Simba, RIP

Simba was my first orange tabby. He came to us from our neighbor, Annette, when she found him and his bro, Copper, as a kitten near her church. She adopted Copper and asked if we would take Simba. Annette thinks this happened in 2005, I think it was 2007. Simba and Copper were nearly identical except that Simba’s eyes were green and Cooper’s were amber. But if you saw them close together like this, you could hardly tell them apart.

Over the years, Simba was the alpha cat – not mean, but firm about his positions among the cats we had. When younger, one of his favorite spots was on top of my desk, just sitting there looking regal as I worked, as in the top photo.

Outside, he and Copper often climbed a tree in our front yard that enabled them to get to the roof, where they would sit together watching the world below. This tree: and that’s Copper during catobatics, with Simba just visible above him. When Copper was hit by a car three years ago, Annette and her family buried him next to this tree. I would often spot Simba sitting on that grave.

One summer, we stated finding dead mice around the house – in the shower, the kitchen. And then we started seeing Simba crouched in various places around the house where he sensed a mouse was hiding. We realized we had an infestation and Rob started placing mousetraps in cabinets Simba had pinpointed. Eventually, they were all caught. He was our mouse detector.

Noah, our Golden Retriever, was like a horse next to Simba but Simba befriended him early on. The same was true of Nigel and of Megan’s dog, Nika. There are Nika and Nigel at the end of the sidewalk, with Simba watching them.

He was tolerant of our other cats, but not exactly warm and fuzzy.

As he got older, his spot at night was next to my head on my bed,where we often tussled over who got the extra pillow.

When Nala entered our lives last Christmas, she quickly cozied up to Noah and Simba gradually accepted her.

For the last several days, he hadn’t been eating and yesterday, didn’t eat at all or go outside to his favorite spot by the pile of wood we use for our fire pit during the winter. He was also bloated  – we thought he’d just gained weight  – so I took him to our vet.

X rays revealed so much fluid in his chest that his lungs were floating. His stomach was also filled with fluid. Ira, our vet, walked me through the X rays and pointed out what he thought might be a mass, a tumor, close to his lungs, which would explain the buildup of fluid. Even if the fluid was drained, it probably would return, he said. Simba was already having difficulty breathing.  Rather than put him through additional tests and blood work, I felt it was best to euthanize him.

Ira and his technician, Juan, were wonderfully compassionate.

I miss seeing Simba by that fire pit in the morning. Or in the backyard by the pool, stalking lizards or trying to teach Nala about the etiquette of outside freedoms. I miss him by my head at night. I hope Noah and our other cats were with him as he passed.

Rob dug a grave for him close to where we buried Powder not that long ago. Now there are 4 cats and a bird buried in our backyard. And I’m waiting for Simba to pay us a visit.

 

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Synchros in St. Augustine

Whenever we travel, we tend to experience synchronicities. Maybe it’s because we are taken out of our everyday routine…and things happen. That was the case again in early May when we journeyed to St. Augustine, Florida – the oldest city in the U.S. – for a couple of days.

A friend had said we should visit a bar called The Well. So after visiting the old stone fort, we decided to go find it. It turned into a half-hour hike, but we located it on the grounds of the The Collector Inn & Garden. By the time we finished our beers it was after 5 p.m. and we debated about walking to a restaurant called Catch 27 – also recommended to us. Google told us it was several blocks away, but Trish said she wanted to go back to our room first. So we headed back through Old Town.

As soon as we got in our car and left the parking lot, we noticed the bridge we needed to cross to the barrier island where we were staying was raised for boat traffic and cars we backed up for more than a quarter mile. Rush hour.We skirted the traffic, circled back through Old Town on what is apparently the only street that allows car traffic. Just a block before we were to exit onto a main road, we noticed a sign for Catch 27, which was more than mile from where we thought the restaurant was located. We managed to get back to our parking spot, which still had two hours left on the meter, and walked over to the restaurant.

As we were seated, I asked if there were two Catch 27s, and was told there was only one and that it had moved to the new location. So if we would’ve taken our other option and attempted to walk to the restaurant from the bar, we wouldn’t have found it. So, for us, what originally seemed like an inconvenience – the bridge raised and a long wait – turned into a lucky find. Instead of being blocked, we ended up right where we wanted to be!

Here’s one other one from that trip. A couple of days before we left for St. Augustine, I completed a script called Spinning Out. In the story, my main character, Jake, has an out-of-body experience in which he becomes stuck out of his body and ultimately is aided by a group of inter-dimensional beings that resemble odd-looking human children. These beings form a circle around Jake, lock arms and rotate around him, bringing him slowly back into his body. Yay, good aliens!

So, to my surprise, upon arriving at our airbnb in St. Augustine, I noticed a strange ceramic sculpture near the floor in one corner of the main room. It’s a group of odd-looking little beings with arms locked forming a circle. Of course, that reminded me of my scenario in the script. Here’s a pic of it. Another syncro.

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Animal Spirit Contact & That Rainbow Bridge

Melissa Fordham is one of the most interesting women I know. Years back when we lived in the neighborhood we moved to when our daughter, Megan, was 6 weeks old, she lived in the neighborhood with her family. She’s 11 years older than Megan, who will be 30 this year, and back then, when Melissa was in her teens, she used to babysit for Megan.

I saw her periodically during her college years, we went to her wedding, and then she and her husband, Jon, moved to New York. But she kept in touch. She’s a Leo who grew up with cats and who, for 20 years, had a beautiful cat named Star. Melissa also has an insatiable appetite for answers that don’t fall within the normal or usual scheme of things and in the past several years, has been exploring that unseen realm.

Last year, Star died and ever since, Melissa has been experiencing a lot of contact with Star. We’ve written about several of her contacts. The most recent event appeared in my text messages this evening. It’s a weird one, for sure.

Toward the end of her life, Star was on a med called Cosequin for her arthritis, featured in both pics.  It’s a joint supplement. But after the cat died, Melissa got rid of the pills and sent them to friends with older cats. “I’ve actually deep cleaned in the year since she died, so there’s really no explanation for what happened.”

On her kitchen floor, she found a single pill, Cosequin, and texted Jon about it. “There’s a Cosequin pill just in the middle of the floor in the kitchen. Just there. Randomly. We don’t have that anymore.”

Jon: Star put it there. She’s saying, “Hi! I don’t need this anymore.”

Melissa wrote that she left the pill there all day and into the next morning – well, just because.

“At first I thought it was a pill of mine, but then I was like, no, I haven’t taken any pills…and Jon’s been gone a week…so it wasn’t his. Then I got closer and was like…OH. MY. GOD.
I was almost afraid to touch it at first. I also liked Jon’s explanation of it.”

What I find so intriguing about her experience is that apparently animal spirits, like their human counterparts, seem to use whatever is most convenient to let us know they’re around.

Now I would really enjoy some type of communication from our Golden Retriever, Noah, who died on March 14. Or form our first Golden, Jessie, who died in 2007. Or from our cats Powder and Tigerlil, who passed in 2017 and 2012, or from our black and white tuxedo cat, Whiskers, who passed in 2006.

You get the idea here, right? We outlive all our animal buddies. And they do seem to reach out to us once they get to that Rainbow Bridge.

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Nala, Nigel, Noah, Nika

Nala is now at least 6 months old and quite comfortable around the house. She’s spayed, has all her shots, and now runs around outside in the backyard, chasing lizards and insects. She also climbs trees. But whenever I shake the treat jar, she comes dashing in.

Sometimes, Nigel or Nika or both of them play with her in the backyard,. Even though Nigel is many times her size, she doesn’t seem intimidated. Even Nika, Megan’s dog, is much larger than she is. But she likes dogs, cuddles up to them when she’s in that be my friend mood.  

Here are Nigel (blonde) and Nika at dinner with us one evening.

But because she was with Noah when he passed, I wonder about the effect of that. Does Nala sense him around? Do Nika and Nigel? I think they do, but it’s more natural for them  to see what we do not.

Today when we were leaving the dog park, a woman whose name I don’t know stopped me at the gate and said, “I heard about Noah. I’m so sorry.” And then she hugged me.

It’s this kind of compassion from virtual strangers that reduces me to tears. Every pet owner knows what it’s like to lose a beloved buddy. And every pet in a house with multiple animals and species feels the same void we humans feel, but not in the same way. At some level, I think animals understand that death isn’t the end of anything, that it’s just another level of being.

 

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Atticus Finch and the Era of trump

Remember Atticus Finch, the heroic lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird, who did the right thing? Jeff Daniels is now playing Finch on Broadway and sat down with Nicolle Wallace to talk about the parallels in Harper Lee’s classic to life under trump. It’s chilling. It’s all about racism. And, unless trump is held accountable, it’s also the end of democracy.

You can watch the segment here.

Where are today’s heroes? Where’s the next Daniel Ellsberg who will leak the unredacted Mueller report to The Washington Post?

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Writing the future

Here’s an astonishing example of an author tuning into the future providing details of an event that would take place two years later. We wrote about this one here many years ago, but it’s worth taking another look at it, and considering the question of whether or not this fictional story created that actual event or did the author tune into what was  to come.

In 1972, Regency Press published a novel, Black Abductor, by Harrison James, a pseudonym for James Rusk Jr. It’s about a terrorist group led by a black man who kidnapped a college student, Patricia. Her wealthy father was well known and had right-wing sympathies.

In the novel, Patricia was kidnapped near campus while she was with her boyfriend, who was badly beaten by the abductors. For a while, the boyfriend was a suspect in the case. The fictional Patricia initially resisted her captors, but eventually subscribed to their ideology and became a champion of their cause. The terrorists sent Polaroid photos to her father and described the abduction as America’s “first political kidnapping.” They predicted they eventually would be surrounded by police, tear-gassed, and wiped out.

Two years after the book was published, in 1974, Patricia Hearst – daughter of newspaper baron Randolph Hearst and then a college student – was abducted from her apartment near campus. The kidnappers were members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a terrorist group led by a black man. Her boyfriend, Steven Weed, was with her at the time and was badly beaten, but became a suspect in the case. Patricia Hearst, like the fictional Patricia, became a sympathizer of her abductors’ cause. She ended up robbing a bank with her kidnappers and was photographed carrying an MI carbine.

The FBI was either familiar with the novel or had read it and the author became a suspect in the case. The real abductors were eventually surrounded by the police, tear-gassed, and killed, just as the fictional kidnappers predicted they would be. All of this begs the question: had the terrorists read the novel? Or was this an instance where the author’s creative edge enabled him  to sense the future so deeply that he uncovered stunning details identical to those that came about two years later?

Realistically, would anyone read a novel with such a deadly plot and decide to duplicate it? Maybe. But it would be challenging to get the boyfriend to play the appropriate role and the authorities to do the same. Most likely, Rusk, through his creative endeavor, had somehow tuned into an event yet to come.

Two years later, playing on the similarity of real life events, the book was republished with an essay introducing it. That’s it in the image above. The author James called the similarities of the two stories a ‘coincidence.’ He also seemed somewhat embarrassed by the attention the book was getting, including interest from the FBI, and he notes on Amazon.com that the book was not only extremely violent, but also pornographic. He said the only reason it rated three stars on Amazon is because of the coincidence.

One other note, I initially was going to call this post by the title of the book, Black Abductor. But it occurred to me that it would be bad form to repeat the provocative title, which plays on race. I doubt that any mainstream publisher would play on the word ‘black’ as was done in 1972.

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Full Moon in Scorpio

 

On May 18, at 5:11 p.m. EDT, we’ve got a full moon at 27 degrees and 38 minutes of Scorpio. This sign is the most emotionally intense, secretive, and psychic of the zodiac. And since full moons often illuminate the stuff that’s roaming around, untethered, in our psyches, it’s going to be a bit nutty for most of us.

Pluto, at 23 Capricorn in house 3, forms a beneficial angle to this full moon and since Pluto rules Scorpio, this aspect is powerful. Transformative. Prepare for a huge energy shift of some kind. But let’s take a closer look at how each sign may be impacted.

Aries:The full moon in Scorpio on May 18 brings a financial matter into focus—your partner’s income, a mortgage or loan for which you’ve applied, an insurance settlement or refund or a tax issue. There may be news concerning any of these areas. Scorpio is an emotionally intense sign, so be prepared to be immersed in what you feel and intuit.

Taurus: The full moon in Scorpio on May 18 falls in your partnership area. Expect news about a personal or business partnership. Thanks to a close, beneficial angle from Pluto to this full moon, you’re empowered by the news. The Scorpio moon is one of the most emotionally intense, so be prepared to for some deep feelings.

Gemini: The 18th brings a full moon in passionate Scorpio and highlights your daily work and the way you maintain your daily health. Deep emotions often accompany a moon in Scorpio, and the trick is to avoid getting sucked into the inner conflict. All too often, inner conflicts find their way into the external world, and the last thing you want is conflict at work with anyone.

Cancer: The full moon in fellow water sign Scorpio on the 18th brings news about a romantic relationship or a creative endeavor. Scorpio is an intense sign, and with the full moon bringing everything into start focus, you may feel more emotional than usual. Any news you hear, though, should work in your favor, thanks to a beneficial angle from powerful Pluto.

Leo: The full moon in Scorpio on May 18 highlights your home life and family. Since Scorpio
is an emotionally intense sign, your feelings may get hurt by something someone in your personal environment says or does. There could also be news about a parent or another family member. Since Pluto forms a beneficial angle to this full moon, your emotions at this time are powerful.

Virgo: The 18th features a full moon in water sign Scorpio. This one receives a harmonious beam of energy from Pluto and any news you hear is positive and powerful. Scorpio urges you to dig deeper for answers, and because you’re a detail-oriented person, you accept the challenge. No telling what treasures you may find!

Libra: On the 18th, the full moon in Scorpio highlights your financial area. You’re able to understand the beliefs and thoughts that may be preventing you from achieving the financial prosperity you desire and grasp how to adjust them. Since Pluto forms a friendly angle to this full moon, any news you hear about money puts you in a more powerful position.

Scorpio: This month’s transits are more to your liking and include a full moon in your sign on May 18. This one lights up your personal life, allowing you to see deep within yourself more easily. Thanks to a harmonious beam from Pluto, any news you hear will put you in a more powerful position.

Sagittarius: The full moon in Scorpio on May 18 is ideal for delving into your own psyche. Your dreams will be more vivid and will contain information and insights that may prove valuable. Your sexuality is heightened during this full moon.

Capricorn: There’s a full moon in Scorpio on May 18 that you’ll enjoy. Your social calendar gets crowded during the several days leading up to this date, and you recognize the opportunity to network and connect with friends. Pluto is friendly to this full moon, indicating that any news you hear puts you in a more powerful position.

Aquarius: The full moon in Scorpio on May 18 highlights your professional life. You feel everything more intensely now and are able to see all the connecting pieces of your career with greater clarity. Pluto is friendly to this full moon, an indication that news you hear puts you in a stronger position to negotiate and bargain.

Pisces: The full moon in fellow water sign Scorpio on May 18 highlights that part of your chart that rules the higher mind—your worldview and deeper spiritual and philosophic beliefs, higher education and international travel. Thanks to a friendly beam from Pluto, news you hear about any of these areas is profound and powerful.

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Happy birthday, Rob!

This beautiful poster is what Megan had made for Rob’s birthday.It’s a collage of photos stretched onto a canvas and hangs now in our hallway.

Rob was always Noah’s human – I was the backup – and the photos express the speciaal place Noah had in Rob’s life.

Happy birthday, Rob!

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Synchronicity & UFOs

 

Here’s an article we wrote for Unknown Country in 2015. I don’t think we ever posted it here. If we did, well, here it is again.

Weekender: When the Unlikely and the Unbelievable Collide

In the aftermath of an early morning UFO encounter in his back yard that ended with both he and his wife losing consciousness, Charles Fontaine was haunted by a series of strange coincidences and paranormal experiences. Even though he rarely read books outside of his field in aeronautics, he went to a bookstore in a Montreal mall and picked up one book, the French edition of The Seven Secrets of Synchronicity.

He began reading it at home in rural Quebec and as he reached the second chapter, he paused and Googled the phrase ‘synchronicity and UFOs.’ That led him right into another synchronicity, an image on a blog that showed a hovering UFO beaming light to the ground, similar to what he had experienced. Looking more closely, he realized he was on a synchronicity blog written by the authors of the book he was reading.That was when he knew he had to contact the authors, and that was how we met Charles Fontaine, who became a central figure in our book, Aliens in the Backyard: UFOS, Abductions & Synchronicity.

Since Carl Jung first wrote about his concept of synchronicity in 1949, in the introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s edition of the I Ching, the word – the concept – seems to have reached a tipping point. If you Google the word, nearly 6 million links appear. And yet, twenty years ago, even ten years ago, if you mentioned this word in the company of strangers, you got a lot of weird looks.

A synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence. As Jung defined it, it’s the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that is meaningful to the person who experiences it and can’t be explained by cause and effect. In its simplest form, you’re thinking of your college roommate, with whom you lost touch twenty years ago, and that very day you receive a friend request from that person on Facebook. In its more complex forms, it blows your head wide open and turns your life inside out like a dirty sock.

It’s an intricate component of the visitor/abduction experience, of afterlife communication, and may be the phenomenon that actually links the two. It seems to exist along the border of what quantum physicist David Bohm called the implicate or enfolded order of existence and the explicate order, what we perceive in our daily lives. It may be our most direct experience of who we are as individuals, as a species, a human collective. It manifests itself at juncture points in our lives – birth or death, marriage or divorce, a move, a change in financial status, an illness, any transitional point. It’s often a wakeup call that shakes us out of our established routines and rigid ways of thinking.

Sometimes, there’s a trickster component to a synchro, where the universe seems to be laughing at us, poking fun at us, whispering Ha-ha, gotcha on that one huh?The paranormal is often involved in synchronicity. In fact, phenomena like telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, telekinesis, retrocognition, and time displacement fall under the umbrella of synchronicity.It sometimes occurs in clusters, where the same songs, numbers, books, names, objects, or place occur repeatedly in a matter of hours or days. Jung believed this meant an archetype had become active in your unconscious and would continue until you got the message.

It often occurs in heightened periods of creativity. Several writers tap into the same story line and plot. Inventors and scientific researchers come up with simultaneous discoveries.When it appears in politics or in mass events – like 911, the Boston Marathon bombing, the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370 -there’s often a trickster element involved, an in your face component that’s hard to ignore. When it manifests itself in tragedies the media seizes upon, synchronicity is often embedded somewhere in the story line.

Not all synchros are biggies. Many are small but so personally significant that they change the way we see the world and ourselves within that world. These synchros act as confirmations, guides, or startle us enough to take a deeper look. They are comforting allies in our journey through life. Some involve animals as messengers. Some unfold over a period of weeks, months, even years. The thing about synchronicity is that the sky is the limit and the only thing holding us back is how willing we are to expand our own consciousness.

Synchronicity is an equal opportunity experiencer. It doesn’t care about your social or financial status, your religious or political beliefs, your ethnicity and parentage, your age, gender, skin color, profession, education, or marital status. It doesn’t even care if you’re a diehard skeptic. It happens. And whether you acknowledge it or not is the key. Awareness is pivotal.

Where do you fall in this vast spectrum?

 

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The Melchizedek synchro machine – and happy mother’s day!

FIRST, HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY TO ALL YOU MOMS!

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When my FB friend, Bill Homann, put up the above photo recently on his FB page, I was reminded of an incredible series of synchronicities related to the name Melchizedek. Now, thanks to Bill, I have a photo of the man who ten years ago inadvertently set off this mysterious compound synchronicity. Here’s the post from May 19, 2009. It was entitled: Order of Melchizedek.

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If you’re not yet convinced that synchronicity is more than mere coincidence, this one might push you to rethink your reservations. The starting point is a comment from our entry on May 19- World on Fire from Gypsy Woman in which she referenced author Drunvalo Melchizedek. When I saw that last name, I was immediately reminded of a bizarre compound synchronicity experienced by two authors, Jacque Vallee and Colin Wilson. I wrote about the story in my book, PSYCHIC POWER: Discover and Develop Your Sixth Sense at any Age.

UFO researcher Vallee was interested in a Los Angeles cult known as the Order of Melchizedek, related to an obscure biblical prophet, Melchizedek. He searched for information about the prophet, but didn’t have much luck. (That was before Google. Now his name immediately elicits a site: https://ad2004.com/Biblecodes/Hebrewmatrix/melchizedek.html)

In the midst of his research, he took a taxi to the Los Angeles airport and asked the taxi driver for a receipt. To his surprise, the receipt was signed M. Melchizedek. He assumed the name must be more common than he thought, but when he checked the Los Angles telephone directory, the only one listed was his taxi driver.

Vallee offered a quirky explanation of how synchronicity works. He said it could be called “the angelic answer.” He suggested that it was as if he’d placed a message that read “Wanted: Melchizedeks: on a universal notice board. As a result, an earnest angel had asked, “How about this?” and handed Vallee the taxi driver.

To clarify his point, Vallee noted two ways a librarian could file information. One is alphabetical. But an easier way of filing would allow the librarian to place each new book on the closest shelf. Each book would have a beeper attached to its spine and could be located with a transmitter. Vallee proposed that the universe works on a similar system, and that explains synchronicity. In more modern terms, that would be like saying that the universe acted like a Google search, but with no computers involved.

The story doesn’t end there. When the prolific writer Colin Wilson wrote about Vallee’s theory for an article on synchronicity, he experienced a related synchronicity himself. After completing work on the passage about Vallee, Wilson took a break from writing to walk his dog. As he left his office, he noticed that a book had fallen from a shelf. He picked it up and looked at the title, You Are Sentenced to Life, by Dr. W.D. Chesney. He’d bought it years ago, but had never read it. He paged through it and near the end found a page headed “Order of Melchizedek.” It was a letter to the author by the founder of the order. Wilson noted that, of the more than 30,000 books in his house, it was that book which fell just after he had written about Melchizedek.

So both authors attracted their own Melchizedeks. Thank you, Gypsy Woman, for reminding me of the story!
Rob

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