The Psychometrist and the Holy Water

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Trish and Rob

One of the unexpected perks of our daughter living in Orlando is that we usually end up detouring for a night in Cassadaga, a Spiritualist community half an hour north of Disney World. The last several times we’ve gone there, we’ve stayed in nearby Lake Helen, at Cabin on the Lake, a B&B owned by a British couple, Heather and her husband.

On this trip, we’ve brought along the vial of holy water that Charles Fontaine had been carrying during the year since his UFO encounter. He had mailed it to Rob sealed up in a Baggie and neither of us had touched the glass container, just the upper edges of the Baggie  in which Charles had mailed it. Rob thought it was best that I get the reading on the holy water, since he had spoken to the psychometrist, Kathy, about the UFO encounter when we had seen her in April. So while I headed up the steps to Kathy’s place, he took the two dogs on a bike ride around Spirit Lake.

I was surprised that I got in right away, that no one was waiting. “All alone?” I asked. “I can’t believe it.”

“Ha! Come back on Saturday and Sunday.”

We chatted a bit about the terrible heat, the hurricane and tropical storm out there somewhere. I brought out the Baggie. “It belongs to someone else.” I handed her the Baggie and noticed a change in her expression that I didn’t understand until later. “No one else has touched it since he mailed it. You can take it out.”

She did so, tucked one foot up under her body, and held the tiny vial between her thumb and forefinger and closed her eyes.

I realized I had already revealed that the owner of the vial was male. But I couldn’t take it back now.  Her fingers moved over the glass. “Is this gentleman in a northern city? I see a lot of snow around him.”

“Yes, in Canada.”

“There’s a lotta stuff going on around him…not necessarily spiritual stuff, but, umm… abnormal occurrences. He’s having a difficult time knowing what’s real and what isn’t.  His significant other is going against what he wants to do. She just wants to forget what happened.”

Okay, she’s tuned into it, I thought, and Kathy  paused and rubbed her fingers over the vial again.

“A gentleman who lives far away from him is trying to help and this gentleman ((the Canadian)  is telling him more and more. You know both of these men.”

If the man she’s referring to is Rob, then yes and no.  Rob has been communicating with Charles since the beginning  and I “know” Charles only through emails and their Skype conversations, as related by Rob.

“Someone who passed away, a relative, has been trying to communicate with this gentleman.”

I thought this reference might relate to Charles’ and his deceased uncle and the first post we did on the encounter.

“He has other spirits around him now who aren’t related to him, a different set of guides, who are trying to help him place things in perspective.”

Kathy went on to say that within a year, Charles would move and that it would be positive for him. He would still keep his present home.

At this point, I gave her some history.  “The vial belongs to a French Canadian guy who had a UFO encounter and was so freaked out that he started carrying that holy water to protect himself.”

She looked relieved. “I work part-time as an ER nurse. When you first handed me this vial, I thought it was filled with urine! I see it all the time in ER. I never expected holy water.” Now I understood the initial expression on her face when I had handed her the Baggie. She leaned forward slightly in her chair. “They won’t be back. This was a one-time deal.”

“So he was abducted?”

“Definitely.”

“But what was the purpose?”

She thought a moment, rubbed her fingers over the vial again. “Entertainment.”

I thought about that.   Entertainment?  You blow open some random guy’s head for fun?  Well, why not? I’ve never read anything to that effect–that the Grays sometimes undertake abductions just for fun–but who’s to say it’s not possible? We humans have done worse. Maybe it’s what some bored aliens do on Saturday nights. It may sound offensive to experiencers who have endured decades of abductions, but what do we humans actually know about any of it?

Kathy handed me the Baggie, with the vial of holy water inside. “I’m glad it isn’t urine,” she said. “But I feel bad for the gentleman. His life burst open because of this.  And now he’s investigating, researching, digging around for answers. And his significant other just wants to forget it and move on and maybe get their house exorcised.”

As I got up to leave a few minutes later, I asked Kathy if we could use her full name. “Sure. I’m Kathy Adams,” she said.

“Trish MacGregor,” I said, and we shook hands and I hurried outside to find Rob and the dogs.

Kathy’s Place (here) is across the street from the Cassadaga Hotel and its restaurant. Note the name.

 

 

 

 

Posted in psychometry, quebec ufo encounter, synchronicity | 15 Comments

Connected

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Last Christmas when Santa brought me an iPad, I was thrilled. I had done quite a bit of research on this gizmo, online, at the Apple store, and asking   writer friends what it could and couldn’t do. I was trying to get some sense of how I might be able to write a book on it. The consensus was that writing a book on the iPad might be possible if you have a keyboard and Pages, but it wouldn’t be any writer’s first choice. However, the iPad, they agreed, does everything else.

“Like what?” I asked.

Your e-mail is easier to pick up

Cool apps

And, my personal favorite – you’re always connected.

But did any of that justify the price of an iPad?

Well, that depends. In the six months I’ve had  iPad2, I’ve tested that Internet connection: at the gym, in the supermarket, on road trips, while getting my hair cut. No matter where I am, I can be electronically connected to the larger world- and to the people I care about most. I can conduct business, purchase a book, read a book, edit a manuscript, write and reply to e-mail. But in the back of my mind, I have always known  the ultimate iPad test would happen during a hurricane.

In 2004 and 2005, when the hurricane season was particularly active, we invariably lost electrical power. In one of those years, we lost power for a week. In the other year, we didn’t have power for 10 days.  During the 10-day outage, we plugged into a neighbor’s generator ad at least got the fridge powered up. I used to open the door and stand in front of it just to cool down.  In both years, I notice that cell reception returned within a day or two.  I remembered this fact when I was doing my research about the iPad.

Today, May 29, two days before the official hurricane season starts, we got a taste of that power outage. A cell of thunderstorms swept in over our county, thunder, lightning, 60 mph winds, the whole Olympian tempest. Our electricity went off at 2:30. Our landline didn’t work, so I called our neighbor on my cell and asked if her electricity was off, too. Yes, it was. Okay, time to report this to Florida Power and Light, I thought, and got out my iPad.

I use ATT for my cellular connection on the iPad. I activated it, went online, reported the outage to FPL,  then used their interactive map to find out where the outages were and to keep tabs on the status of repair. I was able to check the local radar, the National Weather Service, and to answer some email.  Even though this storm was just a violent weather cell passing through, the power failed, the cell towers didn’t. I was always connected.

During a Category 3 hurricane or higher, cell reception probably would be lost because cell towers would go down. But unless those towers snapped in half, they would probably come back online more quickly than the electrical grid. So what purpose might an iPad (or iPhone, for that matter) serve during or in the aftermath of a major hurricane?

Let’s take Hurricane Andrew,  which slammed into South, Florida 20 years ago, in 1992, and decimated Homestead.  Granted, there was barely an Internet in1992, at least not for most of us. But if there had been and if the cell signal held during even part of the storm, I would have live radar that showed  where the worst cells were located, where tornadoes might be, and where the center of the storm was. I would know which side of the storm was the strongest and whether I needed to take extra precautions – like hide in my bathtub with a mattress over me, as one friend had to do. And in the aftermath, once the cell towers were back online, I would know where I could find help, food, water, and everything else I needed to know.

Of course, in the aftermath of a Cat 5 storm the cell towers probably wouldn’t come back online any faster than electrical power, which means you have to rely on battery-operated radios or TVs for news. These venues are better than nothing, but there’s something empowering about holding this iPad gizmo in your lap and hopping around at your own discretion to find useful news. While using FPL’s interactive map, I discovered that only 63 homes had power outages and one of the areas pinpointed on the map was close to the yoga studio where Rob’s meditation class that evening would be held. He used his cell to e-mail the owner of the  studio about whether she had power. She didn’t. She was using candles.

For me, this inconvenient power outage confirmed a couple of things:

–       This is NOT my parents’ world

–        I love most technology

–       I’m grateful this was  NOT a hurricane

–      I love my iPad

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 12 Comments

11:11 Synchro

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Not too long ago, we did a post on 11s or 11:11, can’t recall which, and Daz from down under  provided a link to a store that sells 11:11 t-shirts.  I checked out the site and bought a t-shirt.

When I first put it on, Rob sort of laughed and said that people would think it was a Biblical reference.  One afternoon, I deliberately wore it next door, wondering if my neighbor, who knows her Bible, would comment. She didn’t. Over a weekend when Megan was home visiting and her friends were stopping in, I happened to be wearing the t-shirt and one of Megan’s friends said,  “Wow, cool t-shirt, Trish. Where’d you get it?”

“Internet. You know what 11:11 is?”

“Sure. It’s, like, some sort of mystical thing, right?  A hint about consciousness?”

“Supposedly, it’s a mystical portal, and people who see it repeatedly are experiencing a particular type of synchronicity that suggests a profound change in their consciousness is happening.”

Her eyes widened. “I need one of those t-shirts. My life right now is so totally chaotic.”  That’s probably because she just turned 23!

I’ve worn the t-shirt  a couple of times while running errands, to the grocery store, and no one has ever commented on it until today, at the dog park.  Cassie, who is often out in the park tossing balls for her Border Collie, was sidelined by the heat, like the rest of us, and was sitting on a bench in the shade. “What’s 11:11, Trish?”

Suddenly, all eyes were on my t-shirt and I felt…well, tongue-tied. I was scrambling for some way to explain 11:11 to someone who didn’t have any inkling about what it might mean. “You know who Uri Geller is?”

The blank look on Cassie’s face said no, she didn’t have any idea who Geller was.

“He’s that Israeli psychic who bent spoons back in the 70s.”

“Oh, right,” she said.

The woman next to her – don’t know her name, just her dogs’ names, Hershey and Tootsie – said, “Geller. Sure. I know who he is. I saw him on TV once, years ago, bending spoons. He came up with that?”

“Well, he helped define it.” I then launched into an abbreviated explanation about the meaning of 11:11 – or 11, 1:11, etc – and their eyes glazed over and I shut up.

I decided that the next time I’m asked about 11:11, I’ll have a better explanation, something really simple. Mystical doorway to the unconscious.  Or: If you’re seeing 11:11, 1:11 or 1s everywhere you look, then your life is about to change, big time. Or: You’re being summoned. Something.

What I took away from this is that we all live in our own little universes and I can’t just assume that because I have heard of Uri Geller and 11:11, everyone around me will have heard of them, too.  Yet, interestingly, I have a t-shirt that reads, Have a Namaste.  Countless people have asked me what that means. And I’ve got an answer that satisfies: “Namaste means, the divine light in me greets the divine light in you.”

Everyone seems to get that.

In fact, one day at our local grocery store, an Indian guy in the fruit section noticed my t-shirt and said, “Namaste. I know that!”

I smiled at him and he pressed his palms together,  brought them to his heart, and bowed his head ever so slightly, acknowledging the moment between us. It’s the gesture we make at the end of yoga class.

Maybe 11:11 needs something like that, a hand gesture or nod of the head that becomes a universal acknowledgement of the transformative power of 11:11.

 

Posted in 11:11, synchronicity | 24 Comments

Where’s the Fire?

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Trish and Rob

We decided to take advantage of Megan’s free passes to Disney before her internship ends, and drove up to Orlando to see her this weekend.  As we approached  Disney’s Epcot Center, we passed billowing cascades of smoke on the edge of the Disney property. We wondered  what was burning, then  continued on.

First, we had to drop off Megan at the employee or ‘crew’ gate so she could go get her Disney ID, which she’d left at the office. We couldn’t park there, so when Megan came back, we had to leave Epcot, then find our way back in through the main entrance. Since Megan doesn’t usually drive that route, we got turned around and missed the entrance.

We ended up back even closer to the fire, which had grown larger, with great billowing dark clouds of smoke that obscured the sky. Several choppers hovered overhead.   We found a place to turn around, and went past the fire again before finding the right entrance and making our way to the parking lot.

Once inside the Epcot Center, we headed for the closest building with air conditioning. We’d been walking about twenty minutes in 90 degree heat and were ready to cool off. The building was called ‘Innoventions’ – a fake word combining innovation and invention. It’s a pavilion and interactive play space about technology for kids.

When we reached the first exhibit, we were startled by a synchronicity. In bold red colors, the title of the exhibit read: Where’s the fire?

Well, we knew the answer to that one. We’d seen it several times, while we were asking ourselves, “Where’s the Epcot Center?”

Megan had never been in that particular building so she was as surprised as we were by the exhibit’s name. Later, we spent half an hour with a couple of dolphins in a private tour of the enormous Living Seas Aquarium, courtesy of Megan and two trainers. It was a fantastic experience and we marveled at the intelligence of the two sleek mammals.

We  were delayed leaving when we had trouble finding a restaurant in Epcot that wasn’t fully booked for dinner. That delay turned out to be a good thing; if we had left directly, we would’ve found ourselves on a long detour because the highway leading back to downtown Orlando was closed. The reason: heavy smoke from the 15-acre brush fire that we’d seen earlier.

But by the time we finished our fish and chips in the British pavilion of the Around the World section of Epcot, the smoke had mostly cleared and the highway was re-opened. As we drove away, it occurred to us that Epcot, which is all about the future, doesn’t have any exhibits that feature the possibility of expanded mental abilities, including telepathy, clairvoyance,  precognition, or other psi abilities. It’s more about hands-on technology than mind-on hi tech tools.

But in spite of that, we had found synchronicity within minutes of stepping into Epcot.

Posted in disney world, synchronicity | 4 Comments

Another Dog Park Story

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Trish and Rob

The place where dogs fly…

***

Okay, some of you may be getting tired of these dog park synchro/stories. But, I promise, this one isn’t about politics. By the way, that’s Nika on the ground, with the ball in her mouth, and Lily the pug leaping for another ball above her.  And oh, this picture hasn’t been photo shopped, as one man on Rob’s facebook suggested about the pic of Noah. I mean, really, these are dogs, not UFOs; who would bother or have the time to photo shop something like this?

++

So here’s what happened. With summer already here and the afternoon thunderstorms a given, we’ve been trying to get to the dog park before the skies open up. Today we got there around 4:15, not too many people there.

Karin and Colleen are sitting on a bench in the shade and their dogs are crowded around them. Hey, they aren’t fools. The sun is hot and the shade is the place to be. The dogs: Starr, a Corgie, and Cody, a husky, belong to Karin; Colleen owns Bronson, Thunder, and Rip.

Colleen has been unemployed for the last year, her unemployment just ran out, and she has been dog sitting, which means the pooches in her care come to the park twice a day and eat a lot of treats in between. Good deal for them, good deal for Colleen, whose owners pay her.

Karin inherited Cody, which was her son’s dog, and what a trickster he is, loveable and mischievous.”Hey,” Karin says. “Where’ve you been?”

“Just busy,” I reply.

“You guys off to see Megan this weekend?”

“You bet. We  want to use our free passes at Disney before her internship ends. We’re going to spend a night in Cassadaga first and ask a psychometrist to read a vial of holy water.”

Judging by the look on Karin’s face – and Colleen’s – I suddenly realize how strange this sounds. Oh hey, yeah, off with our holy water to see what a psychic says about it.Huh? What holy water? WTF are you talking about? I can see these questions on their faces. So I rapidly backtrack.

“A guy in Montreal thinks he may have been abducted. By, you know, aliens. We did some blog posts on it. He has been carrying holy water around with him for a year, as a means of protection. Anyway, we’ve put together a proposal, Aliens in the Backyard, about the abduction experience – his and those of some other individuals.”

Uh-oh. Colleen’s expression screams, HUH? Karin murmurs, “Wow, you lead an interesting life.”

And I haven’t even told them anything else about it. I suddenly realize, oh duh, that in this particular area, these kinds of ideas don’t register for most people. Maybe if we lived in Sedona or Santa Fe or San Francisco,  it would be a different story. Or maybe it’s more about mindset than about  place.

These events happened on Wednesday, May 23, the day before we met with Kathy, the Cassadaga psychometrist who read the vial of holy water that Charles Fontaine of the Quebec encounters carried for a year after his UFO encounter. We’ve written about Kathy before.  In the next couple of days, we’ll post some of Kathy’s impressions  about the vial of holy water and the Quebec encounter.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 10 Comments

10 Signs of Spiritual Awakening

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Trish and Rob

These are somewhat basic, but good reminders. Send to your friends. And don’t forget #10!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txTsbeuY5gM&feature=email

Posted in synchronicity | 10 Comments

Name Synchros

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Trish and Rob

(from soul cards)

It’s not uncommon to meet someone whose first name is the same as your own. In Spanish, such a person is called your “tacayo.”  But have you ever met someone whose first and last name is the same as yours?

The odds of this happening are probably dependent on how common your last name is. My maiden name, for instance, is Janeshutz, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever meet a Trish Janeshutz. But I already know there are a few Trish MacGregors out there; I’ve seen their names on Facebook.

Here’s an odd story from Christine Chamber that addresses this strange thing about name synchros. In some ways, it reminds me of stories about twins separated at birth, who subsequently meet years later and discover all sort of parallels in their lives – like yesterday’s post!

++

Not long after we moved to St. Augustine, I opened my first bank account and learned that another Christine Chamber lived in our town. Her husband was a sheriff’s deputy and her family was old St. Augustine residents. Here’s the bombshell: in 1989, on the front page of our local newspaper, there was a report of a bad traffic accident. Christine Chamber was involved but not seriously injured.

From that article, I learned she was a nurse who worked at Flagler (I worked Home Health FOR Flagler); the auto she was driving was the same MAKE, MODEL, YEAR, and COLOR of my old car; and, she is my age. I was blown away. What are the chances that both of us would have the same name, be the same age, share the same profession, drive a brown sedan of the same model and year? I received a lot of calls from folks thinking it was ME in the wreck. Nope. It was her. Have we ever met? Not yet. But I plan to try to do that one day. I’d like to know what she looks like.

 

Posted in names, synchronicity | 13 Comments

Identical synchros

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Trish and Rob

These twin stories have been around for a long time. But this one certainly drives home the point that twins may be ore connected within Indra’s net that even they suspect!

Posted in synchronicity | 16 Comments

Insights @ the Dog Park

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Noah, leaping for a ball!

++

We’ve written about our dog park before, usually in relation to U.S. politics. Well, this entry is entirely different. Just books and authors and, of course, dogs.

When Nika was younger, we used to take her and Noah into a part of the park intended for smaller dogs. Here, they played Frisbee and catch the ball with Lily, a funny, very focused pug (that’s her to the left of Noah), and Willow, a border collie, whose partial body and tail are visible in the photo.  One afternoon, we dog people stood around and talked about stocks with Ralph, who was once a broker on Wall Street, and Cassie, who owns Willow and tends someone’s  horses.

Cassie is one of those women whose presence tells you she considers her dog, Willow, and maybe all dogs and animals, as a lot of notches above humans. She’s originally from New Jersey, and is a skilled horse person who has made horses her profession. Here where we live, she tends four horses that belong to a wealthy person, that’s’ all we know about her.

This area was built with equestrians in mind. They compete, they play polo, they are pro jumpers and Olympian trainers.  Tommy Lee Jones owns a home here – and his own polo team. Bruce Springsteen lives here part-time because his daughter is an equestrian jumper. For a while, Madonna rented a place and so did Bill Gates. I don’t know if either of them are equestrians, but it was rumored that the chopper we saw flying in over the Aero Club every afternoon belonged to Gates, who had rented a house here for the winter.   But until this particular afternoon, I didn’t know that a famous writer also lives here.

“We’re staying here this summer because my boss has another book to write,” Cassie said.

My antenna twitched.  “Your boss is a writer? Of what?”

Cassie looked embarrassed. “Hell if I know. I’ve never read any of her books.”

“What genre?” I asked. “Does she write romance, science fiction, suspense, paranormal, women’s fiction, or what?”

Cassie frowned. “Mystery and suspense, I guess.”

“What’s her name?”

“Tami Hoag.”

I nearly swallowed my tongue. Tami Hoag, like Stephen King, shines in her field. Her writing is tight, her plots are complex, her characters are people we like. “I would love to get a blurb for her for my next book, Ghost Key.” I blurt this and am, frankly, shocked and embarrassed. Never, in thirty years of writing, have I ever been so forward, blunt, and grossly obvious.  And Cassie, gem that she is, tells me to drop her an email and she’ll forward it to Tami.

So I do. And I tell my friend, writer Ed Gorman,  about it and he jokingly says that he would have held Cassie hostage until Tami had to ride to her rescue and give your book a blurb. Ed isn’t kidding and that speaks volumes about the value of a blurb from someone like Tami Hoag.

Stephen King gave The Hunger Games a glowing blurb, and that book went on to become a NYT bestseller and an enormously profitable film. Of course, it helps that the trilogy deserves accolades.

What’s interesting about Hoag is that she’s also an Olympic competitor. That’s part of the reason she employs Cassie. And being a competitor at that level obviously means  you’re serious about what you do. I emailed my request, then later gave Cassie a galley of the book. A few days  later, she came over to me at the dog park and says, “Okay, I gave Tami the galley you gave me and if she doesn’t blurb it I’ll kill her.”

Not long after, she reported that Tami looked at the galley then gestured at the pile of books next to her desk. “You see this? These are all the books my publisher asked me to blurb. I can’t read one more book. I’ve go to finish the book I’m writing.”

What I took away from this whole thing is pretty simple: writers  who are now in the upper one or two percent were once in the lower one or two percent. They are under tremendous pressure to produce something new because these writers are the ones who probably sustain the publishing industry and pay the salaries of the editors who give manuscripts a thumbs up or thumbs down.

I heard a story,  maybe a writers’ urban legend, that when Stephen King visited the office of NAL (Signet, Penguin, lots of imprints) he moved up and down the hall, pointing at this editor, that editor. “I pay your salary and yours and yours…” And this image of King, a master story teller, made me laugh so hard my ribs actually hurt. It’s not even funny. But I can envision King doing that.

The other detail I took away from this experience is that Cassie, Tami Hoag’s horse whisperer, is a really cool woman who understands horses and dogs in ways the rest of us don’t.  When we see her in the afternoons at the dog park, she and Willow, are playing with the blue ball that is the center of his existence right then, in the NOW, and I am reminded that my life isn’t just about writing and publishing. Writers write, artists paint, musicians create, singers sing,  actors act, we all have some creative compulsion that drives us.  But it’s never the sum total of who they are.

Posted in synchronicity | 34 Comments

Meet Einstein

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Trish and Rob

… a most amazing parrot!

Posted in synchronicity | 8 Comments