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Mercury, the trickster planet, rules the signs of Gemini and Virgo and governs communication, travel, contracts, moving parts, your conscious awareness, and the intellect, among other things. Three times a year, it turns retrograde for about three weeks and daily life tends to get, well, fairly screwed up. Here’s the kind of thing I mean.

During the last retrograde, which occurred between May 19 and June 10, in Gemini, our washing machine broke down. It simply stopped spinning. Now, the common wisdom for these retrograde periods consists of a list of DO NOTs and among them is DON’T buy appliances, electronics, or any other high ticket item, especially one with moving parts. But there was no way I was going to do laundry in the swimming pool and pounding clothing against rocks. So I called a repair service. The verdict? The motherboard in the washing machine was shot and it would cost nearly as much to replace it as it would to buy a new washing machine.

We chose a machine from Lowe’s and when the email confirmation came through, realized we had ordered a dryer, not a washing machine. We cancelled that order and ordered the washing machine. The night before the delivery, we got a call about when the dryer would be delivered the next day. I called and explained the situation and was told the washing machine wouldn’t be delivered for another week.

By the time it was delivered, we were two weeks into the retrograde and I had been using our neighbor’s washing machine.

Today, September 17, Mercury turns retrograde in Libra and won’t turn direct again until October 9. So, I began preparing myself for the list of DO NOTS. In addition to the DO NOTs above, these include: do not sign contracts, make travel plans or, if possible, don’t travel great distances at all because your itinerary may change without warning. Do not submit manuscripts, make deals, hire new employees.

Yesterday, when Mercury was slowing down, I got a taste of what this retro may be like for me. I needed a mouse for my laptop, so I headed over to the closest outlet, a Walgreen’s. It was pouring rain and I darted into the store, found a wireless mouse, rather than one with a retractable cord. I bought it because I didn’t feel like driving around in the rain, looking for what I wanted. As I ran back out to the car, I realized I hadn’t seen anything on the box that indicated I could use the mouse on a Mac. So once I was in the car, I opened the box and looked at the directions. Not for use on a Mac. I went back inside, returned it, got my refund. Then I headed over to a small ATT store to buy my mouse.

Now it was pouring buckets. And, uh-oh, the store was no longer there. So I headed to Publix. Hurray! They had a mouse with a retractable cord. All of this suggested that the retrograde might involve inconveniences like this, where you’re running around like the proverbial dog chasing its tail.

While I was running inside Publix, however, I received an email from an editor about the deadline for a project that, as far as I knew, hadn’t been negotiated yet. This email suggests that the retrograde might entail missing communications rather than MIScommunications.

By the time I got home – with my retractable cord mouse! – I’d heard from our agent that we’d received an offer on our book about precognition.

So yesterday, I had a glimpse of the texture of this Mercury retrograde. Inconveniences? Fine. But what I also understood was that projects that seemed to have stalled or been forgotten, may come roaring back once again!

Mercury retro affects everyone. But if you’re a Gemini or a Virgo, ruled by Mercury, or a Libra,  the sign in which Mercury turns retrograde, it’s up close and personal. To find out which areas of your life will be  most affected, go here for a free birth chart and look for where Libra is in your chart – the 7th symbol in this little chart.

And do share your retro stories! We are going to be traveling during this retro and even though the plans were made long before the retro started, we’ll see what unfolds.

Here it is, folks. The emblem for American politics for the presidential run in 2016. Donald Trump’s hair

Seriously?

This is the best the Republicans can do? Trump? The blowhard who is beating the supposed front runner – Jeb Bush – in all the polls? The dude with the strange hair whose foreign policy seems to consist of building a fence across the southern border of the country and nuking Iran? The racist who refers to Mexican immigrants as thieves and rapists? The guy who is on wife #3 and yet apparently hates women?

I make deals, plenty of deals, he yells at a recent rally. And the Iran deal is a very bad deal.

Gag.

American politics, more than a year away from the 2016 presidential election, is a carnival of mutants, with 16 or 17 candidates on the Repub side (I’ve lost the exact count). On the other side, Hilary is the supposed front runner for Democrats even though she’s losing in several recent polls to Bernie Sanders – a supposed outlier independent senator from Vermont,

The mainstream media refuses to take Bernie seriously and never mind that he draws larger crowds than Hilary everywhere he goes. (That’s a significant link!) Never mind that his populist message resonates. He couldn’t possibly win the nomination, could he? His role, after all, was supposed to be that of the outlier who pushes Hilary farther to the left. But oh, guess what. He has an incredible momentum all his own.

And then there’s the media manipulation in the Republican debates about who can appear in the real debates and who will be assigned to the “kid’s table.” Fox News started this format with the first Repub debate and CNN is continuing it – with some bending of the rules – for the second debate on September 16. Tonight.

Really? Why not let all 16 or 17 candidates duke it out in real time? Let people see the racism and misogynistic truth about the Republicans. Let them see how these bozos still hope to overturn ObamaCare and rip health coverage away from the millions who are already benefiting from it. And do they have a plan for these people once affordable health care is torn away from them? Well, yes. DIE.

Then there are the real extremes among the Repub candidates- like Senator Ted Cruz, who bears an eerie physical resemblance to Joseph McCarthy, and Mike Huckabee – who supported the wacko Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Isn’t that like a law in the 60s that forbade the marriage between a black and a white? And oh, guess what. Even though she broke the law as an elected official, she was released from jail with Huckabee at her side.

Seriously?

Who are these guys? What retro era did they crawl out of?

If there’s a synchronicity in all of this, I think it lies in the paradigm shift this planet is going through. The old just isn’t going out with a whimper. It’s fighting hard to remain relevant and the stakes are huge. For the most part, Republicans are climate-change deniers; advocate war over diplomacy; love babies until they’re born and then, well, sorry, you’re on your own; dislike women and Latinos and anyone else who isn’t an aging white male; seek to defund Planned Parenthood, a woman’s health organization; and are locked in some early 19^th century idea of how the world works and why.

Listen up, aging white guy politicos. You know who you are – Boehner, Cruz, Huckabee, Trump, Bush (not another one!), Chris Christie, Lindsey Graham, etc etc. Here are some statistics that should be quite sobering for you about the face of the electorate not too far down the road.  Or about the plight of the planet now and in the very near future.

You Repubs have your minority candidates – Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who believes that the Affordable Care Act is “the worst thing that has happened since slavery,” and Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard who bankrupted the company. Hey, great. But I’m clueless about why any minority of any color or gender would choose to be associated with the Republican party.

My dog would do a better job of running this country than any of you.

If we are going to evolve as individuals of a collective humanity, of a species on a planet with resources stretched to the limit, then a new paradigm will be born. But it’s apparent that birth won’t be easy, that it may be breech, that it may require extraordinary measures.

I don’t think I can stomach watching the Repub presidential debates tonight. But if any of you are that brave, let us know what you think about what they said.

We first posted this synchro when our blog was about a week old. It remains one of my personal favorites, an eerie precognitive synchro involving numbers.

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Wolfgang Pauli, a physicist and Nobel laureate, was an early supporter of Jung’s theory on synchronicity and investigated the phenomenon as well. He had a rather striking experience with a set of numbers. Pauli was confounded by one of the unsolved mysteries of modern physics, the value of the fine structure constant, which involves the number 137. As author and physicist F. David Peats explained, “…while the other fundamental constants of nature are all immensely small or enormously large, this fine structure constant 1/137 turns out to be a human-sized number. This number…and its place in the scale of the universe particularly puzzled Pauli.”

When Pauli was admitted to the hospital at the age of 58 for a routine operation and learned he would be in room 137, he supposedly said, “I will never get out of here.”

And he was right. He died shortly afterward.

When it comes to communication with living things that are not human, many of us tend to become skeptical. Do animal communicators really hold conversations with dogs, cats and even wild creatures? Or, are they saying how an animal might respond…if they could think like a human?

Let’s take that a step further. How about communication with plants? Is that possible? In his non-fiction book, Travels, Michael Crichton talks about communicating with a cactus during a New Age workshop. At first, the cactus wouldn’t say a thing, but finally after days Crichton describes his conversation with the somewhat sickly looking plant that wasn’t getting enough sunshine.

Let’s take it another step. How about communicating with a tree that provides a precognitive message? That story follows. It comes from a beautifully written book called, Partnering with Nature: The Wild Path to Reconnecting with the Earth, by Catriona MacGregor (yes, one of the clan).

She describes arriving home from the office in Oregon late one evening. It was already dark on a moonless night. She was carrying a bag of groceries as she walked carefully up the unlit stone path to her house. “As I turned the corner to walk through the dark, empty lot next to my house, I saw a soft, glowing light. A golden-white light illuminated the lot warmly, like the delicate rays of the first morning sun.”

To her surprise, the strange light seemed to be emanating from a large tree in the lot. “I searched around for a more plausible source of the light, yet I could find none.” After going inside and putting her groceries down, she returned for another look. She expected to see only darkness. “Instead, the tree illuminated the lot and surrounding buildings as brightly as if the moon had come to rest gently on the soft grass.” A deep sense of peace, beauty and joy enveloped her.

“…I knew that the light was the fire of the tree’s divine spirit—the tree’s very soul. There are no words to describe that which is known as intimately as a lover and yet remains unfathomable.”

The next day, she returned home earlier than usual. “When the empty lot next to our house came into view, I was stunned. What I saw was not the beautiful tree that I had communed with less than a day before. Instead, I saw a ghastly two-foot stump surrounded by tiny clumps of wood arbitrarily spewed around the lot….My sadness was immeasurable. Yet, I also recognized the miracle that had occurred. The tree, knowing of its impending demise, shone forth its inner light, sharing its everlasting soul with the rest of the world as if to say: Behold, I am more than bark and limbs and leaves and roots. I am eternal beauty and wonder. Celebrate and honor what I am and recognize that we are one and the same, as this marvel exists within yourself as well.”

Beautiful story, a precognitive tree.

This video is absolutely amazing. Thanks to Lauren Raines for posting the link on her website.

When we spoke at a Writer’s Conference in Tallahassee, Florida last April, one of the  writers we met was Terry Crowley. We posted a synchro she experienced concerning an eagle feather, and the other day she emailed us another about a possible encounter she had with a type of alien known as a Nordic.

There are a lot of images of Nordics on the Internet, but the one above seems to exhibit most of the characteristics I’ve heard about.

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Trish – I was surprised to see you on “Weird or What” today!!  I was streaming the show, hoping to find something that would keep my 89-year-old mother interested.

I took this as a synchro to write to you about an encounter I had at a movie theater.  I hope I haven’t already written to you about this.

I was standing in the concession line at our local AMC.  There was an extremely tall, blonde man in front of me. My eyes were about level with his belt.  I am 5’6″, so I am not sure how tall that would make him. I wondered to myself if he was a Nordic.  I looked at the girl he was with who was leaning against the counter facing me and glaring at me. She was average height.  I looked away, thinking she must be mad that I am noticing his extreme height.

Then I thought, “I wish I had a free small popcorn coupon.”

As soon as I had the thought, the man turned around and handed me a coupon for a small popcorn. I said, “Thank you! I was just thinking about this.”

He said nothing, and then handed a man in the other line a coupon. He paid and he and the woman left. I am kicking myself for not watching them walk away, but the line was long and I was next up.

Have you ever heard of any similar stories? I have read that not only are the Nordics blonde and very tall, they are also telepathic. So, do you think I might have had a

Nordic encounter?  If nothing else, you can file this away in case someone else has an experience like this.

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Here’s an interesting description of these beings. Has anyone else had an encounter like Terry’s?

Recently, we received a note on our blog’s contact form from Brooke Smith. She’s 34 years old, has two children and lives in Meridian, Mississippi. Her experience is an example of what author and psychiatrist Bernard Beitman calls simulpathity – feeling another’s distress at a distance.

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Hi my name is Brooke Smith and I am 34 years old. I recently came across an article on planetary empaths that I found to be interesting. I have had a similar experience and wanted to share with you and get your opinion on what happened to me.

I will begin by saying I have always been intuitive and often have random thoughts or flashes of events that later happen. In April, 2012, my mother was brutally murdered, along with two others. I was very close to my mother until a few months before her death. She was involved with a man who I believe was evil. He murdered her and his own parents.

My mother was killed after midnight on April 6, 2012, making it April 7 in actuality. She was a nurse and had injured her back working. She also started having kidney stones and various other health problems and I believe he was making her physically sick.

On April 6, I got home from work and was bent over looking at the newspaper when I got a catch or something in my back. I began having pain like I’ve never before felt. I’m perfectly healthy and have never had back problems. I was able to get to my bed and could do nothing except roll in bed, writhing in pain. I literally thought I was going to die. This went on until about 3:00 a.m. and then stopped as suddenly as it started. I’ve never had another issue with my back. It was odd to me and I wonder if somehow I was able to feel the pain my mother was in at that time. Investigators believe it was about 3:00 a.m. when she died. We didn’t find out she was dead until the evening of the 7th, about 8:30 p.m.

The man who murdered my mother was named Anthony Garrett. The evening of April 7, 2012, he climbed a 300-foot cell tower and fell or jumped. Before he fell or jumped, he had been screaming at a crowd of onlookers that he had killed his family. But I’m not sure he acted alone in the murders and have several reasons.

I worked for an attorney’s office from 2008 to 2013 as a legal secretary. Since my mother was killed, I can’t focus or stay on task. There are a million thoughts, ideas , and flashes going thru my head all the time. I sense how others feel….I guess that’s what it is. I’m always anxious, nervous, and edgy. I haven’t been holding it together very well. I’m separated from my husband now. We were together since 1999 and got married in 2011.

Please help. I can’t get past my mother’s death and have so many unanswered questions.

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I was struck by the similarities between Brooke’s experience and that of  Bernard, who began choking at the same moment that his father choked to death on the other side of the country. I sent Bernard Brooke’s story and he replied, Yes, sounds like simulpathity for sure!

I asked Brooke if she had felt her mother’s presence at any time since her murder. She replied:

You asked if I felt my mother’s presence……I do not. I look for signs in everything…..this has nearly pushed me past the breaking point, yet I feel as if my purpose is to dig deeper and gain every bit of knowledge and insight that comes my way. Feel free to share my story if you’d like. Also, before my mother was killed I always had the most vivid dreams. I could recall them also. Since her death I’ve had no dreams that I can recall. I’m not sure I can dream anymore.


Thanks for reading this and trying to help.

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Does anyone have any insights that might help Brooke?

September 8 is the official publication date for Unlocking the Secrets to Scorpio.

Fiction and non-fiction books evolve in different ways.

With a novel, the idea for me often begins with a what if… The what if may be something I’ve mulled over for days, weeks, months, sometimes years. Or it may be triggered by something I recently read, a conversation with someone, a random thought.

Non-fiction books sometimes involve what ifs but often come about because of an intellectual curiosity or a question that begs to be answered, like those questions you probably asked your parents when you were a kid. Mom, why is the sky blue?

Dad, if the earth is round, how come all the oceans don‘t spill out of it? You need to know, so you start digging around for answers and pretty soon, you realize you’ve got a book idea.

Then there are non-fiction books that are generated “in house,” when an editor or publisher  has an idea and queries agents about writers who can run with it. Usually, at least for me, there’s a synchronicity involved in this kind of book. That’s how it was for Unlocking the Secrets to Scorpio.

Last year, my agent – Al – emailed me that a publisher was interested in finding an astrologer to write a book about Scorpios and would this interest me? The query itself struck me as somewhat odd. I’ve written a number of astrology books, but in 30 years have never received this sort of query: write about one sign. Most publishers want something broader – like stuff about all twelve signs. I suspected two things immediately: that the publisher was a Scorpio and because I have that sign rising in my chart, I should come up with an outline that would illustrate how I would write such a book.

Also, my interests for most of my life have been Scorpionic – reincarnation, life after death, communication with the dead, synchronicity, the paranormal, astrology, ghosts. In addition, the 8^th house in astrology is ruled by Scorpio, and I have a jammed 8^th house. So I came up with a table of contents and sent it to Al and pretty soon, the publisher – Will- and I were emailing back and forth about this proposal.

In these email exchanges, I discovered that Will is a Scorpio married to a Scorpio, has two Scorpio sons, and a Scorpio sister-in-law. Wow. Trust me. This is a lot of raw emotional and psychic energy in a single family. I thought, Okay, he wants answers. Then I discovered something else, a statistic.

According to this site, as of 2012, the mot common zodiac sign is Scorpio. These folks make up nearly ten percent of the population. Virgo follows with a close second at 9.4% of the population, then:

Gemini – 9.3%

Pisces – 9.1%

Libra – 8.8%

Cancer – 8.5%

Taurus — 8.3%

Capricorn – 8.2%

Aries – 8.1%

Sagittarius – 7.3%

Leo – 7.1%

Aquarius – 6.3%

So yes, Will was curious – who wouldn’t be with that kind of raw energy swirling around you 24/7?- but it’s also a brilliant marketing tactic. Take the most common sign – which happens to be the most complex and profound – and publish a book about it. Who are these Scorpios? How are they doing what they’re supposedly so good at – transforming the world?

Take a look at this really small sampling of famous Scorpios:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe – Carl Sagan, November 9

To whom much is given, much is expected. I do believe this. It’s embedded in me – Tim Cook , November 1

Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success. -Napoleon Hill, October 26

Probably my worst quality is that I get very passionate about what I think is right. Hillary Clinton, October 26

Believe you can and you’re halfway there– Theodore Roosevelt, October 27

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction – Pablo Picasso, October 25

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be – Kurt Vonnegut, November 11

So, I wrote the book from a relationship perspective. Dating a Scorpio. Married to a Scorpio. A kid whose mom or dad is a Scorpio, a parent with a Scorpio kid, a Scorpio sibling.   You get the idea. Each of these relationships is taken through the twelve signs, and has specific information about how to deal with the Scorpio in your life.

A week before the book was published, I went to Amazon to get the links and discovered the book already had a review. I was somewhat confused by this until I discovered that Amazon has a program called Vine, where their top reviewers take a look at free products – i.e., advance copies of books – and review them. And I admit I got a kick out this person’s review:

Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product

I have never in the past given astrology a second thought or cared much about it, beyond thinking it was the work of Satan as a youngster thanks to my mother’s brainwashing “not for profit” church. I saw this book, and thought it would be interesting, as I am a Scorpio. It helped me to give astrology a second thought and, indeed, I believe there is something to it

That first sentence – about the reviewer thinking as a kid that astrology is the work of Satan…It so fits a Scorpio. Many Scorpios seem to deal with bottom line issues that that involve enormous contrasts and leave little room for nuance. Good/evil. God/Satan. Love/hate.

I also got a kick about this line: The writing is fine, but it is her second job, so it is not sublime.

Writing is what I do full-time, so I’m not sure what the reviewer meant by this. Maybe she was referring to the fact that I also write fiction. Who knows? At any rate, here’s an excerpt – the introduction – about astrology and synchronicity.

Amazon, print book-  $10.14

Amazon, ebook- $9.99

Angel Falls is the world’s longest uninterrupted waterfall, located in Canaima National Park in the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela. Years ago, Trish and I spent several days in the vast park and flew close to the falls in a small plane. Trish grew up in Venezuela so it was a homecoming trip for her.

On that journey, we learned about the synchronicity of Angel Falls. When you see the video that’s linked here, you will glimpse the mysterious majesty of the fall and you might even think you see an angel in the mist.

However, surprisingly the falls obtained its name from an American aviator, Jimmie Angel, who discovered the great falls in the early 1930s. However, no one believed his story because maps of the region didn’t show any such enormous geological feature. Finally, on March 24, 1935 his story was verified when he flew his Flamingo plane over the falls with representatives of an American mining company. Realizing the falls had no known name, they dubbed it Angel Falls.

One of the miners, L.R. Dennison, wrote about his adventures with Jimmie Angel in a book called, Devil Mountain.  The mountain is now called Auyan-tepui. No doubt if Jimmie’s last name was Smith, the name of the falls would not have lasted to this day. But Angel Falls is perfect.

Jimmie Angel and Angel Falls became better known after Oct. 9, 1937 when Angel crash landed his Flamingo atop the tepui. He and the other crash survivors hiked for days until they reached a village. You can read more about Jimmie Angel’s adventures here.

Here’s an incredible video of Angel Falls:

As an addendum, it should be noted that no doubt the native population in the region had known about the falls for centuries and had a name for it. In that sense, this story is a latter day version of the idea of Columbus discovering America as if no one already lived there.

Some weeks back, we posted an interesting owl synchro that Kerrie had experienced. One of the comments was from Gail Provost Stockwell,  a friend we have known for years. She and her deceased husband, Gary, started the successful Write It, Sell It workshops. Here was Gail’s comment:

Here’s a synchro for you! While I was running errands earlier this afternoon, I had my radio tuned into my favorite station: Sirius XM 123–PRX, Radio Remix. All stories, all the time. True stories. Although I missed the start of the story I quickly “got” that it was about one lawyer who, despite immense ridicule, theorized that the bloodied woman found dead inside her home at the foot of the staircase was not murdered that night as everyone else believed — (by her husband, I’m guessing only because I missed hearing the story’s ending) . Anyway, he put forth the cause of her death as follows: she had gone outside for some reason such as to take out the garbage, and on her way back to the house, she suddenly was attacked by an owl. Somehow she made it inside, but the blood was gushing, and the pain struck her down.

What this lawyer noticed that no one else had picked up was that among the forensic details he saw this was an owl feather —microscopic, in her hair. Turns out he was right. Owls who attack humans strike with sharp talons that might just as well be made of steel, I suppose. They are known, these particular owls, for spiking into the lower right hand corner of the back of a human head. And so it goes.

But, OWL STORIES? Two of them? Only hours apart? I ‘m not an owl gal. What’s the message . . .I wonder. Better go look this up in my book, ANIMAL SPEAKS. Cheers!

I wrote Gail on Facebook and warned her that a third owl synchro would probably occur soon. Sure enough, she wrote me today that the third owl had shown up through an image a Facebook friend of hers had posted:

…Don’t know if this is for real, or photo shopped, according to others who also responded to the photo. Perhaps, there we go. Perhaps that’s the message. In which reality does this darling creature exists? Which reality calls to me? To you? The power of choice. Power of thought, emotion, intuition.

I said that it didn’t matter if it was photo shopped. The point is that it was her third owl synchro in a matter of days.

 Among indigenous people, owls are believed to be messengers between the living and the dead, and symbolize hidden knowledge, wisdom, the occult. They have also been associated with alien abductions. We’ve done a number of posts about owls (put the word in our search box) and in looking back over them, I ran across this story. It was about the one-legged burrowing owl (that beautiful owl in the photo at the top of the post) that warned us about the impending death of my mother, the most powerful personal synchro I’ve ever experienced.

It was posted on August 13, 2010, but in the actual post, the date I was writing it is noted. I was stunned. I wrote that post (August 7, 2010) exactly five years ago today (August 7, 2015). This is the kind of stuff that happens with owl synchros.