This is the first of many posts on our recent trip to Havana. This video is from a Santeria celebration that happens every Sunday and is jammed with people. It’s fascinating to watch this musical enactment of the melding of African and Catholic beliefs. This street was so crowded with people that at one point, when I was trying to get back to our group, I felt agoraphobic, squashed between two lines of dancing human beings!
We don’t get may synchronicities about other star systems. But here’s one about Arcturus, courtesy of Connie Cannon. Connie has provided us many unusual stories over the years. And this one is right up there. Enjoy…and maybe you can even answer her question.
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With permission from the MacGregors, I have a story to share. There is a question in it, and also a profound synchro. So, here goes…..and I promise to not add or omit anything.
Occasionally I have mentioned my Dad here on the blog. That is because during the eighteen years he was in my life prior to his death at 42, he had the most significant and permanent influences on the person I am. When I was in high school, we lived in Arcadia, CA, which is next to Pasadena. Dad, as previously mentioned, was a cattleman. He was strong, extremely grounded, down-to-earth, had been an award-winning athlete in track and field and swimming when he was in school, he was a 33rd Degree Mason, and he was a math genius. But there could never be a sweeter, more kind, more quietly spiritual man.
From the time I was able to walk, he took me with him to the farms and ranches where he bought cattle, and we rode our horses among hundreds of cattle in meadows and pastures and sometimes n pens.
Our home was located ten blocks from the base of the mountains, and on clear days, the white dome of the Mt. Wilson Observatory could be easily seen. From time to time, before he became ill, my Dad would drive me up to the Observatory. Inside, we would sit in reclining chairs in the darkened arena, and the heavens would very slowly revolve around above us, with an unseen narrator describing what we were seeing.
During out initial visit, Dad leaned over and whispered to me, pointing at a very large, very bright orange orb. He said, “Honey, that Star is Arcturus. It is our Home. We came to Earth from there, and we go back to there. It’s our Home”. My Father had never lied to me, and I had no reason to doubt what he was telling me. As I gazed at that bright orange Star, a tremor of a thrill enveloped me. I asked, “Daddy, how did we get here, and how do we go back?” His response: “Deep, deep within the Great Giza Pyramid in Egypt, deeper than Man can go, there is a portal; a vortex. That is our
doorway between Earth and Arcturus. We come and go through that portal.”
I was completely absorbed, enthralled, astonished, and I KNEW, even tho I was only 17, that I was looking at my True Home.
That was in 1958, so of course computers were not available, which meant encyclopedias were the sources for research. I went to World Book and Compton’s and every text on astronomy that WAS available. I learned that Arcturus is close to us, just 37 light years away, and that it is actually a giant red star but appears orange to the naked eye. I learned that it resides in the Constellation Bootes, and other similar facts.
Once in a while I would ask to be taken to the Observatory, and Dad would drive me up the mountain again, and I never ceased feeling such a powerful sense of BELONGING, and of YEARNING, whenever I gazed at Arcturus.
It became totally stunning to me fairly recently…..decades after the fact of learning where I belong. And here is what I learned: Arcturus derives from the Greek words
“arktos”, meaning “bear”, and “ouros”, meaning “guardian”. But THIS is what has blown me away, and it was not available to us in 1958 except perhaps in university library texts. As stated, Arcturus is in the Bootes Constellation, Bootes is pronounced “boo-oh-tees” and it’s meaning? “HERDSMAN” I couldn’t believe what I was reading, because what was my Dad? He was a HERDSMAN, a CATTLEMAN, who spent his working years herding and buying cattle. He could not possibly had known that about Arcturus, except perhaps and probably on his Souls Level.
That is one of the most astonishing synchros I have ever seen, and it simply takes my breath away.
But, I have a question for anyone and everyone on the blog; Is anyone else here who originated from Arcturus? I would so very much like to know!
One more comment…..I had a dear friend for many years, Sherry, who was born eight days after I was born. She lived a few blocks down the beach from us, and was
incredibly spiritually evolved and knowledgeable. (She died three years ago.) Sherry and I often exchanged books, and one day she dropped by to bring me a book. I had never mentioned anything to her about Arcturus. It was something I have felt extremely cautious about disclosing, even to my closest spiritually-minded friends.
The title of the book Sherry brought me that day: “WE, THE ARCTURIANS”. I almost fell to the floor is shock. She told me she had been “guided” to bring me the book….thst SHE was Arcturian! She’s gone Home now.
Are there any more of us HERE?
Thank you all for listening. I’m Homesick, I think.
When I (Rob) was studying journalism at the University of Minnnesota in the late 1960s, I considered H.L. Mencken one of my journalistic heroes. He was brash and outspoken in his columns in the Baltimore Sun in the early decades of the twentieth century. He was a journalist, a satirist and a cultural critic.
Menken was highly critical of religion calling it a hypocritical institution, as the above quote suggests. He opposed America’s entry in both world wars, and certainly would’ve opposed the Vietnam War if he’d been alive. Yet, he wasn’t exactly a pacifist or an isolationist. He spoke out forcefully against the smug and powerful. Truth to power could’ve best described his work.
While Menken supported scientific progress, oddly enough, he despised mathematics and physics and called mathematics a hoax. He repeated the contention often enough to make it clear he wasn’t being satirical. The guy did not like number, and in one column asked how physicists and mathematicians were going to measure infinity.
He was called a racist by his detractors. But while he did point out certain propensities he saw in some ethnic groups, he didn’t defend his own as superior – which is the mark of a racist. In 1923, at a time when a sense of white racial superiority was commonplace, he wrote an essay in 1923 entitled, “The Anglo-Saxon,” in which he argued that if there was such a thing as a pure “Anglo-Saxon” race, it was defined by its inferiority and cowardice. “The normal American of the ‘pure-blooded’ majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen.”
Mecken was impressed with the novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, because much of the book plays on the gullibility and ignorance of country folks who are swindled by con men as witnessed by Huck and Jim as they travel down the Mississippi River. Noting that such country folk are easy marks, Mecken made a cynical sounding prediction in 1920 that today sounds like prophecy. It’s definitely a synchronicity. Here it is…
Verdadero Beach, Cuba
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When we mention to other people that we’re going to Cuba, the reactions are mixed.
Some people think it’s not safe, and yet tourists from Europe and Canada and other countries have been visiting the island for decades. Only Americans have been denied the experience. It’s why the resorts and hotels are so expensive. It’s why there are tours offered for sightseeing spots all over the island. It ‘s why restaurants are divided between government run- and privately owned. The latter supposedly have the best foods and prices. It’s also why airbnb has such an active site for Cuba.
We have 4 days on the island and that means jamming a lot of stuff into that time frame. We’re targeting Matanzas for a day trip. We plan a day of exploring Havana, with some particular spots to see – the Santeria museum, the museum of arts, the finca where Hemingway lived, a restaurant bar where Hemingway, Neruda, Ezra Pound and Graham Greene hung out.
Beyond the city – Matanzas, the city Lonely Planet touts as the place to go. Just beyond Matanzas lies Verdadero, a beach town my Cuban friend Marina describes as the best in the Caribbean, with blonde sand and blue water so exquisite it’s a kind of paradise. There are some caves, too, that we hope to see, with petroglyphs and crystals embedded in the walls, and stalagmites that are nearly forty feet tall.
I hope to meet the descendants of Yoruba slaves who were brought to Cuba, who became the crucible of the Santeria and mystical culture of this island. On Sunday afternoon, we will be in a plaza in Old Havana, watching and listening as santeros play their drums. Lonely Planet describes this as “hypnotic.”
Internet and WiFi are spotty in Cuba, but stayed tuned….! We’re expecting a lot of synchros with this trip.
We live in a collective sea of signs and symbols. Nature, the universe, Source, God, whatever you want to call it, constantly chatters to us. But we’re so mired in the business of physical life that we don’t always hear that voice. Or we hear it and ignore it. Or we hear it and think, Yeah, sure, I’m kinda losing it here.
You’re in your car. Maybe you’re on a road trip. Or picking up your son or daughter from school. Or maybe you’re backing out of your garage to head off to the library, the park, a friend’s house. Your car dies. It just goes flat out dead. What do you do besides call AAA? Your spouse? A friend?
When our daughter was in elementary school, Rob and I had an arrangement. He would take her to school because he was the lark, up at the crack of dawn, and I would pick her up in the afternoon because I’m an owl, rarely in bed before one or two. On this particular day, I was in the pickup line and my car suddenly went dead. There I was, my car refusing to move, cars behind me honking because hey, why wasn’t I moving forward?
In those days, I had a clunky mobile phone, called Rob, and he came over and jumped the car. We got Megan home. There was a message on our answering machine from a writer friend. The literary agent we’d had for 15 years had died suddenly of a heart attack.
Standstill. The battery dies. The car has to be jumped started.
If there are no accidents, as Robert Hopke theorizes in his book by the same name, then the death of the car coinciding with our hearing about the death of this agent isn’t random. This connection, this experience, though, has puzzled me because we had left this agent eight months earlier. I did, in fact, become somewhat superstitious after this about departure, about ending relationships. Less than a year after Kate Duffy, my editor at Kensington, didn’t renew my contract, she died.
Just how are all of us, the dead and the living, connected, anyway? How are we connected to the larger world beyond us? I think of it as synchronicity, that phenomenon that exists between what we see and what we sense, that border between what quantum physicist David Bohm called the implicate (enfolded) order and the explicate (unfolded) order. The inner, the outer. Right brain, left brain.
I’m pretty sure, though, that the next time my car battery goes dead, that I find a dead frog in house (frogs here) that something unexpectedly good happens, signs and symbols will hold a much different importance for me.
The Orange County History Museum is a fascinating repository of Florida history that focuses on the central Florida area from the ancient past to modern times. There are some real gems in this museum, from quirky stuff like recipes of foods people ate in the early days to the struggles of the Seminoles, the evolution of the citrus industry, the dark days of segregation and discrimination against gays. There’s also a moving tribute to the Pulse tragedy.
This next image was particularly moving. We had just seen the superb movie Hidden Figures, about the contributions made by a group of African-American women in the early days of the space program, when separate bathrooms and other facilities existed for blacks and whites.
I remember these logos and images from my childhood, when Anita Bryant was the face of the industry – until her homophobic and beliefs became well-known.
The popularity of Cypress Garden was during this same period:
The museum even addresses Florida’s infamous sinkholes:
And here’s the actual sinkhole:
Here’s the courtroom where Ted Bundy was tried and convicted:
And his name cut into the defense table, totally creepy!
And then the tragedy of Pulse:
This is out of time sequence, but I wanted to end on something positive- the early space program days. This is a replica of the capsule that the women in Hidden Figures helped to launch into orbit.
And our gorgeous daughter in the courtroom
I put this meme up on Facebook for the fun of it awhile back. Kind of silly. But some people liked it. I didn’t think of it as a synchronicity not until about two weeks later when I was sitting at the kitchen table and happened to look up at the painting directly across from. I stared at it, then looked closer and realized…Those are ducks, and it looks like they’re staring at me!
So, yeah, a duck is watching. But I’m still not suffering from anatidaepobia. I fear not these ducks…even though I’ve been eating ducks, courtesy of the neighbors who hunt them in the wetlands. Trish, on the other hand, refuses to eat any ducks.
Here’s the watching ducks.
And happy Valentine’s Day! Be sure to hug the ones you love!
There are people in the world doing wonderful and compassionate things for animals. I ran across this video this evening on a great site called Great Big Story – positive news!
And today is noble Noah’s 8th birthday! Not sure how we’ll celebrate… Dog park visit, maybe a bite to eat at Darbster’s. Here he is at the opening of Wolfgang Dog Bakery in Orlando, where our daughter Megan had her pet portrait table set up. Nika to the left, buddy Brody to Noah’s right.
Keith Olberman, who kept me sane during the Bush years, encapsulates Trump’s latest regulation about cats and dogs. It’s disturbing.
I received an e-mail earlier this month from a cousin who I hadn’t seen or talked since I was a teen. A long, long time ago. She was wondering what happened to my mother because her Christmas card to her went unanswered and her phone was disconnected.
I explained that she was living in an assisted living facility and had dementia. I started corresponding with Barbara and she told me about her haunted Victorian house. Well, formerly haunted. She’d found a medium who removed reticent spirits and was successful. Barbara provided a lot of details that I’ve already incorporated – with her permission in a book – STRANGE THINGS: True Tales of Alien Encounters and Paranormal Experiences – that I was just completing. When she wrote, I was working on the last chapter, which was called Haunting Experiences. A synchro there.
Barbara told me she wanted to visit my mother and I gave her the address. A snowstorm and the flu outbreak at the facility slowed the reunion. Recently, when my sister was visiting our mother, she called me and I told them both about Barbara’s plans. My sister was too young to remember her, and at first my mother didn’t know who I was talking about. Then she remembered and what she said to me was startling: “Barbara lives in a haunted house.”
Wow! I hadn’t said anything to her or my sister about Barbara’s story. So thinking logically, I figured Barbara had written about it in the Christmas letter, which my mother had finally gotten. Later, I e-mailed Barbara and she said, “I didn’t tell her anything about ghosts.” She was not only perplexed by the comment, but concerned that my mother had used the present tense! Barbara doesn’t want any more ghosts around!
So the very next day she visited my mother, who didn’t recognize her or remember who she was, even though I’d told her about the upcoming visit. They chatted awhile and my mother did remember Barbara’s mother, Elaine. There was no mention of ghosts, but Barbara noticed, as my sister and I also have, that she seemed to converse on the side with invisible people. Dementia, I guess. But maybe dementia somehow opens the mind to invisible worlds and even to knowledge about things that are outside of her regular awareness – like the ghost story.
We are going to Cuba!
Thanks to Obama opening up diplomatic relations with Cuba, American airlines are now flying to the island from various cities in the U.S. From Fort Lauderdale, the airfare round trip is dirt cheap, $150. Visas cost $100 round trip per person. So, for $250, we can fly an hour to a country that has been under a U.S. embargo for 60 years, an embargo that failed miserably. I want to get there before the old cars vanish, before franchises move in, before Cuba is transformed into resorts and casinos.
For lodging, we’ve opted for a casa particular – a room, apartment or home in a neighborhood that is rented out to travelers for far less than the hotels charge. I was surprised by the hotel prices- $400-$500 a night. Then I realized that for years, Cuba has been a tourist hub for travelers from numerous other countries who apparently are willing to pay those prices. Air BNB is the route we took.
Air BNB is one of those marvels that developed because of the Internet. They list hundreds of casas particulares all over the island with photos, prices, numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms, locations, every bit of information you need to make an informed choice. We’re staying at Casa Jose, an apartment to the west of Old Havana that sleeps eight. There will be 7 of us for the four nights, an eighth person for two nights. When we split the cost of the apartment, it comes out to about 40 bucks per person per night. The apartment is about a 20-minute walk from Old Havana.
The apartment has a kitchen, air conditioning, a balcony that overlooks the city. I’ve been in touch with Jose, the host, whose English is better than my Spanish, and he has answered all the questions I’ve asked.
We are going to be seven in the group that arrives first. The eight person is arriving the day after we do and leaving a day earlier. Jose will pick us up at the airport and the ride to the apartment costs 25 CUCs, not bad when you’re splitting the fare with others.
I have learned that there are two currencies in Cuba – the CUCs and the CUPs. One CUC is worth one dollar; this is the currency tourists use. The CUPs are the currency that locals use. It’s best to exchange money at the Havana airport, even though a 10% fee is imposed, which actually means one dollar is worth a bit less than one CUC. I’ve learned that local transportation is relatively inexpensive, so we don’t need to rent a car. However, if we wish to make a day trip out of Havana, there are inexpensive buses or we can hire a driver of one of those incredible cars from the 1950s.
I’ve also learned that the best places to eat are private restaurants and cafes, rather than those owned by the government. The prices are more reasonable and the food is better.
Lonely Planet has a fantastic book on Cuba and I’ve been going through it, selecting spots I really would like to see during our four days on the island. On Sunday afternoons, for instance, there’s a public drumming session by local santeros that Lonely Planet describes as “hypnotic.” There’s a Santeria museum that I hope to visit. Art and music are huge on the island and I’ve selected a couple of spots in Old Havana that are high on my list for both of these pursuits. There’s even a nightclub that features flamenco dancers.
Outside of Havana, I would love to see the island of Trinidad. The caves. The beaches of Matanzas. My friend, Marina, who was an ER doc in Havana and now works at our local Publix, has been advising me on which areas to see. I’ve got my Cuba book in my car, with my map of the island, so that when I see her again, we can pore over it.
I’m psyched for this trip. Cuba has been on my bucket list for years, ever since my dad told me about his stopover in Cuba during the Batista years. I actually never thought the island would open up to Americans in my lifetime, Thank you, President Obama.
Internet is sketchy on the island and when you have it, the price is steep. Supposedly, AT&T finalized a deal with Cuba in October 2016, but Verizon was there first. This Internet iffiness may be a challenge for me, but frankly, I just want to have photos and if I can’t upload them until we get home, well, so what. I’m ready to embrace the entire experience, whatever it may be.
Cuba, si!
