Our book report…

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Time for a little self-promotion. We’ve got new stuff coming out this summer and into the fall. Just yesterday, the paperback edition of Esperanza was released, and a box of books arrived at our door.

Next week the paperback edition of The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity comes out, and along with it will arrive The Synchronicity Journal, where you can collect your synchros.

In August, we’ve got two new books coming out including our second synchronicity book, Synchronicity and the Other Side. Plus, Rob’s novel Time Catcher, featuring anthropologist Will Lansa, will be published in both print and digital. In late September, Double Heart, another Will Lansa novel (a prequel to Time Catcher) will be published.

Just to make sure the books sell well, we’re calling upon the power of the golden scarab. Here he is, photographed by Rob in Costa Rica.

Posted in books, Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Ghost Buster

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Trish and Rob

About three months ago,   a writer friend asked if Rob and I could visit and do her and her family a big favor. She explained that her middle daughter, L, has been experiencing ghostly encounters in her room at night, and she won’t sleep in the room any longer. L also insisted that Trish was the only person who could rid her room of the ghost.  We first wrote about it here.

I’ve never tried to banish any spirit to anywhere, probably because I’ve never had the need to do so. However, in preparation for this, I solicited advice from friends who are psychics/mediums, read up on the subject, and came up with a technique I felt might work. Belief seemed to be a huge component in this picture – L’s beliefs. The above drawing, in fact, is her depiction of what she has seen in her room. Creepy little sucker, isn’t it?

The ghost busting venture finally came to pass. First, Rob took photos in L’s room and in different areas of the house where everyone in the family had felt a presence – the bathroom off the guest room where we were sleeping, and in the youngest daughter’s bedroom. Nothing showed up on the digital pictures.

We saged everyone out on the porch,  taking turns, arms extended, legs spread. We jokingly referred to it as the TSA position. I also told L I’d never done anything like this before, that it was as much an experiment for me as it was for her. She’s an old soul, this one, and understood that I was grappling in the dark, just as she was, that it was a joint venture into the unknown. But she joked, “Gee, great. That’s a vote of confidence.”

L’s mom has a gorgeous Salvator Dali tarot deck, so I pulled out the 22 major arcana cards,  fanned them out, and asked L to draw four, to represent the four directions. Her selections: The Magician for the north, the Empress for the south, the Star for the east, Justice for the west.  I used tarot cards because it’s how L and I initially connected. She was interested in the tarot, so I had sent her a copy of the book on the tarot that I co-authored with Phyllis Vega.

The flash on my camera obscured the top card and I had to Google the image to find it.   After she’d chosen the cards, I removed the stones I had brought out along – a large rose quartz and a large amethyst. L laughed and showed me her selections – a piece of rose quartz and an amethyst, smaller, but the same stones.  We knew we were on a synchronistic roll.

In her room, I drew a circle on her floor with white chalk. We placed the tarot cards at the appropriate directions. In the center of the circle went out stones, a candle, , holy water from the Vatican that L and her family had brought back from a trip to Rome, a rosary, sage for smudging.

L’s mom had prayers and blessings to say. L and I stepped into the circle. It wasn’t large enough to include her mom (the room was crowded with stuff), so mom sat just outside the circle and the three of us  held hands and visualized a white dome of protection around us. Then we said the Lord’s Prayer.

I should note that we aren’t traditionally religious people, that none of us adhere to any particular religious belief, but we recognize that certain rituals are powerful statements. The holy water and rosary, for example, were L’s choices, symbols that are meaningful to her, so we used them. Since Mom had some prayers that were meaningful to her and L, we used those, too.

Once this was done, I told L I was going to step outside the circle, smudge the room with sage, and bless the room with the holy water. While I was doing that, I asked her to  bow to each direction, hands pressed together, touching the center of her chest, the Namaste salutation in yoga. The divine light in me recognizes the divine light in you. I also said that while she was doing these salutations, she should ask the spirit/ghost to move on, that it had nothing to fear in the after life, that it wasn’t welcome in her room, this house.  While I saged and sprinkled the holy water around the room, I silently told the spirit it was time to move on.

We repeated these rituals in the younger daughter’s room and in the guest bathroom.  I saged every inch of the house, sprinkled windows and doors with the holy water. I never felt a presence in the house, never felt threatened or intimidated by anything unseen. This led me to believe that the spirit L had seen was drawn to her because of puberty, her psychic energy, to awaken her to her own intuitive ability.

That night, for the first time in eight months, L slept in her bedroom – with all the lights on.  But as her mother noted, “She’s in there. That’s what is important.”

So, we’ll see.

PS It’s now late June, six weeks later, and L is still sleeping in her room, but with the light on. I wonder if I can add ghost-busting to my resume.

 

 

Posted in ghosts, tarot | 29 Comments

The Tree

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Trish and Rob

I found this on Brizdaz’s blog and wow, is the trailer powerful. One more must see!

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Synchronicity’s GPS: The Shadow Trickster

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Trish and Rob

A Dali tapestry

I was working on a chapter about shadow tricksters and creativity and Rob remarked that he didn’t understand how this archetype was related to creativity. I started thinking about that.

If we look at our lives as a piece of art, then what are we creating from moment to moment, day to day, month to month? The way we live our lives can be haphazard and chaotic when we’re disconnected from who we are in the deepest pockets of our beings. But when we live mindfully, aware of each breath, touch, encounter, each spoken word, thought, and emotion, then aren’t we creating a lovely tapestry that is uniquely ours?

If the true meaning of creativity is, in its broadest sense, about how we live rather than the books we write, the paintings we paint, the sculptures we mold, the photos we take, then the shadow trickster certainly has a place in creativity. It’s the archetype that sneaks up on us whenever we experience selective amnesia about who we are, what we want, how we’ve treated someone else. It’s the manifestation of where we place our attention, particularly when that placement is negative. The shadow trickster reminds us of what our journey is really about  or where we should actually be and often does this with a wry, sometimes twisted humor or irony.

When I was pregnant, we lived in a condo complex in Fort Lauderdale. The complex itself was nice – tennis courts, swimming pool, and the property backed up to a canal. But the community was gated, with a guard 24/7 because the complex was located in the worst cocaine neighborhood in Lauderdale. On weekend nights, it was business as usual  to hear the shriek of tires and a resounding crash as some fleeing drug dealer burst through the guard rail with the cops in hot pursuit. What the fleeing drug dealer never realized was that there was no way out of the complex – except the way you came in – unless you drove into the canal. Some of them did.

I was about five months pregnant when we realized we probably should move and soon. But just the idea of this daunting task made us huge procrastinators.  I had nightmares about robberies and home invasions, one of them was so vivid that we had the locks changed in the condo. Still, we procrastinated. So one evening, the shadow trickster sneaked up on us.

We were at the gas station up the street, at the vacuum pump. While Rob went to work vacuuming the front seat, I got out to remove the floor mats in the back and left my purse on the floor in front of the passenger seat, with that door open.

In my peripheral vision, I glimpsed a car pull up behind us and started feeling uneasy. I ignored the feeling. Suddenly, this large man pushed me out of the way, grabbed my purse off the floor, and ran toward a waiting Camaro. It happened so fast, that Rob didn’t even see it happen. I was literally mute with shock and it wasn’t until we got back in the car that I said, “That guy just stole my purse.”

“What guy?” he asked.

When we got home, I called the cops. An hour later, a woman in an adjacent neighborhood called, said someone had hurled a purse into her yard, and she found my driver’s license in the wallet. We drove over to the woman’s house, which was right in the middle of the cocaine neighborhood. The elderly woman who had called handed me my purse. “No money there, but they didn’t take the plastic.” Then she patted my arm. “Honey, you need to move out of this neighborhood before your baby is born.”

We thanked her profusely, Rob withdrew the cash in his wallet and pressed it into her hand, and the next morning, we started looking for a new neighborhood. I had been robbed – but not injured – my purse had been returned with everything inside except the cash. The nightmares I had ignored had manifested themselves, but in a much milder form than in my dreams. The shadow trickster had made his point. Six weeks after Megan was born, we moved into a house where we lived for the next eleven years.

I wonder now if the shadow trickster is like the GPS we had in our rental car in Costa Rica. It alerted us whenever we were approaching a dangerous bridge or a particularly winding and dangerous road. If you ignore the alert, you end up in the rushing river below or smashed to smithereens on the far side of a precipice. As an archetype, perhaps the shadow trickster is a course corrector, the synchro that coaxes us – or, if we’ve really strayed, shoves us – back to where we need to be in order to live joyfully, creatively.

During the 2005 hurricane season, someone stole a generator from our garage  and we bought a new generator when we filed an insurance claim. Then, a few years later,  my bicycle was stolen from the garage. But neither of these thefts felt personal, neither of them smacked of the shadow trickster. It felt as if   the thieves needed these items more than we did.

So if the role of the shadow trickster is to correct our course, then this archetype may be more prevalent now, as we work our way through these strange, tumultuous times. Globally, there seem to be more incidents of shadow trickster – Obama being locked out of the White House, that’s just one example. But on a personal level, its appearance in our lives may depend on what we are creating for ourselves moment to moment,  breath to breath. Is your life’s tapestry beautiful to you? In the end, that answer seems to be the only one that matters to the shadow trickster.

Posted in creativity, dark trickster | 11 Comments

Can we predict the future?

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Trish and Rob

When Carl Jung coined the word synchronicity to define meaningful coincidence,  he used a wide-angle lens, so to speak, encompassing many aspects of psi phenomena in his definition. In a sense, telepathy and precognition and other ‘sixth sense’ abilities are subsets of synchronicity.

But when we explore precognition, we encounter another question that seems to lie on the border of synchronicity. That is, predestination. In a post that appeared on May 24, Trish explored the question of predestination vs. free will. A few days later, we received an incisive and thoughtful comment on the topic from Australian futurist and intuitive counselor Marcus Anthony, who explores these matters in his books and on his blog.

Since many readers probably missed Marcus’s comment, we decided to put it up as a post.  Marcus not only talks in theoretical terms, but also details  specific examples from his work. One thing that struck me as particularly notable is that Marcus contends that the outcome of sporting events are largely predetermined weeks, in not months, before the players take the field.

That’s quite an astonishing idea, especially since skeptics often dismiss precognition on the basis that if it were true,  psychics could accurately predict the results of horse races, football and baseball games, and other sporting events. Marcus tells us that he has done just that.

Here are his comments.

“There is definitely at least some degree of predestination, though I am undecided exactly how much. I work with spiritual energy quite a bit, so I can sense things about the future in various ways. I don’t predict the future though – if people ask and I sense something , I just relate it as a “sense”, not an inevitability. I have often been given numerous hints and warnings about the future, and it seems to me these come from spirit guides. One I relate in my book Discover Your Soul Template was a vision about a visit to a beach, where I was told swimming was unsafe (the vision occured just before I got a phone call from a friend inviting me to the beach – in winter!). At the beach i made sure I didn’t venture out into deep water! There are numerous other cases I could mention. The point is, why would there be any need for spiritual guidance at all if there was no free will? If there was no choice?

“You can get a strong sense of possible futures through accessing intuitive feelings. For example I applied for a job at an Australian university two weeks ago, and two hours later as I was sitting on the subway train on the way home, I projected my feelings into the job and it felt absolutely 100% like an open doorway – like it was just meant to be. I have learned from personal experience that when intuitive feelings are that strong, they are always correct. I’ll let you know what happens with the job! Again, the point is, with so many possible variables with a job application – you can’t possibly know who else will apply or what the people at that workplace will think of your CV, or your interview performance (if you get one) – it suggests that that particular future has already been set.

“A few months ago I tested empirically whether intuitive feelings and visions were reliable by using them to predict outcome for a sporting event involving 13 games – the England’s cricket team’s tour of Australia. before each game I projected my feelings into the game, and used a light trance state to select the winner. I got 11/13 correct. What’s more, because I was investing an intention into the outcomes of games, I had numerous dreams about the outcomes of specific games. All turned out to be correct. During the recent cricket world cup, as an Australian i was hoping Australia would win, but right at the beginning of the month long tournament I had a vision that Australia would be eliminated at the quarter final stage, which turned out to be true. In one early game played against Pakistan (not a knock-out game), I had the strongest intuitive feeling that Australia would lose the game. I predicted Pakistan would win. At that point Australia had been undefeated at cricket games at the world cup for 12 years, so it was a big call. Yes, they lost.

“I now believe that sports events are predetermined many weeks or months before anyone steps onto the field or court. I thus also conclude that many – perhaps even all – of life’s events are determined well in advance of when they happen. Yet there is free will nonetheless. The more conscious you are of the “energy” that is unfolding from present to future, the more you can shift possible futures.”

***

I’m not convinced that the results of games are mostly predetermined. After all, if this concept became commonly accepted and people like Marcus could pinpoint the winner, there would be little motivation to play the game or race the horses. Yet, despite any predetermined victor, ultimately free will could still play a role. All it would take would be for a key player on the perceived winning team to drop out of the game at the last minute. Or maybe a referee makes a bad call and throws the game. Unless those factors are also predetermined, free will would still prevail.

As Marcus concludes, “The more conscious you are of the ‘energy’ that is unfolding from present to future, the more you can shift possible futures.” Hence, free will exists in spite of any perceived underlying patterns that suggests victory or defeat.

Complicated stuff. – R

 

 

 

Posted in Marcus Anthony, prediction | 48 Comments

Endgame

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This piece was written by Pulitzer-prize winning author and New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, and read by George Atherton. It’s powerful, chilling, but not without hope. Rather like The Key, in that sense.

It addresses many of the concerns discussed on this blog from time to time, and on other blogs. Nancy Atkinson’s blog has gone into some depth about sustainable communities, one of the things Hedges talks about. It’s worth listening to in its entirety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImSzACcQ368&feature=player_embedded#at=45

Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments

Thomas Edison sees gold

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Photograph of Edison circa 1911 is from the Library of Congress.
One hundred years ago today, June 23, 1911, the Miami Metropolis published predictions about the year 2011 from Thomas Edison.

Edison makes some amazing predictions about a future of golden automobiles, the discontinuation of gold as currency, the rise of steel and the death of the steam engine.

Especially interesting considering the emergence of digital books, Edison predicted that books would be printed on leaves of nickel, “so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume.”

He goes on to explain that, “a book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound.”

He was a bit short-sighted on the possibilities of how many pages could be stored in a small volume, like a Kindle. But not bad. Here’s the original  article.

What will the world be a hundred years hence?

None but a wizard dare raise the curtain and disclose the secrets of the future; and what wizard can do it with so sure a hand as Mr. Thomas Alva Edison, who has wrested so many secrets from jealous Nature? He alone of all men who live has the necessary courage and gift of foresight, and he has not shrunk from the venture.

Already, Mr. Edison tells us, the steam engine is emitting its last gasps. A century hence it will be as remote as antiquity as the lumbering coach of Tudor days, which took a week to travel from Yorkshire to London. In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world’s machinery), generated by “hydraulic” wheels.

But the traveler of the future, says a writer in Answers, will largely scorn such earth crawling. He will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside.

The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost — of steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradle; his father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother’s boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings, converted by cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or any other wood her ladyship fancies.

Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound.

Already Mr. Edison can produce a pound weight of these nickel leaves, more flexible than paper and ten times as durable, at a cost of five shillings. In a hundred years’ time the cost will probably be reduced to a tenth.

More amazing still, this American wizard sounds the death knell of gold as a precious metal. “Gold,” he says, “has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel.

“We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same in matter, though combined in different proportions.”

Before long it will be an easy matter to convert a truck load of iron bars into as many bars of virgin gold.

In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern; why we should not ride in golden taxicabs, or substituted gold for steel in our drawing room suites. Only steel will be the more durable, and thus the cheaper in the long run.

***
Considering the price of gold, Edison was a tad off. It goes to show that even the brilliant minds of the day can’t really foresee a century in the future. But he was on the right track with books.

Posted in prediction, Thomas Edison | 5 Comments

The Key

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Trish and Rob

One of our favorite travel activities is reading. On our recent trip to Costa Rica, I had a selection of books – three on my Nook and two actual books. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, is over 700 pages long and I was totally wrapped up in it until Megan absconded with it.  So then I started reading Whitley Strieber’s The Key.  Rob and I read it years ago, but this reading felt like the first time.

The background about the book is as fascinating as the book itself. On June 6, 1998, Strieber was in Toronto, on a book tour for Confirmation. At 2:30 in the morning, someone knocked on his hotel room door and when Strieber opened it, a stranger swept into the room. At first, Strieber thought the man was an overzealous fan and tried to get him to leave. But the stranger said something that seized Strieber’s attention. “…he offered the arresting thought that, because of the murder of a couple who had been killed in the Holocaust, the person who would have cracked the mystery of gravity was never born…” As a result, mankind would “remain trapped on a dying planet.”

Now put yourself in Strieber’s shoes. What would you have done?

For Strieber, their subsequent conversation was “life-changing.” As I read the book, I dropped by his website, and recognized just how profoundly this single conversation seemed to have sculpted Strieber’s interests from that point forward. His website isn’t just about contact and the visitors; there are articles about climate change, reincarnation, 2012, astrology, anomalies, dreams, politics, psychics, the economy, communication with the dead.  All of these areas are touched upon in The Key and the stranger’s take on these areas is intriguing – and disturbing.

According to the stranger, “the living and the dead share the same  world. Your dead are not off somewhere in space.  Their lives and beings are intertwined with yours. They see all that passes here, but can only affect it indirectly, if they can make themselves heard in the minds of the living.”  The stranger goes on to say that we, the living, are changing, evolving to the point where we’re better able to detect the presence of the dead.

He talks a lot about the radiant body, the part of us that is conscious “in the energetic world.” It enables us to remain separate beings after death. “If a being cannot self-maintain after the elemental body no longer does it automatically, it is absorbed into the flux of conscious energy.”  The stranger advocates meditation as a means of attaining the radiant body. “Who does not meditate, disintegrates.”

I was particularly intrigued by the stranger’s discussion of devices to detect  magnetic fields and electromagnetic plasma – the spirits of the dead. He pointed out that crop circles are “two-dimensional portraits of these beings, self-created. They are trying to introduce themselves to this age.”

The most disturbing parts of the book concern climate change. According to the stranger, we have reached the end of our planetary resources. “After the suffering you are about to endure, mankind will never again lust after material wealth. You are about to suffocate in your own garbage.” In other words, our consumer society  has pretty much done us in.

He goes into detail about the form climate change will take and much of what he says seems to have been happening since he provided the material thirteen years ago, in 1998. More violent storms, disruption of the Gulf stream, the melting of glaciers. If you click this link, you’ll see exactly what the master of the key was talking about.  Interestingly, he says that humans didn’t cause this – it’s part of a natural cycle –but we sped things up.

Then there’s the secrecy of governments. All governments. He says the U.S. is ruled by secrecy and until that ends, this country is in its death throes. “Human life is about freedom, and secrecy is the murderer of freedom.”

Interestingly, as I was writing this, MSNBC noted that today, June 13, is the anniversary of the publication of The Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg, then an analyst for the Rand corporation, was disturbed by the real reasons for the Vietnam War, and began Xeroxing the classified documents about it and removing them from his office. He eventually released them to the New York Times and Richard Nixon went after him to discredit him. It all led to the Nixon’s resignation and an end to the war. Tonight, Ellsberg told MSNBC that Afghanistan has  disturbing parallels to Vietnam.

It’s the kind of secrecy, I think, that the stranger was referring to when he said, “You must face the fact that the American intelligence establishment is just as rotten and just as evil as every other secret human government that has ever existed.”

There’s much to contemplate in this book. And despite all the gloom about climate change and the extinction of mankind, I found the stranger’s take on laughter enormously liberating. “Laughter is the key to everything.” More powerful that prayer or meditation, he says. It’s “the stuff of which the world is created. Find laughter, find freedom.”

 

 

Posted in streiber, writers | 39 Comments

Midnight in Paris

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This post may be a synchro in that the first movie we saw after returning from our Costa Rica trip was Midnight in Paris, a time travel movie in the Woody Allen sense. It felt right because Costa Rica is like traveling through time. OK, so maybe that’s a stretch.  But the movie is a total delight, pure Woody, from start to finish.

For anyone who has followed Woody Allen’s career since, oh, say, Annie Hall, then his usual themes are familiar to you. A fear of death, a sense that you aren’t worthy – of a relationship, a certain desire you hold, a dream. Owen Wilson plays the character that Woody used to play in his own movies. And it’s kind of eerie. He talks like Woody in his younger days, that same tone and texture, that subtext, that glorious imagination that always embraces more.

From a novelist’s point of view, the story is seamless, perfectly told, no complicated detours.  Owen Wilson, the protagonist, is vacationing in Paris with his fiancée, Rachel McAdams, and her family. He’s a Hollywood scriptwriter, successful, but thinks he’s a hack who would be better off living in Paris in the 1920s when the artistic greats glommed to this city like frogs to a pond.  Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso: Wilson knows that history.

And one night when he explores Paris on his own, he pauses on a particular corner and an odd car pulls up to the curb and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald lean out the window and shout for him to join them. At that moment, he doesn’t know who they are, but he has had a lot to drink and laughs and climbs into the car with them.

Owen Wilson ends up at a party where the women are dressed like flappers and Cole Porter plays beautiful music on a piano. He meets Picasso’s mistress and falls for her. And then they all got to a bar where he meets Hemingway, who promises to give his manuscript to Gertrude Stein.

You get the idea the idea here, right? At some point, Wilson wonders if he’s lost his mind, his fiancée is sure of it. But night after night, he enters into this very magical world of time travel, and Woody Allen never explains how it’s possible. The car simply draws up to this particular corner just as the city clock chimes twelve for midnight, Wilson gets in, and is delivered to the past. The technique works beautifully.

Woody Allen is one of those artists with whom you come of age.  He captures the synchronistic weirdness of a particular time and place in such a way so that when you look back over your own life, you can say, Wow, I saw Annie Hall when…. Or: I was with so and so when I saw Sleeper….

There was a time when his movies were boycotted or banned in the U.S. because he deserted his partner, Mia Farrow, and married his stepdaughter, who was ridiculously younger, and fled the U.S. Yeah, okay, so what? Politicians do this daily. For me, Woody Allen remains a quintessential filmmaker who grasps the angst behind the façade, whose films urge us to question our mass reality and ask…what if?

Info on the film is here.

Posted in movies, time travel, Woody Allen | 35 Comments

111.11

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

 

 

On the morning of June 8, we left Arenal Lodge and set out in our rented 4×4 for Monteverde, Costa Rica’s cloud forest, one of the country’s protected regions. More than a third of Costa Rica is protected by either the government or private ownership, usually families who have owned property for several generations and maintain its pristine conditions.

We had our trusty GPS set for Arcoiris Hotel in Santa Elena, a small town in the region. We knew the distance was less than 70 miles and that the trip would take about four hours because most of the road was unpaved. Well, unpaved isn’t really the adjective I would use. Horrid fits the bill. Pitted with craters, the roads twists and turns upward from about 1,500 feet to around 5,000, the altitude of Denver, Colorado. But it takes you through such exquisite and dramatic landscapes that after the first, oh, 15 miles, you forget about how your kidneys are about to drop through your feet.

We stayed at a place called Arcoiris – rainbow – another spot I’d selected from the Internet . I wasn’t sure if it was a pit or what, but once again, we were shocked and delighted. It’s right in Santa Elena, a town favored by backpackers from all over the world who come here for the adrenaline – ziplining, Tarzan swings, the Superman fly. Our cabin was set off in a corner of the property and every afternoon, like clockwork, the fog rolled in, creating an eerie strangeness to the place.

One morning, Megan and I were in the lobby, making a reservation for ziplining, and I noticed a poster on the bulletin board for yoga classes. I just scanned it, didn’t think anymore about it, and we made our reservation for the ziplining tour. Rob and I walked over to the Mercado a while later to buy some stuff for our drive back to San Jose the next day. While waiting in line, we noticed a woman wearing a namaste t-shirt and Rob said, “My wife has that same t-shirt.”

Turns out the woman and her husband were American expats who own a yoga studio a few miles outside of town. When she asked Rob what sort of yoga he taught, I mentioned that we were writers and he had created his own system of yoga, a vinyasa flow connected to the zodiac.

“Oh, I was  a writer.,” she gushed. “Past life.”

I thought she meant she had been a writer in a past life and asked if she was familiar with Carol Bowman’s work. She wasn’t. Later, Rob pointed out that she was referring to her life before Costa Rica, when she and her husband were journalists. Well, hey. I equate yoga with an awareness of past lives, and laughed afterward at my tunnel vision. At any rate, she invited us to  drop by the yoga studio that afternoon and work out.  So, after we ziplined (another post!), we did.  The studio was spacious with a gorgeous view and while Rob did his yoga, Megan and I went shopping.

This area boasts a number of artists and we found some fantastic shops that featured local art, jewelry, sculpture, even tailored yoga clothing. In a place called Luna Azul, we  did some serious shopping, took our purchases up to the counter, and the young woman who spoke perfect English began adding it all up.  All these businesses have computer software that do the math, but also have backup hand calculators.

“Uh-oh,” the young woman said. “I made a mistake,” and she turned her calculator toward us so we could see what she was taking about. “I punched in too many ones.”

Megan and I just stared at the five ones. $111.11. Then we burst out laughing.

“Wow,” I breathed.

“Awesome,” Megan remarked.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman said.

“Don’t be,” I told her. ” This is a powerful number.”

She glanced up, frowning. “Really?”

“Absolutely.” I handed her a credit card.

“The actual price is $111.00. I’ll give you the difference in colones.”

“May I get a receipt?” I was thinking I could scan it and post it here.

“That’s the problem.,” she replied. “Since I messed up on the ones, I’ll have to put  the card through again.”

“Just leave it,” I told her. “ I’d like to take a photo of it.” So I brought out my BlackBerry and snapped a pic.

Then Megan and I left the shop, giggling about all those ones.

And that’s how Costa Rica was for us from Sunday to Sunday, a stream of  small, silly synchros that were, nonetheless, powerful indicators that we were in some kind of beautiful synchro groove. I mean, really, $111.11?

 

 

 

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