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Our daughter Megan, recently told us a chilling story involving Liberty University. This university was begun by fundamentalist Jerry Falwell,  a man whose entire platform is built on extreme religious doctrine and dogma.

So Megan met a young man – let’s call him John – who attended Liberty. The following story was told to John by his closest friend, Rick, who was a residential advisor in the dorm in question.

Three days a week, students were obligated to attend a church service and the RAs checked the dorms to look for students who skipped out. One evening, Rick walked into one of the dorms and found a student standing in the shower with the shower curtain wrapped around him. Rick asked him if he was going to be attending the church ceremony and the boy said no. When Rick asked him why, the kid answered, “I can’t cross the barrier.”

Several weeks later, a similar scenario played out. Curfew at the school was midnight, and Rick was doing rounds making sure everyone was in their dorm. This time, he discovered the same student standing in the middle of his bed, dressed in a suit and tie and clutching a briefcase, saying he had things to attend to.

This time, Rick reported the incident to the powers that be, who called the student’s parents. The mother remarked that her son was always a bit anti-social, but became concerned and removed her son from the university.

Weeks passed and a new student moved into the same dorm room. Once again, it was a church service night and Rick was checking the dorm for students who had skipped out. He walked into the same room and found the new student standing in the middle of his bed, wearing only his boxers. When Rick asked what he was doing, this new student glanced up at him and said, “I can’t cross the barrier.”

So Rob and I are listening to this story and at the end, he said, “You aren’t going to believe this. I had a dream in which a dream character couldn’t cross a barrier.” 

In the dream, Rob was in an RV with 2 young guys and they were watching a very strange video involving Donald Trump. A man was squatting in the middle of a road wearing only a t-shirt. Trump, meanwhile, was lighting firecrackers and tossing them along the ground between the man’s legs. However, the fuses burned out on the first few and Trump was getting annoyed. Finally, he succeeded and the firecracker blew up beneath the man, who howled, jumped up, grabbed his crotch and ran down the street.

Other people were watching him and tried to help him, but they were prevented from crossing the street, as if an invisible barrier blocked their way.

I used to think of this day as something made up by Hallmarks. Maybe that’s true, but the origin isn’t as important as the sentiment.

Over the years since this blog started, we have met way too many parents who have lost their children. That’s just not how it’s supposed to be. We parents are supposed to outlive our kids. But when that isn’t how things pan out,  then I’m confident the children are communicating from the other side through synchros.

Isabella Dove’s story made me cry. So did Debra Page’s story. And then there’s DJan, who lost two sons. The point of these two stories is not to depress anyone, but to urge you, as a parent, to give your kid a huge bear hug! Mother’s Day and Father’s Day should both be KID’S day!

This is a rather embarrassing synchro since I’m an astrologer and a Gemini, ruled by Mercury, and should have paid closer attention!

Once a week or so, I buy a $1 Lotto scratch-off ticket. Numerous variations on these scratch-offs exist, but the idea with all of them is immediate gratification. You eagerly scratch off the appropriate areas and, depending on which ticket you bought, can win up to a cool million.The most I have won is $2.

But today I was out and about and bought one. I didn’t have a chance to scratch it off until I pulled into the Target parking lot. And then I sat there staring at the thing, at a pair of $1,000, and thought, Wait a minute. I just won a thousand bucks! How cool is that?

Excited about the win, I called Rob, then when I got home, read the direction on the back of the scratch off to find out how to redeem my thousand bucks. If you win less than $600, you take the ticket to a retailer – a convenience store, grocery store, wherever you bought the ticket – and they would pay you.

If you win more than $600, you can mail it to Lottery headquarters in Tallahassee with photographic ID and the appropriate paperwork and they would mail you a check within six weeks. Or, you can take it to a district office in various cities around the state, where you would fill out the paperwork that basically lets the IRS know you’ve won this money so they can tax you on it. Then they would issue you a check.

So Rob, our dog and I drove over to the district office in West Palm Beach. I was excited when I went inside and got into line behind an elderly black man, a white guy who had paperwork and his lottery card in hand. I looked around for stacks of the paperwork I was supposed to fill out, spotted some at a table, and sat down and filled it out.

When I returned to the line, I noticed that the white guy in front of me held a scratch- off with $10,000 written across the top of it He looked pretty happy, too, so I figured he had hit that jackpot. He handed in his paperwork and was asked to wait in the lobby for his check to be issued. And then it was my turn.

I got right up there to the window, handed over my ticket, paperwork, and driver’s license. At some point while I waited for the clerk to fill in forms on her end, it occurred to me that Mercury was still retrograde, and that there could be some snafu I hadn’t foreseen. Sure enough, about a minute later, the clerk glanced up at me, frowning. “Uh, ma’am, it says this isn’t a winning ticket.”

“What?”

Sure enough, to the immediate left of the scratch off area, the ticket read: Get three like PRIZE amounts and win that amount! The fine print. I had seen those two $1,000 amounts and had totally missed the fine print.

This is why astrologers advise people not so sign contracts during a Mercury retro and to always, always read the fine print!

It may be my most embarrassing Mercury retro ever. So the next day, I bought another $1 scratch-off, wondering what sort of Merc retro might happen, and burst out laughing. I won $1, the cost of the ticket. This one seems to have the trickster’s fingerprints all over it!

Here’s a segment of a longer story we posted here in 2012 that came to us from Sharon Catley. This part was the tail end of a post about a series of startling synchronicities related to the repeated appearance of cardinals, which she associated with her  father who had recently died. For example, 7 of 11 Christmas cards she’d received all featured cardinals, and she’d never told anyone about how cardinals were linked to her memory of her father. This part of the story related to her mother who was soon to follow Sharon’s father in death. It appeared in the original post almost like an addendum, and some readers might’ve missed it.

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“Just after Christmas my Mother entered the final phase of her life and was placed in hospice.  I was able to take three more trips out to see her before her death.  On the last trip, while I was on my way home to Vancouver, I stopped in at the little Virgin Records Store near my departure gate at the airport.  I don’t like to fly and it is my ritual to always treat myself to a new book to occupy myself with during the flight. I had about ten minutes of worth of “spare” time to look around and make my purchase before I had to go through security.

“While I was browsing the books I noticed that the last three songs playing on the store’s intercom had all been older ones performed by the band “Heart”.  I was thinking there must be a new Heart “Greatest Hits” CD out as they usually play whatever they are currently marketing at the time.  I quite like Heart so thought I would pick it up a copy.

“Looking at the clock I noticed I had already used up all my browsing time, but I did want that CD. So I quickly ran over to the CD section and looked through the H’s, but found no Heart CDs at all.  So I looked on shelves above where the new releases were and at the other various free standing CD displays – no Heart CD.  There was still the bargain bin, but I thought there would be little chance of it being in there as they usually play new releases. But I gave it a shot.  There was one CD that I could tell what it was so I put my hand in the bin pulled it out.  There it was – Heart Greatest Hits.

“While he was ringing up my purchases, I told the cashier about the synchronicity of finding the CD (hearing the music, wanting the CD, picking a single CD from the bargain bin and it being the one I wanted.) He said there were no bosses around today so he decided to hook his personal Ipod to the intercom and listen to his own music.  The CD was from 1998 and he was surprised that they had it in their stock.

“I didn’t get to play the CD until Mother’s day, which came three weeks after my Mother’s passing.  It was going to be a sad one for me this year, so I decided just to stay home and clean the house.  Chores are always more pleasant with some music and I remembered the Heart CD.  I had not taken a really good look at it before as I was in such a hurry in the airport and as I said my eyesight is not that good anymore.  I knew there was a folk art painting on the cover but now taking a better look at it I could not believe what I was seeing and that I had not seen it before.

“If you look below you will see what I saw – a cardinal!  To me it meant Mom and my Dad are back together again and happy once more.”

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Interestingly, we’d received this story in the aftermath of the publication of my novel, Double Heart.

NEW YORK, NY – MAY 03: Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump speaks to supporters and the media at Trump Tower in Manhattan following his victory in the Indiana primary on May 03, 2016 in New York City. Trump beat rival Ted Cruz decisively in a contest that many analysts believe was the last chance for any other Republican candidate to catch Trump in the delegate count. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Oh, yuck. Everything the pundits predicted couldn’t happen, happened in Indiana on the evening of May 3, when Trump,  the dude with the orange hair, swept the state and became the Republican nominee.

While Rob and I were watching this, he remarked that the young man standing behind Trump in the pink tie in that  Huffington Post photo (click link above), the young guy whose face is white, looked like a vampire. “Actually,” he added, “they all look like vampires.” The son with an unhealthy pallor, the plastic wife, the plastic blonde daughters, the son-in-law who supposedly likes politics, as Trump said, better than he likes selling real estate.

Great. A family of vampires in the White House. That will certainly be the walking dead.Yet,  that analogy fits Trump and his clan.

A candidate who has yet to say much of anything other than his slogan that he’ll make America great again might well occupy the White House with his vampire kin. His wife – the third – will have the dubious distinction of having posed nude for a magazine. And oh, by the way, the Clintons were at his wedding to that third wife.

Bernie Sanders also won Indiana tonight and that gives him a momentum to stay in the race through the California primary on June 7. But the pundits also got his candidacy all wrong. They expected the Democratic selection process to be wrapped up by now and still refer to Clinton, who represents politics as usual, as the presumptive nominee.

Why is it that two outliers – Trump and Sanders – have galvanized the electorate?

Why is it that the two candidates with the most unfavorable ratings in many polls – Trump and Clinton – are what the two parties are offering? As Chuck Todd noted on MSNBC, this is the first time something like this has happened.

But then, this election season has been completely unpredictable, with all the usual rules out the window. Sanders rightly argues that the super delegates rule in the Democratic party is not democracy; it’s the party selecting the candidate. He also points out some weird stuff going on with the Clinton fund raising machine- an investigation conducted by Politico that found some irregularities about where the funds actually go (hint: into Clinton’s coffers with less than one percent of $60 million going to Dem candidates in other states).

The sad and pathetic part of all this is that pundits believe that if Clinton is the nominee, Bernie’s supporters will hold their noses and vote collectively for her just to ensure that Trump doesn’t win. At one time, I was in that camp. But if she and Trump are it, I will hold my nose and choose not to vote at all on election day.

In the larger picture, this election isn’t just about who becomes the next president. It’s about our evolution as a country, a species. Clinton represents the old guard. Sanders represents the new guard. And Trump represents the really old guard from the mid-20^th century, where women and minorities were second class citizens without any rights at all.

Cedar Key is an old fishing village about 50 miles southwest of Gainesville, an island in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s often referred to as “old Florida” because not much has changed here in decades. I set my novel Ghost Key here. It isn’t a tourist mecca, like the 113-mile string of islands that stretch from Miami to Key West, connected by a single road and 42 bridges. In fact, I’m always surprised how many Floridians have never heard of Cedar Key.

We’ve been visiting the island for years, staying in different areas – in a condo on the Gulf, in a house on a magnificent salt marsh, and most recently in a house on stilts on a dead end road that faces Gooseneck Bay. A dog friendly house.

Cedar Key has an intriguing history. In 1999, an archeological dig at Shell Mound, 9 miles north of the island, found artifacts in the top ten feet of a 28-foot tall mound that date back to 500 BC. A skeleton that was 2,000 years old was found in an ancient burial site. What lies even farther down inside that mound?

The original Cedar Key was called Atsena Otie Key and lies about half a mile away. In the late 1800s, it was home to a pencil-wood factory – Eagle pencils – and several hundred residents. The cedar trees that provided the wood for the pencils were wiped out and in 1896, so was the island. That was the year a hurricane and a ten-foot storm surge flattened Atsena Otie Key. The survivors moved to another island and built the present-day Cedar Key.

Today, the original island is managed by the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge and if you rent kayaks or a boat, the island is accessible. We did kayaks one day and rented a boat the next and took the dogs with us.

They were overjoyed to be on solid ground after two hours of drifting and fishing, and leaped into the water to cool off.

Then we all headed for the boardwalk and path through the wilderness of oaks strung with Spanish moss.

The path used to be the main street through town and all along it, white butterflies flit and dance through light and shadows until it ends at a spooky cemetery.

When you enter this place, the air changes. It’s not that the heat or humidity are replaced by frigid air; it’s something more subtle. I immediately felt that all the white butterflies we saw coming in were spirits, and that some of them were the spirits of the 25 people buried here.

Several of the ornately carved gravestones have withstood the weathering of more than a century. As I snapped photos with my phone, I suddenly felt like a time traveler, plunked down in a strange little town in the late 1890s. I started wondering about and imagining the lives of some of the people buried here. For a novelist, this place lends itself to the wild and unpredictable.

The challenges the residents of this island faced just in terms of climate must have been formidable. The interminable heat. The bugs. Just the bugs would be enough to make me flee – mosquitoes the size of 747s, no-seeums barely as large as a period that bite their way through your hair, spiders with massive webs strung between the trees.

These people also faced disease – malaria and typhoid among the most prevalent And, of course the hurricanes and dramatic tide changes. At low tide, there was probably a floor of soggy mud all the way to today’s Cedar Key. Low tide would have been a great time to harvest clams and crabs. Here’s Megan, pretending to eat a dead Horseshoe crab she found in the sand.

I knew that if I stood in the midst of these oaks that shaded the cemetery, relaxed and with my eyes shut, I would be able to pull that time around me. If I did that, would I be able to get back to my own time? Coward that I am, I snapped my photos and kept moving.

The gravestones – the etchings of dates, of signs and symbols, the names themselves – reveal bits and pieces of a lost culture. Fragments have survived in the present day Cedar Key – the stilt houses built on tall concrete pilings to withstand any storm surge, the fishing tradition, the camaraderie and friendliness of the people who call this place home. And always wherever you venture of the island, there’s the lure and mystery of the sea.

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We recently posted two stories from our friend Dale Dassel  about his  mother’s pending death, her death, and the synchronicities that followed. This is the second story that involves a ladybug as a spirit messenger.

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It’s been exactly one month since Mom passed, and things have finally settled down. But something really amazing happened last night around 12:30 a.m., as I was reading in bed. I began to grow drowsy, so I put the novel aside and lay calmly, gazing around my room for awhile just thinking about life but nothing in particular.

I was about to open the book to resume reading when I heard Mom’s voice clearly in my mind: I can hear you now. It seemed to come from immediately beside me, as if she were standing right by the bed. If my eyes had been closed, I would’ve sworn she just opened the door and walked into the room. The words were spoken with absolute calm; a matter-of-fact statement in her own voice, crystal clear. I looked in the direction of the voice in mild surprise, as it was completely out of the blue. I wasn’t even thinking about Mom, and she had never said that to me before, so I don’t have a mental sound byte of that sentence. She had spoken to me.

Being the emotional person that I am, I grew teary as I began talking to her, mentally at first, then speaking aloud. Over the next 20 minutes, I told her everything that had transpired since she departed. I told her how much we love and miss her, and reassured her that we were okay. The experience was very moving, and I am convinced that her presence was in the room, listening to me (I’m crying as I type this right now). When I was finished, I asked her to give Dad a sign or message that she was still with us. Then I went to sleep.

Today I related the incident to Dad and asked if he’d received a particular message or dream about Mom. He said he has dreams about her all the time, but nothing that stands out in his mind. He believes she is still with us, but said that some people are more receptive than others when it comes to this type of communication.

I personally have never seen a ghost / had spirit communication (with the exception of the dream message from Grandma after she died). But I firmly believe that Mom is honoring my request when I asked her to give me a sign from the other side (via the ladybug that came to me the week before she passed over). Last week, as I was getting into my car to go back to work after my lunch break, I was sitting in the driver seat with the door open, talking to Dad in the driveway, when a ladybug landed on the windshield between us. I immediately pointed it out and said that it’s Mom saying ‘hi’ to us. 🙂

These synchros are wonderfully reassuring, and they make it so much easier to handle this transition. I’m so glad that Mom is okay, and able to communicate with us from time to time.

Antillean Crested Hummingbird

When our family lived in Caracas, the American newspaper, The Daily Journal, ran a contest. They showed a cartoon of a cute little alien with his palm extended. Contestants were to caption the cartoon and the best caption would win a week’s trip to Barbados for two.

My dad, who as far as I know never had any interest in aliens, entered a caption: Yes, we do deliver. And it won! He paid the difference for my sister and I and a few months later, we landed in Barbados, an island in the Netherlands Antilles. I think I was 12, which meant my sister was nearly 7.

We stayed at a very cool hotel in Bridgeport, the main town. The hotel, I remember, was small, and we had a suite or apartment on the first floor. Out back, there was an open porch that faced the beach. It had a table and chairs and a glorious view of the beach. Every afternoon, waiters brought around the tea and crumpets and the four of us would sit out there, sunburned from our beach combing, and sip tea like proper British folks, which we weren’t.

One afternoon, I was sitting out there by myself, trying to decide if I should dip my spoon into the sugar bowl and add a couple of teaspoons to my tea, which I didn’t really like. A hummingbird suddenly appeared on the porch and touched down on the edge of the sugar bowl. I was shocked. I’d never seen a hummingbird this close before. It was a beautiful little thing with luminous bluish green wings like the bird in the photo above. And it moved fast, those wings pumping, fluttering, keeping it aloft as it dipped its delicate beak into that mountain of sugar in the bowl.

I think this memory is so vivid for me, so many years after the fact, because it was when I realized, if only intuitively, that we are all part of a much larger picture. It was the instant that I recognized I was part of an intricate web of sensations and connections that extended well beyond my little world of family, friends, Venezuela and this Barbados trip. That hummingbird and I were connected in an inexplicable way. I tasted that sugar when he dipped his beak into the sugar bowl. I felt the frantic beat of his wings, the hammering of his little heart, his fear of me as a huge shape nearby. But his hunger overcame his fear and he feasted from that sugar bowl.

Ever since, I have been fascinated by hummingbirds. In Ecuador some years ago, we stayed in a place in the high mountains where hummingbirds flocked to the feeders in the evening, dozens of them vying for food, their wings moving so fast they generated a sound, a collective humming. We stood at the windows watching them up close, jut a thin pane of glass between us.

During the winter months here in Florida we sometimes spot hummingbirds, the ruby-throated variety. In fact, the other day, I was thinking about my parents, both deceased, and a pair of hummingbirds touched down on the plants just outside my window.

A shudder of shock tore through me. Mom? Dad? Really? Was I seeing what I thought I was seeing? Maybe these figures were actually fast-moving butterflies. Or something else altogether.

They were there – then gone.

And I thought of the Barbados hummingbird way back when, and how my family and I had come to be in that place, at that time, when the beautiful little bird touched down on the edge of the sugar bowl. My parents had made that trip possible. I was pretty sure they had just dropped by to say hello.

The Clintons at Trump’s wedding in 2015

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Bernie Sanders’s path to the presidential nomination just got a lot more difficult tonight. He won just one state – Rhode Island – out of five. Clinton has far more delegates than Bernie and more super delegates, that UNdemocratic rule in the Democratic party that makes sure the party – rather than the people – have the final say about who becomes the nominee.

Trump swept all five states by huge margins.

Unless something nearly miraculous happens, Clinton and Trump will be the nominees. I would love to see a woman as president, but not Clinton. She’s part of the political machine, entrenched in establishment politics, in bed with Wall Street, and I’ve yet to hear the kind of passion from her that I hear continually from Sanders.

Yes, she’s smart and experienced and, thanks in large part to Obama appointing her secretary of state, knows her foreign policy. Unfortunately, her foreign policy is business as usual – the U.S. as world cop, endless war in the Mideast, take out dictators whom we helped put into power…well, we all know this story by now.

Her vote for the war in Iraq helped propel the chaos in the Mideast, the rise of Isis, and terrorism and did not, as one of Bush’s boys predicted, end with the people of Iraq welcoming us with open arms. Instead, with the fall of Baghdad, the seething cauldron of hatred and fear and poverty blew wide open and here we are in 2016, trillions of dollars later, thousands of Americans dead, countries decimated, and millions of displaced people on the move.

Clinton claims she would rein in Wall Street, but her super pacs of banker boys have raised millions for her. Her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street organizations have earned her sums that most of us won’t see in our lifetimes.

When pressured to release transcripts of her speeches, she gives that annoying Hillary laugh and says she would be glad to release them if all the other candidates do the same. That means the Republicans. Sanders doesn’t have any transcripts to release. He doesn’t have any super pacs. Yet, he has raised more money than any other candidate through small online donations from ordinary people, several million of them. She is losing among young voters who realize what they may gain through a Sanders presidency and what they stand to lose with a Clinton presidency.

Tonight in Philadelphia when she gave her victory speech, I was struck by just how far to the left her rhetoric has moved since this campaign started. At some points she sounded like Sanders – but just the words not the genuine passion of convictions. Like Claire Underwood in House of Cards, Clinton is a strategist, an opportunist whose instincts are so sharply honed she’s able to sniff out the political climate and play to it.

My neighbors, whom I’ve known for 11 years, are Republicans. And for the first time, we are on the same political page. If Sanders is the nominee, they will vote for him because what he says about big money in politics, about the hold corporate America and the banking industry have over the rest of us resonates for them. If Clinton is the nominee, they will vote Republican – i.e., Trump. I have friends who are Clinton supporters, friends who are supporters of Sanders. And I doubt that the Sanders supporters will vote for Clinton just to keep a Dem in the White House. They will probably choose to sit out this election.

In a recent town hall, Sanders was asked how he would unify the party if Clinton was the nominee. I thought his response was terrific, that it wasn’t incumbent on him to convince his supporters to vote for Clinton. She was the one who would have to win them over by moving farther to the left in her platform. Free college tuition at public universities. Health care as a right for all rather than a privilege. Overturning Citizens United. Not engaging in endless war. Moving rapidly away from fossil fuels. She would have to embrace more of his truly progressive platform. After all, Clinton needs the youth vote and the independents who embrace Sanders if she is to win the presidency.

If she is the nominee, I don’t think she can beat Trump. He appeals to angry racists who must have an enemy- the Mexicans, the Muslims, ISIS, take your pick. Hatred is often just as powerful as love. In spite of my hope that we are moving into a new, more progressive paradigm, the old guard is alive and well and turning out in shocking numbers for Trump.

I recently told a friend that I would be sitting out this election if Clinton is the nominee. Her response: But we can’t have a President Trump! Well, maybe Trump is the exclamation point at the end of a long haul since a movie star named Ronald Reagan won the White House. If we are incapable of connecting the dots, if we continually vote against our best interests as a nation and as individuals, then perhaps he is the president we deserve.

At the very least, Bernie has changed the dialogue in this country and made people more aware of the existing disparities and inequalities. And, in the larger scheme of things, that’s no small feat.

Whenever someone famous and talented, someone who has made an impact, dies, people notice synchronicities. Not surprisingly, that has been the case with the death of Prince at age 57. I started noticing the color purple on web sites, clothes and cars. Maybe the colors were always out there, but I had no reason to notice. I read where someone heard about Prince’s death, looked outside, and saw a purple roadster drive by.

Robert, aka Rabbit, a longtime friend from my hometown of Minneapolis, which was also Prince’s place of birth, life and death, wrote about a synchronicity he experienced on the day of Prince’s death.

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“A while back I heard an NPR or a MPR interview with author Alan Light on a new biography of Nina Simone What Happened, Miss Simone, which I picked up today at the the Rondo public library. Looking at Light’s other titles I saw: Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain. That, of course, caught my attention. I’d just the news. Before I started reading, I browsed the index and found a “Prince” entry. Late in her career, considering tunes for a covers album, Simone thought about Prince’s Sign of the Times, which she eventually recorded.

“Years ago in Jamaica I was staying with Maggie and her Jamaican boyfriend Chester, who had gone to school in Texas, was in NYC during the “Shaft” years, and loved Philly soul. I can remember he and I heard on the radio that Nina Simone had died, and we talked about her career. I can’t remember what time of year it was although it certainly wasn’t summer. Randomly reading through the book now…Nina in Barbados, in Liberia, I came across…Nina Simone’s date of death:  April 21, 2003! Wow, wow….today’s date, and now the date of Prince’s death.

“I’m glad I got to experience the dynamic genius of Prince Rogers Nelson in concert at First Avenue in his prime, before he did arena gigs.”

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I saw him only once, when he was 16, a year before he signed a recording contract. It was in an old out-of-business movie theater in North Minneapolis. A neighbor mentioned the show and recommended seeing the kid, that he was going to be big. I don’t remember much about his performance that day. Oddly, the only thing I recall is that my ex and I were among the few white folks in the crowd. In other words, he hadn’t been discovered yet.