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?

 

 

 

Posted in 11, Costa Rica | 19 Comments

Egyptian synchros

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Jane and the sheik

Jane Clifford of Wales recently spent a month in the Sinai, which she describes as a life-changing experience. Her time with the Bedouins was marked by numerous synchronicities and startling encounters.

“The Bedouin camp I stayed in is known for its incredible music. They say the muse is there (Hathor) & she is!  An extraordinary vibration there. As 2 or 3 musicians left,more would arrive. I heard divine music for 2 weeks,  sometimes before breakfast &  always under the stars at night.”

A Bedouin dreamed  that her name was Najima (Star) & they all called her Najima throughout her stay. “It was the end of a 7 year cycle for me & a re-birth, just as Egypt was being re-birthed after the revolution! Speaking my truth around the campfire one night I suddenly shifted a gear & felt I was channelling. An Egyptian asked if I realised that what I had just said was in The Koran. I have never read the Koran and said so & he then quoted most elegantly and beautifully & indeed it was what I had just said!”

Jane’s work as a healer became known and one day a powerful Sheik sent for her and asked for healing. “Afterwards, he said he felt very good & lined up 2 friends for healing.”

The sheik told her: “You are here because the vibrations from the mountains and earth coming up through your body & the vibrations from moon and stars coming down through your body will affect you and make you a new woman!”

Jane says he was right, that she already sensed it and she was amazed that he knew.

Here are a few synchros Jane experienced.

1) I had only one pair of shoes with me–flip flops. One takes them off before going indoors. I left them outside my hut one night & next morning only one was there, but someone else had left a pair of sandals in the night! Next evening my flip flop was returned.  A dog had gone off with it and someone had recovered it and placed outside my hut!

2)My visa bank cash card would not work, and so I ran out of cash after 2 weeks. My friend was going to lend me cash, but we got separated and she had no mobile phone. We had travelled to a new town separately. Arriving one day later I urgently needed to see her, so I sent up a prayer.  I then went to a market and bumped into her immediately!

3) After a week I needed to connect with her again. I had been away  & she been on a trip of her own. I sat on a beach the next morning in an area well away from the tourist area. A fishing boat landed in front of me & my friend got off it! Miracle!

4) I was in a pharmacy in Dahab & a woman rushed in distressed, and told the pharmacist her dog had been poisoned. The dog had 9 puppies. Within an hour I received a text message from 100 miles away asking if my vet friend was still with me because the dog at camp had been poisoned. She had 9 puppies! Sadly, poisoning dogs is common in Egypt.

5) You may recall I had a connection and synchros with the goddess Hathor before leaving Wales.  At a low point on my trip I pulled a card from a friend’s Goddess Oracle cards  & picked Hathor, confirmation she was with me, which lifted my spirits!

6) Here’s a neat one, a blast from the past! Few years back I started collecting joker cards from packs & a days after I began the trip, I randomly bought a novel in which the main character collected joker cards. Spotting the novel again in a second-hand store in Sinai, I advised my friend to read it, that it was a remarkable read. Within the hour another travel friend, who knew nothing about the novel or my own joker collection, gave me a lighter with a JOKER on it!

7) A Norwegian guy proudly showed me a photo of his girlfriend back home on his phone. I thought “Oh no! She has another man. She is going to end the relationship whilst he is here.” I told a friend what I thought and she was amazed when the guy told her the next day that his girlfriend dumped him by phone.

8) The same friend went to look up an ex-lover from her stay a year before. I went traveling elsewhere, but suddenly had a thought that the ex-lover would now be married and a bit embarrassed when she turned up. Sure enough, that is what happened!

Posted in Egypt, jane clifford | 8 Comments

Angel in My Pocket

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

 

Last year, we posted a moving synchronicity from Judy, a woman Trish knew in college, who is a professional photographer in Manhattan. For 35 years, she was involved with Hank, also a professional photographer. Their relationship went through various permutations over the years, but always, they were close. Hank died in 2009 and Judy says she “feel lost without him.”

But Hank has certainly communicated with her, as we wrote about in this post. We used this story in our second synchronicity book. Today, we received an email from her about another communication:

+++

I’m writing because I had a bit of a strange thing happen last night.  Shortly after Hank died, a coin fell out of my closet that said, Angel in My Pocket.  I had no idea that I had it and put it on my key chain.

So last night I woke up at 2 AM and could not get back to sleep. I turned on the TV and the movie, “Angel in My Pocket” was on.  No biggie, except that today is Hank’s birthday.  He would have been 67 and absolutely loved presents, even small ones.

Do you think he was reminding me or is it just a coincidence ?

+++

Definitely no coincidence here.  It seems that Hank dropped in to say hello on his birthday and just to make sure Judy was paying attention, the synchro gods (or whatever power arranges these things!) woke her in time to catch a movie with the same name as the words on her coin.

 

 

Posted in judy and hank, spirit contact | 11 Comments

The Orangutan and the Pooch

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Our friend Judi Hertling sent us this sequence of photos and the story. It’s one of those stories that illustrates how animals of different species find love and support and friendship with each other. Now: if only we humans of different colors, cultures, beliefs, and creeds, could do this. Meet the orangutan and the pooch:

After losing his parents, this 3 year old orangutan was so depressed he wouldn’t eat and didn’t respond to any medical treatments.The veterinarians thought he would surely die from sadness.

The zoo keepers found an old sick dog on the grounds in the park at the zoo where the orangutan lived and took the dog to the animal treatment center.  The dog arrived at the same time the orangutan was there being treated.  The 2 lost souls met and have been inseparable ever since.

The orangutan found a new reason to live and each always tries his best to be a good companion to his new found friend.  They are together 24 hours a day in all their activities.

They live in Northern California where swimming is their favorite past time,
although Roscoe (the orangutan) is a little afraid of the water and  needs his friend’s help to swim.

Together they have discovered the joy and laughter in life and the value of friendship.

Long Live Friendship!

I don’t know… some say life is too short, others say it is too long, but I know that nothing that we do makes sense if we don’t touch the hearts of others.

+++

These two have figured it out!

And take a look at this Mike Perry’s post today for a way each of us can make a difference in the world.

 

Posted in animals | 12 Comments

Time, Space, and Costa Rica

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Arenal volcano, Costa Rica & the view from our porch

The name means “rich coasts,” and yet on our trip to this country, we didn’t visit the Atlantic or Pacific coasts.  We focused on the interior, around Arenal volcano, one of the ten most active in the world, the lake by the same name, and the area called Monteverde -green fields – otherwise known as the cloud forest. We had some odd synchros on this trip, and they fit right into the areas we chose to visit.

Originally, our family vacation this summer was going to be to Peru, to the stone forest outside of Lima, which we wrote about here. I even worked it into the ending of Ghost Key, the sequel to Esperanza. But when the gas prices began to rise, so did the airfares. When Miami-Lima hit more than $900 a ticket, that quickly removed the destination from our budget. So we opted for Costa Rica. It turned out to be exactly the right place.

The morning we left for our flight out of Miami, we thought we were doing well on time until we reached the entrance to the turnpike – and discovered it was closed. We had to drive north – when we wanted to drive south –  and lost about ten minutes. OK, no big deal. We were able to make up the time, it was Sunday, barely 6 AM, no traffic. We arrived at our off airport parking with time to spare.

We drove into the lot where we thought we were supposed to park, realized it was the wrong lot – and then couldn’t get out!  We had to go inside the hotel to find someone who could let us out of the lot (guard gate), and by the time that got straightened out, had lost another ten minutes. Amazingly, we still managed to make it to the airport two hours before our flight left and got to our gate with plenty of time to spare.

The operative word at that point was time: not enough of it, plenty to spare, and what time was it, really? This is where it got tricky and odd. The flight was slated to leave at 9:50 AM EDT and to arrive in San Jose at 10:40 AM. Yet, the pilot announced the flight would arrive at 11:30 AM.

The three of us quibbled about what time zone CR was in. We finally determined it was in central standard time, two hours behind EDT, so even the pilot was messed up about the time. We landed at 10:30 AM,  CR time and just as we picked up our bags, Rob’s watch band caught on something and fell apart. It seemed synchronistically appropriate, since it rendered his watch useless. Strangely enough, he had packed a spare watch and put it on. A bit of precog planning?

This mishap seemed to end the synchronicity loop related to time mishaps.

From this point on, we experienced odd synchros related to destinations- space. During our trip to Sarasota a week or two earlier for Megan’s graduation, our GPS had disappeared. We bought a new one, purchased a map of  Costa Rica, downloaded it, and figured we were ready for driving in Costa Rica. But when we reached the car rental place in San Jose,  we discovered the map had never downloaded, and had to rent a GPS from Thrifty. Good thing we did.

The drive from San Jose to the lodge near Arenal volcano where we stayed was less than a 100 kilometers – but only as the crow flies. Once we left the Pan American highway, the road climbed steadily through the mountains, with more twists than a pretzel and a scarcity of road signs. We got lost a couple of times when we consulted an actual map instead of following the GPS directions.

The GPS itself was humorous. It issued alerts for every dangerous curve and bridge on our route. Whenever it announced puente peligroso – dangerous bridge- we learned to slow down because quite often, the bridge was on the verge of imminent collapse. It took us about four hours to reach Arenal Lodge and once we did, the space part of this synchro loop ended. This is when the trip, at least for me, became a quantum vacation, where time and space become irrelevant; there is just a vast now.

I had selected this place from the internet and was a bit worried that maybe it would be a dump in the middle of nowhere. We were pleasantly shocked.


view from our balcony

rob, megan, playing chess in the lobby, which is completely open to the elements

This 2,000 acres encompasses a magnificent rain forest replete with howler monkeys, bats, sloths, hummingbirds, deer, and a lone macaw, Stephanie, whose story is for another post. There are more types of frogs and butterflies than we’ve ever seen in one location. In fact, Costa Rica has more biodiversity than nearly every other country in the world. It’s the home of 500,000 species, four percent of the total species in the world.

From dusk to dawn, nature’s orchestra is continual, a cacophony of insects and frogs so lovely and powerful that it permeates your very being.

Arenal frog, major part of nature’s orchestra

Intimately woven throughout this orchestra are the details that awaken your other senses. The lushness of the landscape is apparent even at night – in the air you breathe, the taste of it against your tongue, the way it feels against your skin. The Angel Trumpets surrounding one of the ponds sway and dance in the moonlight, promising hallucinogenic dreams to those who sleep nearby.

Then there’s the starkness of Arenal volcano rising against all this abundance, jutting upward more than a mile, as if reaching for something within the belly of the sky. It dominates the landscape at every moment of the day and seems to shout, I am here, timeless and invincible.

It last erupted in 1968, buried several towns, and continues to spout ash and smoke. Even though it was quiet during our stay, I woke suddenly one night, bolted upright, and there it was, framed in the open porch door. Smoke curled upward from its cone, inscribing secrets against the stars.

Now: if only I can decipher all these secrets.

 

 

 

Posted in Costa Rica | 17 Comments