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Over the Thanksgiving holidays, we drove north to Jupiter, where there’s a dog beach – and that means NO LEASHES, RUN FREE, DIVE INTO THE SURF.

As we approached a vacant spot on the beach, we all noticed a strange blue structure about thirty feet away.

“What’s that?” Megan asked.

“It looks like a boat,” Rob said.

It looked, I thought, like a disaster. Beach patrol emplyees were clustered around it and the curious, like us, were moving in closer, snapping photos of it. This boat, which felt like it was made of foam, Rob said, had probably dared the rough seas between Cuba and the U.S. with thirty plus people on board.

“What kind of foam?” I asked. “Styrofoam?”

“Not styrofoam. More like foam you might find in a mattress,” Rob said.

I could see this, desperate refugees slicing open their mattresses to extract the stuff inside so that the boat could be created. For years, any fleeing Cuban who reaches the shores of the U.S. has been allowed to stay. Now that quasi-diplomatic ties are being restored, this automatic refugee carte blanche might be rescinded and Cubans are arriving in Florida in droves.

From a January 2015 article in the Washington Post:

Many of those Cubans flew straight into the Miami airport, having boarded flights in Madrid; Nassau, Bahamas; or elsewhere with passports from Spain and other third countries. Upon reaching U.S. Customs, they pull out their Cuban documents and request asylum, or ask to stay under the protections offered by the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which offers permanent residency to Cubans one year after arrival in the United States.

Now, please, take a close look at this “boat.” The rudder is rusted. If you turn it over, the lack of space would be shocking. And really, foam from a mattress? To cross 90 miles of rough seas, some of it in the dark? As one beach patrol employee said, “No one survived this.”

The U.S., as politicians are quick to point out, is a country of refugees. But to the Republicans, these refugees are only cool if they come from Europe or Cuba, and not from any Muslim or predominantly black country like Haiti. And according to Donald Trump, immigrants from Mexico are definitely not welcome and when he becomes prez, a thousand-mile wall is going to make it really difficult for anyone from Mexico to get into the U.S. And nefer mind what he recently said about banning all Muslims.

There’s a common belief that Cuban refugees are predominately conservative because they fled a Communist/Socialist government and that only the children of Cuban refugees are moderately more liberal than their parents. I’m happy to report this isn’t uniformly true. Marina, who was once an emergency room doctor in Cuba, is now living in the U.S., bagging groceries at Publix, and she has a lot to say about American politics.

Marina is in her mid-fifties. Her sister and mother and other members of her family are still living in Cuba. She gets her news from the Spanish TV station, Telemundo, and is proud to tell me that she and her husband believe that Republicans work against their best interests by trying to keep the embargo in place – which makes it more difficult and expensive for her to visit her relatives. Why, she asks, should she have to pay $400 or more for a round trip airfare ticket to her former home, just 90 miles off the Florida coast?

And Marina isn’t alone. Many of her Cuban friends in the same age bracket feel as she does. Marina won a lottery to cone to the U.S., and her husband followed several years later. As she and I walk out to my car, both of us pushing my grocery cart along in front of us, I am reminded of a quote by Che Guevarra: “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

Idealism without action is an empty call.

That abandoned refugee boat still haunts me. Those refugees died trying to get here.

Wow, is there any doubt this youbng woman won the audition or whatever this was?

UPDATE ON ANNE’S CONDITION: This newest entry from Whitley is powerful.

There are people you never meet, but for whom you feel deep affection because of the tremendous impact they have had on your life. Whitley and Anne Strieber are two such individuals for me.

In 1987, Rob and I walked into a B Dalton bookstore (which no longer exists) in the Fort Lauderdale mall, and saw Communion on the new release table. That image of a Gray, that face, is permanently etched into my consciousness. We bought it, our worldview blew wide open, and we’ve been following Strieber’s career and insights ever since. No one writes like he does about the contact experience. Few writers have his grasp of language and nuance.

When our first synchronicity book was released, he invited us on to his Dreamland radio show and we’ve been back half a dozen times over the years. Sometimes he interviewed us, other times Anne did. These shows were always highlights for us, like chatting with old friends. During our interviews with Anne, she invariably brought her particular take on aliens, abductions, and the nature of reality.

When my novel Esperanza was bought by TOR, who has published many of Strieber’s books, my editor at the time sent him the manuscript and he gave the book a wonderful blurb. That editor also bought a mystery Anne had written. He and Anne are incredibly generous souls who have pursued and explored a strange and often difficult path.

This afternoon, our friend, Sandy, who was on one of the Dreamland shows with us, wrote that Anne, who has had brain cancer for several years now, is in ER and seriously ill. Both Whitley and Anne have written movingly of their journey through her first bout with brain cancer in their beautiful book, Miraculous Journey.  Both of them have also written journal entries on their website,  about her current bout during the last several years. One of the most moving was a piece Anne wrote on November 2, 2014. Anne’s wit and courage truly shine in this piece. Another piece that Whitley wrote in 2013 brought me to tears.

Only once before have we written a post like this requesting healing energy for a friend and that was for our blogging buddy Mike Perry, when he underwent surgery for the removal of a kidney. And he came through it just fine! There’s great power in collective thought and prayer. Please send Anne and Whitley Strieber your healing energy, prayers, thoughts, whatever you do in times like this.

Our candle is lit.

A friend of ours, who passed away a couple of years ago, took an interest in synchronicity in his latter years after we sent him one of our books. He was somewhat skeptical by nature, and usually dismissive of anything paranormal. However, when we saw him for the last time on a visit to Key West, where he lived, he confided that synchronicity does exist and that he’d had two such experiences in his eight-plus decades of life.

He proceeded to tell us a complicated story that involved a coincidence that was meaningful to him. What I found most curious, though, was that he was convinced that he’d only had two such experiences in his life. I didn’t say anything about it, but I remember thinking that I’d probably had a couple within the past few days.

Some of us, it seems, are in the flow of synchronicity and experience meaningful coincidences frequently. But do we actually have these experiences more frequently than others ? Or, is it that we are aware of synchronicity and, therefore, notice rather than ignore, dismiss or overlook coincidences? Maybe the answer is yes to both questions.

Fiona Harris is one of those people who has numerous synchros. She takes the time to write and post them on two synchronicity Facebook pages, and we’ve used one of her stories here. Here’s another from Fiona, related to the end of the holiday season.

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I was just putting away my Christmas decorations this morning, and I remembered a neat thing that happened last summer. It actually started last Christmas. I was putting away my Christmas stuff, and somehow, a green glass bird ornament got left behind, stuck to my curtain. I didn’t want to go and dig around in my basement to put it back, so I hung the decoration on a nail on my fireplace and forgot about it.

In the summer, I visited my Aunt in Victoria. I admired a beautiful green glass bird ornament that she had hanging in her kitchen, and asked her about it.

“Oh, that thing? I found it on the floor after Christmas. I’d already put my ornaments away, so I just hung it up!”

So somehow, my Aunt and I, in different cities, both had one ornament accidentally left out, and both were green glass birds (not the exact same, but similar), and both of us, instead of putting them back, or putting them away somewhere, just decided to leave it out as a decoration. When I got back to Calgary, I took a picture of mine and send it to her.

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This is a good synchro, because it involves layers of coincidental events. If it just happened that Fiona had visited her aunt over the holidays and noticed that she and her aunt both had antique glass bird Christmas ornaments on their trees, it wouldn’t be a very impressive synchro. After all, there are no doubt lots of green glass bird ornaments on trees and it’s not too surprising that someone who has one would notice that someone else – a friend or relative – also has a similar bird ornament of the color. Like when you get a new car, you notice all the others like yours on the road that you never really noticed prior to getting one yourself.

However, Fiona’s synchro becomes more interesting, as she pointed out, when we find out that she and her aunt both forgot to put away their similar glass birds, and both displayed them in their homes, rather than putting them away.

The story also reminded me that we always seem to forget to re-pack some little Christmas-related item that remains on a shelf for weeks until I finally go back into the attic and put it away.

Hermes – the messenger dude, Mercury

Yes, I realize that a lot of people think Mercury retrograde is silly, that it doesn’t apply to them, that it’s just some nutty designation astrologers create. Well, it’s not. If you pay attention to what’s going on in your life during the three Mercury retros each year, you’ll find that things don’t run as smoothly as you would like.

Computers go haywire, appliances break down, toilets back up and overflow, creating chaos in your basement. Relationships suffer from miscommunication, travel plans go awry, you get locked out of your house, your manuscript is rejected, your car breaks down on a highway at night, the bank errs and it’s not in your favor. For Geminis and Virgos, which are ruled by Mercury, these periods tend to be really annoying. But everyone experiences Mercury retrograde in a unique way and the first retro of 2016 starts on January 5 in Aquarius at 8:04 a.m., slips back into Capricorn, and turns direct again in that sign on January 25, at 4:50 p.m. eastern time.

To give you an idea of the global scale of a Mercury retro, look back to November 7, 2000. Mercury had been retrograde since mid-October – first in Scorpio, then it slipped back into Libra and at 9:20 p.m., it turned direct in that sign. When Mercury stations – which means it’s about to turn retrograde or direct – the potential for miscommunication is strong. But for that date, the station caused bedlam because it was election day in the U.S.

Astrologers were predicting chaos and, sure enough, at 7:49 p.m., NBC decided they had enough data from exit polls in Florida and Tom Brokaw called the state for Al Gore. With Florida’s 25 electoral votes, it meant he had won the election.

However, shortly after 10 p.m. – less than an hour after Mercury had turned direct – Brokaw backtracked and said that George W. Bush had won the state and the election. We all know what ensued after that – the endless dispute over the chads on Palm Beach County’s ballot and the eventual decision by the Supreme Court that Bush was the 43^rd president of the U.S.

On a personal level, your best way to navigate this period is to follow the rule of the 3 Rs: revise, review, reconsider. Don’t start anything new, don’t sign contracts, don’t move or travel, don’t take anything for granted, don’t assume. In fact, if you can get away with it, just hang out at home for a few weeks, sleep and eat and indulge your fantasies. Yeah, sure. Like any of us can do that without feeling totally guilty and anxious about what we should be doing or must be doing or…well, something.

Our daughter, Megan, is going to be moving and when I was looking at charts for January, I suggested that she be moved into her new place before January 5, when Mercury turns retrograde. As a Virgo, she’s now well-versed enough in this Mercury retro business to know what it means. She readily agreed.

These periods, despite how they seem in the external world, really aren’t negative. They give us a chance to lay low, to mull over, to move within and rearrange the furniture of our inner lives. People we haven’t seen in years often resurface. Old opportunities surface with new faces and possibilities. If we happen to travel during these periods, then our itineraries change without rhyme or reason, but we will undoubtedly revisit our destination in the future.

Mercury is about communication, travel, our conscious mind, how we learn and absorb, the stuff of our daily life. It can be a trickster planet, for sure, but it’s also the messenger, our most immediate and direct conduit to our left brain, our reasoning self, our ego. It’s smart to honor the retro with a gesture, a ritual, an intention: I’m going to quit eating desserts, stop smoking, start a regular exercise regimen. And well, if your toilet backs up and floods, so it goes. Take a deep breath and understand that this, too, shall pass.

– the Montauk lighthouse

Every time our daughter comes home, she introduces us to some riveting movie or new TV show we’ve never heard of. Over the Christmas holidays, it was a new TV series, Showtime’s The Affair.

 There were a couple of interesting synchros associated with this series. First, it takes place on Montauk, Long Island.

Given our interests and the weird stuff we write about, Montauk is up there with Roswell and Area 51. But instead of UFOs, time travel, and things that go bump in the night, the series focuses on what happens when two  individuals married to other people have an affair with each other.

From the official Showtime website: At once deeply observed and intriguingly elusive, THE AFFAIR explores the emotional effects of an extramarital relationship. Noah is a New York City schoolteacher and novelist who is happily married, but resents his dependence on his wealthy father-in-law. Alison is a young waitress trying to piece her life and marriage back together in the wake of a tragedy. The provocative drama unfolds when Alison and Noah meet in Montauk at the end of Long Island.

 What this summary doesn’t mention is that:

– Noah and his wife have four children,  he has published one novel that didn’t sell well, and that he and his family are spending the summer on Montauk with his in-laws, so that he can write his second novel.

– The father-in-law is also a writer, but one who has made it in a huge way – bestsellers, movies, etc. He’s an obnoxious and arrogant man  who lives with his wife on a sprawling estate on Long Island Sound, pays for the private school tuition for Noah’s kids, and lent him and his wife, Helen, the down payment for the Manhattan brownstone.

– Alison is married to Cole, whose family has lived in Montauk for seven generations and  two years ago, her four-year-old son drowned. Her son’s name was Gabriel and Cole has a massive tattoo on his back of the angel Gabriel.

This information is revealed in the first three episodes that Rob, Megan, and I watched. When I saw the tattoo on Cole’s back and learned that her son’s name was Gabriel, I thought: Cluster synchro! Here’s why:

During the five days or so that we watched these episodes, I finished a draft of a new novel in which the antagonist has an angel tattoo on the back of his right knee, communicates with a woman he believes is an angel, and whose name is Gabriel. I’m not sure what any of this means, not yet, anyway.

But I know that if I meet a Gabriel any time soon, my mind won’t rush to a fictional four-year-old boy who drowned. It  will leap to Gabriel the antagonist in my novel, a truly bad, sick dude, and I will spin around and race in the opposite direction.

I found this 8 minute interview with scientist and science fiction writer David Brin startlingly comprehensive in terms of mechanistic views of the universe and metaphysical views.

Spam. When I was in college, it came in a tin can, was cheap, and I ate a lot of it. Today, I can’t even stomach looking at a can of spam, much less consuming it. But the 21^st century version of spam is, in some ways, more palatable for me. It’s often funny and even brings synchronicity with it.

There seem to be 4 types of spam: compliments; condemnation; self-help; and general info.

Here’s an example of a compliment:

Good web site you’ve got here.. It’s hard to find high quality writing like yours nowadays. I truly appreciate people like you! Take care!! And then the link leads you to something like a plumbing company.

Here’s an information type of spam:

My programmer is trying to convince me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses. But he’s trying none the less. I’ve been using WordPress on several websites for about a year and am worried about switching to another platform. I have heard fantastic things about blogengine.net.
Is there a way I can transfer all my wordpress posts into it? Any help would be really appreciated!

Self-help, which I have apparently deleted, usually revolves around a product or service like vitamins and herbs that help you lose weight, find a healthy and optimistic outlook on life, maintain an erection, look 20 years younger.

And here’s a condemnation:

The next time I read a website, I am hoping that it doesnt disappoint me around this one. I mean, I know it was my decision to learn, but I actually thought youd have something interesting to say.

Recently, we’ve gotten a lot of sexual spam under a static page setting for my book Unlocking the Secrets to Scorpio. 

Since Scorpio is the most sexual sign of the zodiac, I’m amused when I see a spam here for live porn videos, live threesome, raw sex…. These blatant sexual spams don’t ever appear elsewhere, just under the Scorpio entry, so I’m taking that as a synchro. I don’t have any idea what it means other than the fact that the synchros seem to be a reflection of what is.

If you’re a Scorpio sun or have a moon, rising or other planet in this sign, take heed.

Just as there are people who write books about synchronicity, there are others who write books attesting that there is no such thing, invoking randomness, what I prefer to call randomania.

A few such writers discussed their ideas in a recent article in Men’s Health Magazine. The article, called COINCIDENCE, actually is generally favorable to meaningful coincidence and included an interview with Dr. Bernard Beitman, a proponent of synchronicity, whose work we’ve written about here on a few occasions. His comments are both near the beginning and the end of the article.

However, underlying all the good stories and the belief that something unusual and special is taking place when these events happen, is the other point of view that it’s all quite meaningless, and people (silly us) seem to need to search for meaning, even when there is none. To the question of how an extraordinary coincidence with outrageous odds happen, the answer is simply: it was bound to happen.

Instead of ignoring this point of view, let’s take a closer look. After all, these anti-synchro scholars are bright people, even if their contentions take away all the magic many of us find in these experiences.

I’ll quote from the article.

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With 7 billion increasingly interconnected people on the planet, sooner or later things are going to intersect. In fact, as the world becomes “smaller,” expect the unexpected to happen more often. In his book The Improbability Principle, statistician David Hand explains that “with a large enough number of opportunities, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. No mysteries are required to explain [coincidences]—no superstitions, no god. All that’s needed are the basic laws of probability.”

David Spiegelhalter, a University of Cambridge statistician, reached the same conclusion after reviewing 3,500 stories of coincidence submitted to his website. “Lots of people believe some external force leads to all these bizarre events,” he explains. “But they’re what we would expect by chance patterns.”

Do you think being killed by lightning is an unfortunate coincidence? Your odds are actually 1 in 136,011, according to the National Safety Council. That’s just slightly less probable than dying from a dog attack (1 in 103,798). Believe a par-3 hole in one is a rare mark of good fortune? Actually, in a 100-person amateur tournament on a course with four par-3s, the odds of an ace are 1 in 32.

Despite the irrefutable laws of probability, it’s still hard for most people (read: non-mathematicians) to accept that life and lightning strikes are entirely random. Indeed, it takes effort to act randomly. (Admit it: devising secure passwords isn’t easy.) That’s because accepting the concept of a meaningless world requires accepting the fact that maybe we’re meaningless too. “The basic human drive for safety and security induces a fundamental unease with the notion that events happen by chance,” writes Hand.

“…So the brain continually searches for patterns. It even cross-checks information while we sleep, which occasionally enables us to wake with fresh insight. And it seizes on coincidences as possible clues to a new order or way of understanding the world. Linking cause and effect is a basic evolutionary process that helps us adapt. “By creating self-referential meaning out of coincidence, we build a sense of personal order and control in our lives,” says Steve Hladkyj, Ph.d., a psychology researcher at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. “This, in turn, may reduce stress and may increase the functioning of the immune system to fight disease.”

The article’s author concludes: “So the woeful state of your apartment or office aside, you are wired for order. We all are. It makes us healthier and, by inflating our egos with the air of self-importance, more assured. Little wonder, then, that we want to believe in something more.”

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Interesting how the scientists turn around the question of cause and effect. A synchronicity, as we use the term here, is when two unrelated events come together outside of cause and effect and the resulting coincidence is meaningful to the experiencer. But the scientists say that by applying ‘meaning’ to coincidence, we are searching for the missing cause and effect when, in fact, we are recognizing that a deeper reality exists outside of the everyday world of cause and effect, a reality where everything is connected. The scientists, of course, don’t address that matter, because they don’t believe in any deeper reality outside of the mundane world where there are no mysterious connections outside of cause and effect—except synchronicity, which is what they are dismissing.

At the heart of their randomness argument is the curious theme that more people means more coincidences. Okay, maybe statistically that’s true. Let’s say it is. But what about when there are no people, zero? How did we appear out of the random, meaningless universe? What were the chances of specs of stardust drifting through a black void forming humans, who could ask such questions?

Here’s Hand’s answer, in short: “The tendency to synchronize is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe, extending from atoms to animals, from people to planets.”

Hmm, if there is such a ‘tendency,’ that would indicate consciousness underlying all matter. And consciousness suggests meaning, not randomness. As the cartoon at the top tells us: “That’s the thing about randomness. You can never be sure.”

The MacGregor Christmas cactus, which always knows when to bloom!

It began blooming a couple of days before Christmas and as of this writing, it still blooms. I suspect that once we’re a week into the new year, the beautiful red flowers will fall off and it will go dormant until next year.

This cactus, like the lily that invariably blooms on or around Easter, intrigues and bewilders me. I know there are scientific and biological explanations for why these plants bloom when they do. But I haven’t been able to find an explanation that satisfies me. Even though the date  for Christmas remains static, the date for Easter does not. Yet, the lily blooms every Easter without fail, regardless of what date the calendars say.

Our Christmas cactus started blooming on December 21, the winter solstice, and on Christmas day, was really decked out in full color, plumpness, beauty.

For me, these two plants are nature’s synchros, its way of saying, Hey, humans out there. Pay attention. There’s wisdom for you here.

HAPPY 2015 to all of you from us! May the new year bring you everything you desire and deserve! And someone, please tell me where 2014 went? It seems I took a brief nap and suddenly, it was a new year.