Welcome to The Mystical Underground

One of our truly messy bookshelves

Our book Sensing the Future, A Field Guide to Precognition, will be published on January 3, 2017. As part of our publicity for the book, we’ve been writing to various authors who books have contributed to our knowledge, whose books we enjoy, asking if we can send them a PDF of the book in early August.   If they enjoy the book, we would be delighted to have them blurb it.

Initially, the publisher was going to provide just an excerpt from the book, which is what we said in our email to Robert Moss, whose books on dreaming , oracles, and synchronicity are terrific. He responded quickly:

Dear Trish and Rob

 I don’t “blurb” books (such an ugly word) on the basis of excerpts. Send me the whole book – by pdf if you like – and I’ll consider writing an endorsement, but can’t promise to get to this for a while.

bright blessings

The publisher agreed to send a full PDF of the book after I forwarded Moss’s email. And we used the word “endorsement” from then on. Rosemary Guiley, author of the Djinn and co-author of a book with George Noory, Talking to the Dead – also responded quickly. I loved DJinn and Rob is enjoying Talking to the Dead,  so this email was gratifying – and gracious.

Hi Trish

Congratulations! I will take a look at it. You can email it to me at…

We also contacted Rupert Sheldrake. Ever since reading his Presence of the Past in the late 1980s, we have been big fans of everything he writes. He’s a British biologist, a visionary  A few years back, TED talks banned his talk from you tube.

 Nature magazine called his work “infuriating…the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.”

Our kind of guy, for sure. The initial response to our request was answered by his research person, Pam:

Dear Trish and Rob,

Thank you for your kind email enquiry, which I will pass onto Rupert Sheldrake.  Your books sounds very interesting.  Although I need to mention Rupert is completely inundated at the moment and never endorses books he hasn’t read.  Your book is on a subject Rupert has a lot of interest in but he is awash with tottering piles of unread books.  Good luck with yours.  Best wishes

I felt this was a fairly positive response and replied that a PDF of the book would be available in early August and that if Mr. Sheldrake had worked his way through his pile of books by then, I would be glad to send him a PDF. The response to this email was from Sheldrake himself and kind of blew us away:

Dear Rob and Trish,

Thanks for your email and offer of sending the PDF of your book in due course.  As Pam says it’s very unlikely I’d be able to read it, and I never endorse books I haven’t actually read.  However I would of course be interested to look through it given that it’s close to some of my own interests. 

Best wishes,

Rupert Sheldrake

Wow!  Sheldrake isn’t just brilliant, he’s a nice guy. He’s giving himself an out in the event that he hates the book, and that’s only fair. Now compare these gracious responses from Guilley, Moss, and Sheldrake, with the complete antithesis, from a man whose books we have been buying since 1994:

As a general rule I tend to support books that either refer to my work or are sufficiently close to my interests to command my attention.  I do get a lot of requests from people seeking endorsements to do this; almost every time I speak at a different venue, someone comes up and tries to either hand me a book or make a request to have me read his or her book.  Before I consider even reading anyone’s book, I need to know the following:

   

Who is publishing the book and where, what countries is it being published in?
  In one page (under 700 words)  what is in your book that has not be said or written about before?  In brief, what is new in your book?
       

Do you reference my work in any way other than a footnote or in the bibliography?  If so, I need to see what you have written about my work.
 

I ask about (1) because I do not tend to support self-published books.  I will make exceptions, but not often.  I expect a book to have legs of its own and not depend on my endorsement to make it in the marketplace.  My endorsement means a lot to me and I don’t use it unless I really know the work and the author well enough and I believe in the work. 
      

I ask about (2) because I really don’t have time to read what people send me and I need to see that the writer has really done his or her homework and knows the field well enough to reference other people’s works and writes well enough, by providing me a short summary of what is new in his or her book, to deserve my full attention. 
   

I ask about (3) to see if the field the writer has written about is one that I have written about and have knowledge about.  If the writer has actually read any of my works and indicates that he or she has and has used my ideas in a new or original way, it goes a long way to having me support the book, even if the writer disagrees with me.
     

In brief I tend to support works that really deserve my full support because of my true interests and not just my name.

Seriously, dude? I need to write a college term paper justifying my request?  I wrote him back and answered his queries in less than the 700 words he had stipulated. His response was odd:

Could you please let me see where and how you reference my work in any way other than a footnote or in the bibliography?  I need to see what you have written about my work.  After I see this I’ll consider looking at a pdf of your book.  OK?

I’m not sure what contributes to such an inflated ego, but Rob and I have decided to delete any reference to this author in our book. And it’s unlikely that I’ll buy one of his books from this point forward.

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In the fall of 2015, we were visiting our daughter and attended one of her Paint Nite classes. Afterward, we stopped by a downtown bar and were treated to a first class magic show by Richard Waddington – whose street magician name is Richard the Adequate.

After seeing his show – and asking him a ton of questions – I friended him on Facebook. I didn’t hear anything until nine months later, shortly after the Orlando mass shooting, when I received a note that he had accepted my friend request. He apologized that he hadn’t seen my friend request. We exchanged messages and then text messages, and I told him about the blog post I’d done on him last fall and gave him the link.

His response: I’m speechless. You have honored me beyond words. Thank you. This week has been a bad one for us all. Tears of joy are so much better than tears of grief. You paid attention to my banter. Most people just watch my hands and ignore my mouth. What touched my heart the deepest was that you researched in addition. Are you a journalist?

This led to another exchange of messages where I explained that Rob and I are writers and learned  that Richard is an avid reader who devours 2-4 novels a week. Stephen King is at the top of his list and he has read most of King’s books multiple times. Richard is also writing a book and asked if I would take a look at the first chapter. I told him sure and he sent it along.

My sense is that he’s writing a memoir. He has a clear, unusual voice and a big life story – an unusual childhood in which his grandmother was a powerful influence, the loss of everything in 2006, when he ended up living under a bridge, and how magic brought him back. At any rate, I told him we would be in Orlando the following week and would love to see him perform more magic.

We met up with Richard after Megan’s Paint Nite class in a burger joint downtown. I had brought him one of King’s Dark Tower books that he said he hadn’t read, and then commented on the Bernie Sanders button on his hat, which led to the four of us talking politics. His grasp of political history is staggering. Name a president, any president, and he’ll talk about that presidency as though he was there. His grasp of religious doctrines spans the spectrum. As a young boy attending a Catholic church, he was abused by a priest and this incident launched a journey of voracious reading about every major religion and led him to the point where he is now an atheist.

When we got around to the topic of his magic, he whipped out his deck of cards and dazzled us with his wizardry. He even showed us how he does one of his card tricks but when Rob and I talked about it today, we realized neither of us understood it. He also did a very cool trick with 3 coins – a quarter, a British coin, and a Chinese coin that looked like a coin from the I Ching. He puts the three coins in his left hand, asked Megan to name one of the coins, opened his right hand, and there was the coin she’d named.

When Megan’s roommate, Nick, joined us, Richard really entered his street magician mode, blindsiding Nick with a couple of card tricks. I asked Richard for his birth data – he was born on the same day as John Lennon – and he gave me what I needed to do his chart. He’s a skeptic, but is “open-minded.” I told him I would send him some notes on his birth chart and that when he read it, he would no longer be skeptical about astrology.

Then it was time for Richard to head out to other sidewalk venues for the evening, where he would undoubtedly dazzle and entertain and blow a lot of minds. He left us with a piece of wisdom. “Magic is like politics. You distract the bystanders so they don’t see the truth of what you’re doing.”

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I sometimes go back into the blog’s earlier years and run across a post that’s puzzling, like the one below. This evening I chose a month at random – November 2011- and this post was the one that caught my eye. The post  itself is something of a synchro for me.

Earlier in the evening, I read through a chapter in the young adult book that Rob and our friend, Bruce Gernon, are writing on the Bermuda Triangle. This chapter dealt specifically with AUTEC, a U.S. Navy base on Andros Island in the Bahamas, and events that occurred in 2009, when Rob and I, Bruce and his wife, Lynn, flew there to meet with the cast and crew of UFO Hunters. AUTEC is known as the underwater area 51.

Here’s the older post, which was called UFO, Area 51 Synchro:

A friend, let’s call her Harriet (she doesn’t want her real name used) was en route to New Berne, North Carolina. She had a window seat and was peering out and saw an odd light. At first, it seemed to be dark, then it turned paler and brighter, then it began to move in an erratic way, and finally shot off quickly in a way that normal aircraft simply can’t do.

She snapped a photo with her iPhone, but it didn’t turn out clearly at all. There was too much reflection from the window.   But the woman in the seat next to Harriet saw the object, too, and the two women discussed what they thought it was.  Harriet was pretty sure she had just seen a UFO and lamented that her iPhone just couldn’t render what she saw in any clear way.

The plane landed at the New Berne Airport and Harriet hurried off to find a bite to eat. She burst out laughing when she saw the sign for the Area 51 Deli – and took the photo above. Her phone got this one clearly!   She knew it was a synchro and a confirmation of what she’d seen.

We thought it was odd that Area 51 would be mentioned at some small town airport in North Carolina. Harriet says  there’s some sort of secret military base in New Berne, so that could explain it.  There’s an element of the trickster here – even though she couldn’t get the picture she wanted, she sees Area 51 Deli s soon as she’s off the plane.

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I don’t recall the real name of the woman who sent us this, don’t even recall writing this. I guess Area 51, underwater or on land, is just around us now!

Several days ago, I received this poem from Sharlie West, a poet who lives in Maryland. I was struck by the eerie similarities between the poem and the ghost ship Caleuche, which supposedly appears in a harbor on the island of Chiloe in southern Chile. The Caleuche’s crew is manned by men in black – brujos – sorcerers who are shape shifters and abduct islanders.

Her poem prompted me to revisit the legend of the Caleuche.

Ghost Ship

He lives in the borderland

between sky and ocean’s blue

The tall sea

is in his ebony eyes,

the hint of a cold dark place

He comes for me this slivered night

a specter from a ghost ship,

tall and thin, with black eyes and

black shoes.

In his voice, the same undertow

that entered a few weeks ago

like water that freezes in the rock

and spits it open.

Tonight I’ll cup his secrets in my hands,

a white palm breeze

anoints us with liquid salt.

Seaman’s moon, hairbreadth thin.

then a mast, two more masts and

the ship approaches.

I turn my face seaward,

embrace the dark light.

It was a synchronicity that led us to the island of Chiloe, Chile, and the legend of the ghost ship Caleuche. We first heard about the ghost ship on a flight from Miami to Santiago, in July 1983. We were on our honeymoon and Chile was our first destination. We struck up a conversation with the woman who sat next to us and asked her where the mythology, the mystery, of Chile could be found. “Chiloe,” she said without hesitation.

We’d never heard of it.

“It’s an island off Puerto Montt, where land transportation ends in my country.  From Puerto Montt, you take a ferry to Chiloe. The name means land of sea gulls. There, they believe in a ghost ship, the Caleuche, that’s manned by sorcerers or brujos, who are immortal and possess the power to alter their shapes at will. They can transform themselves into wolves, fish, rocks and birds, and when they take human form, they are tall, foreign, blond.” She went on to say that some islanders believed that the ship itself could transform its shape.

We were hooked. Our synchronistic choice of seats pretty much defined our journey through Chile. Once we got to Chiloe and found a place to stay, we started our exploration.  At a local restaurant, we quickly discovered that the ghost ship wasn’t just a myth to the locals. It was based on real events that involved encounters with the brujos, who supposedly crewed  the ship. The villagers also spoke of stories of the pincoyas – the mermaids – that inhabited the waters near the island. Everything in the restaurant – from the ashtrays to the art on the walls – depicted the ship, the mermaids, the brujos.

We asked our waiter if there was anyone in town we could talk to who had seen the Caleuche. He directed us to a neighborhood down the road, where many of the homes are built on stilts that keep them above the water. “Ask anyone you see about the Caleuche.”

But first, we stopped at the pier where a fisherman offered us a local delicacy – a sea urchin cut in half, spines removed and the jelly-like innards splashed with lime juice. Rob tried one, and while he was devouring it, I asked the fishermen about mermaids. He sort of chuckled. “The legend says that when the fish are running, the mermaids face shore. When the fish are gone, the mermaids face the ocean, so their backs are to us.”

My next question – had he ever seen one – brought a response that turned out to be fairly common. “My father did.” Or, my cousin, grandmother, friend etc. But there were also people who claimed to be actual witnesses.

We walked on toward the outskirts of town and paused on a bridge, gazing out over the harbor where the Caleuche supposedly had been sighted. Chilean author Antonio Cardenas Tabies believes he sighted the ship in one of its altered forms – as a small launch that approached him and his four companions in the fog. Even though the boat passed within several feet of their boat, they didn’t see anyone on board and didn’t hear any noise from the motor.

Then Cardenas and his buddies seemed to have some sort of space/time slippage. They kept rowing for hours and at dawn, found themselves in the same spot. “We hadn’t advanced a meter in any direction,” Tabies wrote in Aboard the Caleuche, published in Santiago in 1980. But that experience led him to interview dozens of islanders who had witnessed an appearance of the ship or encountered its crew members.

Many of the experiences Tabies recounts deal with individuals who bear an uncanny resemblance to MIBs. The crew has been blamed for abductions of islanders.

One morning in 1935, when Juan Antonio Fernandez was 16, he left his home at dawn to go fishing. He recalls that he arrived at a small hill that overlooked the beach and heard a strange noise, like motors. Two days later, his family found him wandering aimlessly on the beach.

“I had a terrible scar on my chest, shaped like a gigantic hand with long, narrow fingers,” Fernandez said. “It didn’t hurt and the strange part was that it looked as if it were old.”

Author Cardenas Tabies spoke with Fernandez’s family, who said he was never quite the same after his disappearance. He was difficult, assaulted people without provocation and spoke and worked only when he was in the mood. Cardenas coaxed Fernandez  into showing him his scar. “I have never seen anything like it,” Cardenas said. “The hand covered almost his entire chest, like a scar from a severe burn. When I questioned him about it, he said that if he revealed the secret he would die.”

Armando Pacheco, a journalist and writer in Valparaiso on the Chilean mainland, theorizes that the legend of the Caleuche is so deeply ingrained that the islanders are predisposed to sightings. He contends that the Caleuche is an archetype of the collective mind of the islanders, “given reality through their intense and prolonged belief in it.”

As Sharlie asked me, are men in black an archetype?

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Bernard Beitman, a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and author of Connecting with Coincidence, blogs for Psychology Today on coincidence and synchronicity. In his latest post, he discusses the most common coincidences he has found in his research. These were taken from 1,551 responses to his weird coincidence survey. From the PT post:

I think of a question only to have it answered by an external source (i.e. radio, TV, or other people) before I can ask it.

I think of an idea and hear or see it on the radio, TV, or Internet.

I think of calling someone, only to have that person unexpectedly call me.

I advance in my work/career/education by being in the right place at the right time.

In descending order of frequency, the rest of the items lined up like this:

I need something, and the need is then met without my having to do anything.

I am introduced to people who unexpectedly further my work/career.

I run into a friend in an out-of-the-way place.

When my phone rings, I know who is calling without checking the screen or using personalized ring tones.

Meaningful coincidence helps determine my educational path.

I think about someone and then that person unexpectedly drops by my house or office, or passes me in the hall or street.

I experience strong emotions or physical sensations that were simultaneously experienced at a distance by someone I love

After experiencing meaningful coincidence, I analyze the meaning of my experience.

In an email, Bernard mentioned this post had gotten 2,500 hits in a week and he wasn’t sure why. He did some sleuthing and discovered that The Guardian had done a piece on his book. It’s by Oliver Burkeman and employs some of the usual tactics that skeptics use when they talk about synchronicity or anything else that can’t be explained by mainstream science.

He begins with a story in Beitman’s book about a British soldier fighting in Italy who is knocked unconscious by shell fragments. That same day in Monmouthshire, his wife was cleaning up after lunch and his daughter, two and a half, “to whom I was only a name,” suddenly went over to her mother and announced that daddy had been hurt.

Burkeman’s take: “The rationalist in me knows this all comes down to the “law of truly large numbers”, which states that, given a large enough sample, many seemingly unlikely things become downright probable. Even assuming the soldier’s memories were accurate, so many fought in the second world war that it’s almost inevitable a few would have odd stories.”

He goes on to mention another story that Beitman relates in his book, about a therapist who dreamed of an ex-patient lying immobile in a beach hut. A week later, he found out that the patient had taken an overdose in a seaside hotel and nearly died. “Spooky!” Burkeman writes. “But less so when you factor in the patients the therapist didn’t dream about – not to mention all the other therapists with no such anecdotes to relate.”

This last sentence is straight out of the skeptics’ playbook and one that Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, uses frequently, as in this story. The punch line here  is that Shermer  ran into his agent, Scott, in Portland, Oregon, a city they both happened to be visiting.

“We were stunned,” Shermer writes. “It sure seemed like something more than a coincidence, and we both joked about how there must be some sort of scheduling god who makes these things happen.

“But Scott and I are good skeptics. We know how to think about such events. Even though such coincidences as this really stand out as unusual—and they are when I describe it in this manner—most people forget to consider all the other possibilities: the thousands of people I know who didn’t happen by that diner, the delay at the diner talking to Scott when I might have left earlier and had something else unusual happen that now didn’t, all the other cities I’ve traveled to and dined in when I didn’t see anyone I knew, and so on. And the same for Scott: he has hundreds of clients and knows thousands of people in the lecture business, any one of which he would ever happen to bump into in any given city he happened to travel to, would stand out as unusual.”

See the parallels? What’s humorous, though, is that Burkeman has trouble dismissing it all because Beitman is a psychiatrist, the first since Jung to take a serious look at synchronicity. “Still, Beitman makes an intriguing case for approaching coincidences as if they weren’t just random, whatever your beliefs. Connecting With Coincidence is full of people taking such happenings as “signs”, telling them who to marry, whether to have kids or get divorced – and it serves them rather well.”

However, there’s an upside to all this. Beitman’s website got 650 hits on the day the article in The Guardian was posted. So even publicity generated by a skeptic is good for the sale of books!

HAPPY JULY 4TH!

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Disclosure. Other people have written about this far more eloquently, but I’ve been thinking about this ever since I read something about Obama possibly becoming the “disclosure president.”

So let’s pretend. Let’s pretend there’re a news conference where this actually happens. Let’s pretend this revelation occurs in the Rose Garden and that it’s pretty much like many of us have figured. Something WAS recovered at Roswell – or some nearby location – in 1947. Technology WAS exchanged with an alien race. Deals WERE struck. Disinformation HAS BEEN the primary method of keeping everything quiet because we, the people, would be totally freaked out if we knew the truth.

But here’s the thing. Popular culture – books, movies, You Tube videos, social media – have prepared us for this eventuality for years. From ET to The Visitors, from Independence Day and Men in Black to Childhood’s End and The Fifth Wave, from Communion to Missing Time, we the people have gotten the message and total freakout is unlikely.

According to a Newsweek article in September 2015, slightly more than fifty percent of Americans, Germans, and Brits believe we aren’t alone in the universe.

“The poll, conducted by the market-research company YouGov, found the Germans are most likely to believe, at 56 percent, followed by Americans and British, at 54 and 52 percent, respectively.”

So what kind of shock waves would this news trigger? It probably would depend on the evidence Obama has to back up his announcement. Is an alien standing next to him? Does he have convincing video? Photos? Documents? Has Obama gone rogue to make this announcement? Have the aliens created a spectacle in the sky, with hovering crafts?

Regardless, this would be a moment like the JFK or MLK assassinations, like 9-11, when everyone would remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. It would trigger a massive paradigm shift. Science would scramble to explain it. Religions probably would attribute it to divine intervention. Psychology would struggle to stick it in a niche of some kind. And Carl Jung would be turning over in his grave, anxious to update his ideas of what this might mean as an archetypal event.

The intriguing component of an event like this is that people who have had encounters, experienced abductions, seen UFOs, would feel validated. Experts would emerge, people eager to interpret it all and make sense of the information for the rest of us. Maybe mankind as a collective would be so swept up in the drama that war would end or perhaps the military would be galvanized to take on the new enemy.

The discourse in this year’s election season would undoubtedly include campaign promises about how to deal with the aliens. Trump would build a wall and ban them from the U.S. Clinton would ramp up the military and maybe attempt to open a negotiation. Sanders might tap one of them as his V.P.

Several years ago, Rob, Megan, and I were returning home from a dinner at a local restaurant and I pointed at the sunset sky and asked, If a UFO suddenly appeared, how would that change us?

 Silence in the car. Then Megan said, “It would depend on our belief system.”

And I think she was right. If you don’t believe in something, then it’s not on your radar, it hasn’t registered on your consciousness. So there might be a lot of people who wouldn’t see the evidence that Obama presents. But if there was tangible evidence – an alien standing next to him, crafts in the sky – then even non-believers would have to deal with it.

Beyond that, all sorts of scenarios are possible – chaos, disintegration, acceptance, new technology, new ideas about the nature of reality, resistance, more war, peace, a better world… You get the idea. The scenario that evolved would depend on our collective reaction to disclosure.

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Sometimes, synchros occur and it isn’t until later that I recognize them as clusters- synchronicities that concern the same thing and happen over a period of time. This cluster of four concerns names and is tied to our daughter’s move this past January. All four illustrate, I think, the way creativity enables us to tap into synchronicity – and to the future.

In late December of last year and early January this year, Megan started looking for a new place to live and found a great little house with a yard for her dog, Nika. The name of the street was Harwood.

Then her search for a roommate began and in late January, a wonderful young woman named Lauren moved in with her dog. Nika finally had a friend to play with and the two dogs got along as well as Megan and Lauren. But Lauren got pregnant and she and her boyfriend subsequently became engaged and wanted to live together.

Megan began her search again for a roommate and a woman named Alex moved in. Within a week, Alex decided she wanted to live alone, so the roommate search began once again. This time, Megan was contacted by an attorney, Nick, who was starting a new job in Orlando and needed a place to live fast. Megan had reservations about a male roommate, but when she met Nick, they clicked and a few days later, Alex moved out and Nick moved in with his dog. Another new friend for Nika!

Now here’s where these synchros come in. For the last several years, Rob has been finishing a novel called Tulpas, which is now with his agent. In the book there’s a character named Dr. Harwood. Way back in January when we learned the name of the street where Megan would be living, we were both struck by the oddity of the synchronicity. Harwood isn’t a name you hear very often. That was synchro #1.

In my novel, U R Mine, which I started in the fall of 2014 and is now with my agent, the protagonist’s name is Laurie. Eerily close to Lauren. Laurie is an animal communicator and helps out the detective in charge of the case – Nick – who was at one time an attorney. Those are synchros #2 and 3.

In March, when Lauren and Megan were still roommates, before any of us even knew about Alex, I started a new novel. The protagonist in this book? Yeah, you guessed it. Alex. After Alex the roommate broke lease and moved out, I changed the character’s name.

It does seem that through our creative endeavors – writing –  Rob and I have been tuning into Megan’s future in a rather odd, specific way.

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This is a curious topic that we’ve written about previously, but one that interests me because all of my life people have asked me where I’m from. Trish grew up in Venezuela, yet very few people ask where she’s from because she speaks without any noticeable Latin accent.

I didn’t originally gain an accent because I had moved from somewhere else where people spoke differently.  But, for whatever reason, my speech was somehow different…different enough that when I was in fourth grade I was sent to a speech therapist who visited our school every week. I remember the  nice woman who would try to tell me how to move my tongue when I talked.

After leaving Minnesota, the inquiries about my origin became more specific. It was usually…”Are you from Canada?” When I go back to Minnesota, it seems that everyone there speaks with an accent, even though I hadn’t noticed so much when I was living there. And still people there ask where I’m from.

I’ve never had surgery that somehow accounted for how the woman in the video and others gained their accents.  So I guess mine was a speech impediment. Trish still thinks I speak with accent, but she relates it to Minnesota-talk. ‘Ya, sure, doncha know, you betcha, aye?’ That’s an exaggeration. But sort of what I hear when I go back.

I heard about how the woman in the video awoke from surgery with a British accent from Connie Cannon, who offered three possible reasons for foreign accent syndrome. Apparently, there are about 100 cases of foreign accent syndrome.

Here are Connie’s thoughts…

“I’m wondering if, while deeply anesthetized, these folks experience one of three potential events: they either return to a former life lived in the country where the language is native, (one women who had surgery awakened with a permanent, strong Irish accent for which no one has any explanation….true in each of the 100 cases), or perhaps they have become hosts for a discarnate entity, (possession or spirit attachment), or, their soul “walked out” and a different soul “walked in”….a phenomenon extensively explored by Ruth Montgomery. (I’m not sure where my personal belief is concerning Walk-ins.)”

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Of course mainstream science doesn’t accept any of those possibilities, which are metaphysical in nature. But there seems to be no simple scientific explanation. It remains a mystery. Supposedly, there are also cases where the person speaks a different language, not just an accent. If that’s true, then the mystery is even deeper.

Do our animal buddies follow us throughout our lives, once a cat, then a dog, then a hamster or some wild bird that roosts in our backyard? This is one area where a past life regression probably won’t yield much information that you can check through Google. But I suspect there are clues here and there that may be telling.

We recently posted a piece about a kitten we’re fostering for our daughter until she finds a roommate who isn’t allergic to cats. I put the post on Facebook and our friend, Vivian Ortiz, remarked that the kitten might be a reborn Kali. Vivian is intuitive when it comes to animals and it got me thinking.

Kali was a dusky conure that graced our lives for five years, from 2000-2005. She was a lover, a cutie, smart and sassy, and we gave her a lot of freedom.

She spent most her days under a tree in our backyard, on top of her cage or perched in the tree she called home. Every evening, we brought her indoors, where she snuggled into her little house and slept until dawn.

Then in October 2005, Hurricane Wilma ripped through South Florida as a category 1. It stalled over Wellington, the eye was directly over us. When you’re in the eye of a hurricane, you can walk outside into sunlight and blue skies, so that’s what we did.   In addition to the destruction to our yard – trees down, plants ripped up, fence down, screens ripped away – the tree where Kali had spent her days had split down the middle. It was as if some giant had come in with a huge machete and just chopped it in half.

At the time, we didn’t see it as anything other than another piece of destruction.

As the storm started moving again, we hurried back inside and waited for the backside of the hurricane. It was worse than the front of the hurricane. But fortunately Wilma sped up and an hour later, was gone and had left a lot of devastation in her wake, including power lines. We didn’t have electricity for 10 days.

As we were cleaning up the yard and house in the aftermath of the storm, we moved Kali and her cage outside, close but not under her decimated tree. She got spooked by the sounds of the generators that we and most of our neighbors had started up and flew off. We ran after her but lost sight of her. We searched for her until dark, when a cold front moved in.

The next morning, Rob got up at dawn and went looking for her. He found her across the street, huddled under some leaves, and brought her home. She was obviously sick, but no vets were open. Nothing was open. She died that evening, when I was holding her against my chest, and we buried her under her tree. That tree, eleven years later, is huge and beautiful, completely healed.

Vivian had met Kali several times. She came with us on a number of our road trips and spent time on Vivian’s porch on Tybee Island, where she was fascinated by the salt marsh and its diverse wildlife.

I was bewildered initially by Vivian’s comment that the kitten might be Kali. But the more I’ve thought about it and observed the cat – how she plays, how she interacts fearlessly with our dog (which is at least a thousand times her size), with the other cats and with the people around her, I think Vivian may be onto something. The kitten doesn’t say, Hola or Hello or any of the other words Rob taught Kali, but there are times when there’s a look in her eyes that reminds me of Kali.

It’s a look that is curious but stately, playful and fun, knowing and wise. Kali, like the kitten, was Megan’s animal, but we inherited her. A friend on Facebook suggested, half-jokingly, that we should call her Sanders because of our support for Bernie. She responds to the name, so that’s who she is now. Sanders, who may be a reincarnated Kali. She’s now at Megan’s house, and has been renamed Piper, which really does fit her.

I sure wish she spoke English. I’m still hoping to hear Hola or Hello! But in lieu of spoken words, it’s her eyes that capture me, intrigue me, make me whisper, Hey, Kali, is that you?

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In 1984, Chris Cox, an editor at Ballantine Books, bought my first novel, In Shadow. He was the editor for my next ten books, was also a writer, and went to the Amazon and to Colombia with us when Rob and I led travel tours for writers through Avianca Airlines. He’s in that tiny picture at the top of the post, the guy at the far right. He was a complete original, funny and smart, adventurous and compassionate, and had a Virgo eye for detail, a valuable asset for an editor. I have always felt enormous gratitude to him for launching my career as a writer.

He died in 1990, one of the many young men of that time killed by AIDS. At his memorial service in New York, Susan Sarandon spoke movingly of her long-time friendship with Chris, which dated back before her first movie. I later was told by Chris’s friend and fellow editor, Cheryl, that Sarandon had paid for a private nurse for Chris during the final months of his illness.

I also spoke at that memorial service, remembering Chris’s sense of adventure on the trips he took with us. He was the first to suggest we get off the boat and traipse through the jungle, the first to board an inflatable raft at night that took us through a tributary, surrounded by a cacophony of jungle sounds. He was the first to eat the piranha we caught, the first to trade trinkets with the locals for a beautiful owl that we brought onto the boat and set free at the jungle camp where we stayed a couple of nights.

I had bought this wooden sculpture, the traveling man, on one of those trips and talked about how it exemplified Chris’s intrepid spirit.

After he died, I eventually lost touch with the people in his circle – Bob Wyatt, who was then editor –in-chief at Ballantine, and Iris Bass, who had been Chris’s wonderful assistant.

Periodically over the years, I “call” on Chris to get the publishing ball rolling. It goes something like this: Hey, you guys on the other side, can you help get stuff moving here? This group of publishing folks consists of Chris, our first agent Diane Cleaver, Kate Duffy, who was my editor at Kensington, and several writers. So, several days ago, en route to Orlando to celebrate Rob’s birthday, I called specifically on Chris and this time I added, Give me a sign that you received the message, ok?

Two days later, I received an email from the editor at Page Street who bought our book on precognition, Sensing the Future, which comes out in January 2017. Marissa said she loved the book and was sending it on to the copy editor. She then sent an introductory email to me and the copy editor. When I saw the copy editor’s name, Iris Bass, I thought no way it can be the same Iris. Then she emailed:

Thanks Marissa and hello Trish –

Not meaning to “weird you out,” Trish—esp. given the genre of this book—but we already know each other, sort of. I am the Iris Bass who was Chris Cox’s assistant 25+ years ago when you were writing mysteries for Ballantine. Not all that weird, actually; publishing is a surprisingly small world.

Publishing may be a small world, but it’s not that small and the odds impressed me. And I knew that Iris was the sign that Chris had received the message.Save