his intelligence or his ambitions. But as we watched the movie, we kept talking about Ross, whom we consider our surrogate son, the kid who is always welcome here, for as long as he wants to stay. When Megan did her month-long internship at Dolphins Plus, she stayed with  Ross’s mom. What does Ross think of the movie? We don’t know yet.

The traditional family of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best and the Donna Reed Show are dead. That was the 1950s, when fewer than 50% of women worked, when the Cold War raged, Russia was our arch enemy, and China was some backward Communist country.

The Kids Are All Right is the new norm. Even the blah title tells you that. The world and its paradigms are in flux, the family is redefining itself,  and the fact that New York has recognized same sex marriage  is a game changer. And yet, you still have the Repugs up there in front of the cameras, raging about how gay marriage will undermine the  American family.

Eventually, these Repugs will die off, their silly arguments will vanish in the dark corridors of other silly arguments, and Megan’s generation will assume the helm.  And her generation does not recognize differences in skin color,  sexual orientation, religious biases or anything else. They are the true egalitarians. Live and let live, that’s  their motto. They not only believe it, they  actually live it.

 

 

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