The Locked Door Opens – Spirit Contact

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Trish and Rob

orbs photographed behind Lauren’s home

One of the blogs I frequent regularly is Lauren Raines Threads of the Spiderwoman.  We’ve used some of her stories on our blog before. This one struck me as genuine spirit  contact.

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Towards the end of her life, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, the author of  “On Death And Dying”, believed there was no death, only transformation from the physical to other states of being.  As a member of IANDS (International Association of Near Death Studies) and having heard quite a few speakers discuss their experiences, I have come to agree.  That, and the many personal experiences I’ve had (not an NDE, however).

This is a time to remember those we’ve lost, and times that have passed, and this is a journal, so I felt like telling a “ghost story” of my own.  It’s sad that the people who  most need to hear  are  closed to it.

In 2008 my brother, Glenn, had a massive brain stem stroke.  He is brain dead, and because he left no living will, he is sustained entirely by life support – a machine breathes for him, another one drips nutrients.  He’s not there.  But because my mother and other brother will not allow it,  I am unable to remove life support and allow him to die with dignity. And so it continues, and they visit him, continually grieving, and of course, any discussion about my “metaphysical ideas” is out of the question.  So I’ve had to accept the situation, and I have also consulted a medium, whose reading seemed both accurate and comforting in that she said he had “crossed over” and was at peace.

So here’s my story.  Last year I renovated my mother’s house, because I needed to rent rooms, as my mother is now in assisted living.  Glenn’s room had a closet where he kept his gun collection, and I didn’t have a key for it because my other brother, David, who lives in California, insisted on keeping them in the house for sentimental reasons.  To me, Glenn’s guns represented the unhappiness and fearfulness he lived with the last years of his life, and getting rid of them seemed like a way to transform that negativity for his spirit.   I didn’t have the key (but I tried the lock numerous times) – so I figured I’d put off the issue for the time being.  But I did renovate his room, replacing the floor, and purposefully painted it sky blue, which symbolized spiritual freedom and expansion.

As I was painting sky blue around the closet door it very gently opened!  I stood there with my mouth open as well. Then I took out the guns in the closet, went to a local gun shop, sold them, and sent the money to several charities for children. I also  sponsored a little girl in Nepal with PLAN International for my brother, transforming all that sad energy into helping children.  Which I think he knew I would do, and I am certain that’s why the closet opened…………his way of letting me know it was fine.  And I believe he is fine too – not his body, but his spirit.

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I’m intrigued by the metaphor of a door, locked so long, suddenly opening. Maybe it augurs an opening of closed minds?

Posted in spirit contact, synchronicity | 10 Comments

Henri, the Existential Cat, Is Back!

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Love this cat!

 

Posted in synchronicity | 6 Comments

Eve of Samhain (sow’-wen)

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Halloween: it’s known as the day when the veil between worlds of the living and the dead is the thinnest. In pagan times, it was the eve of Samhain—pronounced sow’-en or sow’-ween.—the end of the Celtic year, the beginning of winter and the day when the dead were said to rise from the grave and walk the earth. Like many pagan holidays, it was Christianized in the Middle Ages as a Catholic vigil observed on the eve of All Saints Day, November 1—All Hallows Eve.

Regardless of its origin, it was a day when homages for the dead were observed, and eventually it became linked with spooks, ghosts, all things that go bump in the night.

Our neighbors on one side have two elementary school-aged kids, and they are big on holiday decorations, usually putting up an extensive Halloween display by the first week of October. This year they waited until Oct. 10 – late for them. Last year they had a skeleton laid out on the lawn among the plastic headstones, cobwebs, bats and assorted spooky paraphernalia. On a couple of occasions,  Noah would sneak over there and grab a plastic femur or some other bone and run off with it, wagging his tail. I have not seen that skeleton this year.

The neighbors on the other side don’t celebrate Halloween, keep their outside lights turned off, and don’t answer the door to any trick and treaters. Being from Haiti, they know a thing or two about the dark side and don’t want to encourage. Wisner, the man of the house, has told me stories of voodoo curses and zombies and he wasn’t kidding. Why Americans celebrate and play with the dark side is beyond him.

As for us, no decorations, but we carve a pumpkin and provide goodies for the costumed little ones that come by. Also, a little synchro, a day or two before the neighbors started assembling their holiday decor, I noticed something laying in front of our front door – something that Noah was very interested in. I took a closer look – a dead bat. Probably caught by one of the cats. I showed it to our Halloween-happy neighbors and the mother and kids all backed away in horror. I had the real thing – no plastic bats for us!

Happy Halloween to everyone!

Posted in synchronicity | 11 Comments

Black Swan: Hurricane Sandy and the Election

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Megan and Rob with a black swan

A black swan is an event or occurrence that deviates from what is normally expected of a situation, surprises the observer, has a major impact, and is difficult to predict. And Hurricane Sandy is the election season’s black swan. Here’s why:

Hurricane Sandy has broken all sorts of records. It’s barometric pressure is now 940 millibars, the strongest to ever hit the North Atlantic. By comparison, the pressure of Hurricane Wilma, the strongest pressure on record, was between 882-888. Hurricane Andrew, which devastated Miami-Dade County in 1992, had an internal pressure of 922. It created a storm surge of nearly 17 feet and caused $27 billion of damage.

Sandy brought high storm surges to New Jersey and New York City, coinciding with a full moon and high tide. It has merged with a nor’easter to become a huge, hybrid storm impacting 60 million people in seven states. Millions will lose power. And it’s all happening 7-8 days before the presidential election.  Millions of people will lose electrical power and some places may not have power for weeks, which is surely going to impact the presidential election on November 6.

Most meteorologists agree  this storm is a result of global warming, an issue neither presidential candidate has addressed during this campaign. “The irony is that the two presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, and now they are seeing the climate speak to them,” said Mike Tidwell, director of Maryland’s Chesapeake Climate Action Network. “That’s really what’s happening here. The climate is now speaking to them — and to everyone else.”

Ironic? We call this synchronicity.  

An unprecedented natural disaster, this black swan that’s shutting down the northeast, is rapidly clarifying the stark differences between Romney and Obama.

Romney has stated that FEMA –the Federal Emergency Management Administration that moves in after any disaster with food and supplies and rescue missions – should be relegated to the states or, better yet, privatized. Can you imagine? Privatized.   That means that  companies like Halliburton, who are contracted and paid by the U.S. government, who work for profit, move in.

When asked in June during a GOP debate if he would favor cutting off federal disaster relief, he said:

“We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.”

Federal disaster relief is immoral? Huh?  Romney is already distancing him from that comment. He suddenly thinks that FEMA is not so bad.

Obama, on the other hand, thinks that federal disaster relief is a moral duty. When asked what effect he thought Hurricane Sandy would have on the election he replied, “I’m not worried about the effect on the election. I’m worried about the effect on families, on our first responders, on our economy and on transportation.” He understands that only the federal government has the resources to cope with widespread devastation in the wake of natural disasters.  No one should have to pay to be rescued from a rooftop.

Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the USA National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the world’s foremost experts on changes to global energy and water cycles, called Hurricane Sandy  the “new normal.”

“Climate change is changing the weather,” Trenberth said. “The past few years have been marked by unusually severe extreme weather characteristic of climate change. The oceans are warmer and the atmosphere above the oceans is warmer and wetter. This new normal changes the environment for all storms and makes them more intense…”

How many more national disasters will it take before climate change becomes part of the national discourse?  How many more black swans? How many more in-your-face synchros will it take?

 

Posted in hurricanes, synchronicity | 31 Comments

Mystical Polling

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Eight days to the U.S. election and there is no doubt that the race for president between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is tight. Neither candidate is a shoe-in. That’s what the polls show us. No doubt it will remain that way to election day. That said, there has been considerable shifting in the polls back and forth that seems to relate directly to the collective unconscious. Things happen and the mood shifts. But are millions of people actu

ally changing their votes back and forth between candidates as events unfold? I don’t think so, and I’ll explain why. But first let’s look at events that have caused a shift in polling in the past few weeks.

There was the convention bump that worked in Oba

ma’s favor resulting in a period of a couple of weeks where he was leading in ‘swing states’ – the ones that will determine the outcome because they could go either way – by as much as 8-10 points after being neck and neck in the polls. Republicans were scrambling, in near panic-mode. Some quietly even conceded it was over when their problems were compounded by outrageous statements about rape by members of their party on the far right whose beliefs are automatically tied to the top of the ticket.

Then the first debate changed everything as Obama appeared listless, uninterested, even unwilling to take on Romney. Did he really want a second term? Within days, the polls shifted in Romney favor. Republicans who had doubted the veracity of the polls when their candidate was sinking into the sunset now touted the new results of the same polling organizations.

In a sense, the Republicans who were disputing the earlier polls were right when they said they didn’t see voters changing their minds. Likewise, Democrats now could make the same argument. When the same people are polled before and after these influential, poll-changing events occur, my guess is that there is typically little or no shift between candidates. There are not enough undecided voters to sway the polls, and when undecided voters make a decision, they’re as likely as the next voter to stick with it.

Yet, interviews derived from random dialing of telephone numbers reveal some remarkable shifts as mentioned above. The random process of course results in different people being interviewed each time., and they probably haven’t changed their minds about the candidates. Yet, the shift of points are fairly consistent among the various polling organizations.

In essence, polling is a form of divination – like attracts like. Something has changed in the collective unconscious and the polling process picks up on it. In that sense, polling is not really much different from the astrology, Tarot cards, numerology, or the I Ching. Rather than providing a reading for the near future for an individual, the ‘poll readings’ provide it for the entire country.

No doubt the scientific-minded polling experts would be puzzled by such a perspective on what they do. But I think there’s something to it, that polling shifts are more about the state of the collective unconscious rather than individuals changing votes.

Maybe in the future as intuitive technology expands in the realm of science – if it ever does – we’ll reach a point where it won’t be necessary to stand to line to vote. It will be recognized and accepted that real democracy happens at the level of the collective unconscious.

Meanwhile, polling and voting will merge a week from tomorrow in the U.S. when we ‘go to the polls,’ as they say, finding out way to the ‘the polling booths.’

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Hurricane Sandy

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Frankenstorm, that’s what they’re calling it.

On Twitter, someone referred to it as a “Stephen King” kind of storm.

Hurricane Sandy is a trickster. As it left the Caribbean and was predicted to make a close swing toward Florida, the National Hurricane Center put most of the east coast of Florida under tropical storm warnings. In the tri-county area that includes Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach County, school for Friday, October 26, was promptly cancelled. We were warned that we would experience 1-3 inches of rain, high winds just under 75 MPH, and that we should take the usual storm precautions.

I didn’t trust the prediction. Isaac, back in August, wasn’t supposed to do much of anything to us, yet it dumped 14 inches of rain on South Florida in a period of about 24 hours and caused such widespread flooding we couldn’t get out of our neighborhood for two days. But okay. I listened to the forecast.

Sandy, they said,  was going to impact South Florida seven years and one day after 2005 Hurricane Wilma,   the last time we got walloped by an actual hurricane. The synchro of the timing and the late October storm bothered me, so I made sure we had plenty of food and water, Rob checked the propane tanks,  we had plenty of pet food. Good to go.

Sandy proved to be pretty much of a nonevent for us. We got some rain, some wind, but we have worse summer thunderstorms. Now Sandy is forecast to be a Cat 2 when it slams into New Jersey and affects more than 60 million people who live in the northeast.  Some of the descriptions of this storm are frightening:

From Jeff Masters, director of Weather Undergound, a private weather forecast service: “This storm is so dangerous and so unusual because it is coming at the tail end of hurricane season and beginning of winter storm season, “so it’s kind of taking something from both – part hurricane, part nor’easter, all trouble.”

From Louis Ucellini, the environmental prediction chief of NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminsistration – meteorologists: “The total is greater than the sum of the individual parts. That is exactly what’s going on here. This storm as it grows and moves back to the coast on Monday and Tuesday, the circulation of this storm will extend all the way from the Midwest, the Ohio Valley, toward the Carolinas up into New England and southern Canada. It’s really going to be an expansive storm system.”

The writer on a Wall Street Journal blog says it best, I think. You have a combination of unusual weather that could result in the worst storm NY has seen since the hurricane of 1938.  NOAA forecast Jim Cisco is the one who tagged it Frankenstorm and he and others have referred to Hurricane Sandy as “unprecedented.”
Now: is this hype?

I went through my first hurricane in 1963 – Cleo –  the year my parents moved to the U.S. from Venezuela, and I have been fascinated by them ever since. Over the decades, they seem to have grown in intensity and size, and gradually, they are hitting much farther north. They have figured prominently into several novels I’ve written. At some level, I feel they are sentient  beings. Yes, I know how wacko that sounds.  But when you watch these suckers form, when you watch how they set their sights on a particular area, when you study them, it’s not a stretch to recognize a kind of consciousness in them that responds to something in us.

If we are as interconnected as quantum physics suggests, as the Hindus believe (Indra’s Net), then there’s a rather puzzling synchronicity happening with this storm. It will begin to move inland on the night when the moon is full (scientific fact the tides are higher under a full moon) and  will merge with another weather system about a week before the presidential election, November 6, when Mercury (communication) will turn retrograde.

If NOAA is right, if  these meteorologists are correct, then election day across much of the country could be a mess because the massive power outages expected with this storm could persist to election day – and beyond. The media itself will be focused on Sandy – not on the election.

Lots of ifs here. But people are paying attention. One writer friend wrote today that her son is at a wedding in Tampa, and is scheduled to fly back to NY on Sunday, October 28. If his flight is cancelled, could he drive across the state and stay with us?

Gypsy, currently living in Delaware,   dropped us a line about what she and her family were doing to prepare. Her description of the scarcity of supplies in grocery stores is interesting. The shelves are practically bare. Bottled water is scarce. 

Yes, there’s a certain hype in buying that rides tandem with the hype in the news. That said, I’m a big believer in how the collective is acting. What does the collect consciousness tap into? Are the shelves of bottled water empty? Are the canned goods and flashlights and batteries gone? Are the lines at the gas pumps impossibly long? What do you feel in your gut?

So now we’ll wait and see. Sandy will either be a nonevent or something unprecedented. I don’t think there’s much middle ground here. Either/or, just like our choices in this election. And oh, not exactly a PS: what are planetary empaths feeling about all this?

 

Posted in hurricanes, planetary empaths, synchronicity | 26 Comments

Young poet speaks out…

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Trish and Rob

It’s interesting that even talented kids, like this one, speak out against the education system…and the teaching of Shakespeare, even though he is funded by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Posted in synchronicity | 6 Comments

Crystal Skull synchros…

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Trish and Rob
I was shelving a couple of books in my office the other day when my gaze fell on an antique snuff box on one of the shelves. I hadn’t opened it for quite awhile and had forgotten what was inside. I’d bought the box  at an outdoor clan gathering in Orlando a few years ago after the cover caught my attention: McGREGORS HIGH TOAST SNUFF next to a little pic of a  Scotsman. 
 
Curious now, I opened it and inside were two grape-sized quartz crystal skulls I’d bought in NYC years ago, an unusually smooth igneous stone (spewed out from a volcano and handed down from a Santero in Miami long ago), and a palm-sized skull made from a dark blue stone like lapiz that came from China via a Colorado rock store.

I took out the blue skull, held it in my hand, and gazed at it. I tried to quiet my mind, but kept  wondering if it had any power.  I had just read a book called Paranormal, by Raymond Moody and in it he has a chapter about the power of crystal gazing. (Was it the gazing or the crystal that had the power?) After a minute, I put it back in the box. Nothing had happened that I could tell.

I turned to my e-mail and opened one from our e-book editor, who asked about cover art for my novel, Crystal Skull. Hm, intereesting, I thought. I’d sent a copy of the out-of-print novel weeks ago and I didn’t know he was ready to move ahead with it.

After answering his query, telling him I would look for photos I noticed that I had a Facebook message from JoAnn Parks, someone I hadn’t heard from for months. JoAnn happens to own Max, a life-sized crystal skull that she inherited from a Tibetan healer in Houston. She worked for him for years, but he had never mentioned the skull to her. JoAnn readily agreed to have her granddaughter take a couple photos of Max and e-mail them to us.

To top off the series of synchros, JoAnn had come to my Facebook page to comment on a photo of a shaved llama (or alpaca), a photo that I’d snatched from David Wilson’s Facebook page. David is the editor who had asked about the Crystal Skull cover!

All that happened within minutes of gazing at the blue skull. So, well, maybe there is some power there.

Posted in synchronicity | 4 Comments

Bookazines

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Trish and Rob

a bookazine

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Some synchronicities are in your face, so obvious that you would have to be blind and deaf to miss them. But others are apparent only in retrospect and they’re usually more subtle, unfolding over a greater length of time, and it isn’t until you reflect on what’s happening that you see them. Like a game of hide ‘n seek.

On June 11, 2012, Jupiter moved into Gemini (my sign), where it will be until late June 2013. Any time Jupiter transits your sun sign, your life expands in several ways. Even though some doors slam shut, new opportunities surface. This 12-year cycle is one to anticipate.

For a sense of history here, the last time Jupiter was in my sign, we were living in a three-bedroom house that we had outgrown when my dad moved in with us and our daughter, Megan, gave him her bedroom and she slept in the living room. In June 2000 we moved from our three-bedroom home, into a  larger house that could accommodate my dad, Megan, and our offices. My mother passed away a few weeks after that move.  In August of that year, Rob, Megan and I traveled to Venezuela, where I was born, for a week of windsurfing on Margarita island. Megan entered middle school that fall. Work-wise, we both had contracts. Life was good, but with my mother gone, life was also very different.

In June 2012, our Omarr contract, which we had for nine years, wasn’t renewed. I had felt this was coming and dreaded it. I knew that when I turned in my final manuscript for the Esperanza series in October 2012, that contract would be done, too. In nearly thirty years of writing, this would be the first time we were without a single contract. Scary. It kept me awake nights. The other thing was that on July 16, 2012, Rob and I celebrated our 29th year anniversary.

The 29th year is known as the Saturn return in astrology, a major milestone in life, in relationships, in everything. In life, it’s when major transitions occur – you get married or divorced or start a family; you begin your real career, your real path; you embark on a quest. You get the idea. The second Saturn return happens between the ages of 58-60 and the third, when you hit 90. Each Saturn return is different.

I knew it had to be significant for our marriage, but wasn’t sure how.  My parents were married for more than 50 years, but I have no clue what happened to them during the first Saturn return of their marriage. I just felt that the coinciding of Jupiter in my sign and the Saturn return for our marriage would be significant also.

On June 12, 2012, a day after Jupiter entered my sign, we connected with David Wilson at Crossroad Press and suddenly it was going to be possible for us to bring our out of print books back into “print” digitally. There would be no upfront costs to us and this entrepreneurial company not only fills a niche, it redefines it. On August 7, while Rob was visiting his mother in Minnesota, we got a call from Tony Seidl, who had been Rob’s agent at one time. Would we be interested in writing some bookazines?

We’d never heard of bookazines. They’re a cross between books and magazines, focus on one particular topic, are often connected to an event of some kind, have no advertising, and are distributed through airports, grocery stores, drug stores, Barnes and Noble, and other outlets that have magazines. They are owned by Hudson News, who has newstands across the country. The photo above is one of the first that came out this month. The other one is on Abe Lincoln, a tie-in to the Spielberg  movie on Lincoln that will be released soon.  I felt the contact and opportunity were significant. Tony was a guy from the past (Saturn return), who was proposing something expansive (Jupiter). Sure, we’re interested, we told him. What’re the details?

The details are as intriguing as the bigger picture. The editor for these bookazines is Bob Guccione, son of the man by the same name who started Penthouse – and OMNI Magazine,  for whom we wrote shortly after we were married. In those days, OMNI was a slick cutting edge magazine that featured articles about the frontiers of knowledge (the Monroe Institute, for example) and fiction by well known writers.

We wrote for their anti-matter section, on UFOs, the paranormal, and they paid better than any other magazine, anywhere, and they also paid a kill fee if they didn’t publish what you’d written. Through OMNI, we met Betty Hill and Budd Hopkins.    For us, professionally, that connection was huge.

So when we learned that Guccione’s son would be the editor for these bookazines,  we recognized the synchros- astrologically and otherwise. Today, October 9, as Jupiter forms an exact conjunction with my Gemini sun (16 degrees) and is right in the middle of Rob’s financial area, we got our contracts for our first two bookazines, Sexy Horoscopes and Ghosts and Spirit Guides, with two more to follow next month on UFOs and lost everythings – ships, planes, people, continents.

These bookazines are short – between 14,000-20,000  words (a book/novel runs between 60,000 to 150,000 words, and some are MUCH longer), so we’ll still have time to write our other stuff. And the topics we’ve proposed are about things that interest us. The bookazines are also a visual feast, beautifully laid out, and are filled with information you might not find anywhere else, not in one place.

So, since June, we’ve been fortunate enough to connect with two visionaries – David Wilson at Crossroad and Tony Seidl – who recognized a niche in the market and are filling it. Wherever there are endings, there are also beginnings and new opportunities.

Perhaps this is what the paradigm shift is about – finding new ways of doing things, new ways to connect not only with other people, but with a deeper part of ourselves, and to enjoy these new connections. It seems that everywhere I look, everyone I know, is going through this reconnection in some way. Some people hate it and are locked in a kind of spiral of despair. But other people are adapting, are redefining themselves  so that it works for them.

Going with the flow: isn’t that part of what synchronicity is about?

Posted in astrology, bookazines, synchronicity | 13 Comments

An invisible visitor?

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Since I’m working on a tight deadline for book about ghosts and spirits, I was wondering earlier today that if my concentration would attract any of the spirit beings I’m writing about. I figured if something happened today in that respect, it certainly would be a synchronicity.

As the evening wore on, I decided to take a break and watch an episode of the new season of Dexter. No  ghosts had appeared in my office, but plenty in my head as I’d written for several hours.

One scene in Dexter made me laugh. A stripper was talking to a cop on the show and told him that she wasn’t going to stay in this business. “I have big plans. I want to start my own business as a dog walker.”

A few minutes after the show ended, Megan – our dog-walking daughter–called, and I told her about the scene. She laughed and then told me a bit of trivia about the show that is a synchro of sorts in the same vein.

Michael C. Hall, the actor who plays Dexter Morgan is now divorced from Jennifer Carpenter, who plays Dexter’s sister. (They met on the set, married, and divorced and continued their fictive roles all the while.) Now Michael Hall has a new girlfriend, Megan said, and “Guess what her name is?  Morgan MacGregor!”

Good one, I told her. Then, shortly after hanging up, I noticed a small manicure scissors on the floor of the closet in my office. It was in plain view and I’d never seen it before. It turned out that Trish had lost it a month ago, and had looked all over for it. Oddly enough, she very rarely goes into that closet. So we wondered how it had gotten there.

While talking about it I suddenly smelled a strong scent of lavender and asked Trish if she’d just put it on some scented hand lotion or something smelling of lavender. Nope. Then she smelled it, too, and said, “It’s that book you’re writing. You’re attracting this stuff.”

Hm, maybe so.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 16 Comments