35 years ago today, Megan was born! She is one of the most joyous people & talented women I have ever known and completely changed our lives.
Today, she’s in the San Juan islands working as a marine naturalist on whale watching tours. She’s an animal lover, writer, adventurer, artist, and illustrator with an extraordinary sense of color.
She has also designed several book covers for us:
Love you, Megger!
On September 2 at 9:56 PM Eastern time, there’s a new moon in 11 degrees Virgo. New moons typically usher in new opportunities according to sign and house placement. This beauty is conjunct Venus within 6 degrees, which holds a promise of romance, creativity, and money.
For specifics about where this new moon falls in your chart, check the September forecast here. Or go to cafe astrology for your natal chart and look for the sign for Virgo- it resembles an M. Note the house in which it falls.
Here’s a rundown on the meaning of the houses:
1st: SELF, PERSONALITY
2ND FINANCES, VALUES
3rd COMMUNICATION, SIBLINGS
4th: HOME & FAMILY
5TH: CREATIVITY & FUN, CHILDREN, ROMANCE
6th: DAILY WORK
7th: BUSINESS & PERSONAL PARTNERSHIPS, MARRIAGE
8th: OTHER PEOPLE’S RESOURCES, THE PARANORMAL
9th: WORLDVIEW, SPIRITUALITY
10th: CAREER, PUBLIC FACE
11th: WISHES & DREAMS, NETWORKS
12th: PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS, WHAT’S HIDDEN
In his brilliant book Save the Cat, screenwriter Blake Snyder introduced the 15 beats of storytelling. In terms of the story of democracy as we head toward the Nov 2024 election, it feels like we’re now in Act 3.
First, here are the 15 beats:
1) opening image – the hero’s life as the book opens.
2) theme stated – what your hero must learn emotionally, spiritually
3) setup -here, you show at least one thing in your hero’s life that needs fixing. The hero’s flaws are evident in the setup.
4) catalyst -it happens to the hero, an action beat, and it then become impossible for the hero to go back to her life the way it was.
5) debate – can your hero do what’s required? Is she hesitating?
6) break into part 2 – your hero is leaving the old world behind and entering a new world. This part is the opposite of part 1. Your hero makes a proactive move or decision to enter this new world (think of it as the quest)
7) B story – love interest, mentor, friend or antagonist who helps the hero learn the lesson
8) fun & games – the heroins either succeeds or flounders in this new world. This beat delivers on the promise of the premise.
9) midpoint – midway thru the novel The stakes are raised. the external and internal stories cross in some way.
10) bad guys close in – internal or external bad guys. The hero in this beat either succeeds or flounders
11) all is lost – something happens here to the hero. There’s often a death in this beat. The event pushes him/her into part 3
12) dark night of the soul – just like it sounds.
13) break into part 3 – the lesson your hero is learning. he makes a proactive decision to fix something
14) finale – He struggles to enact his plan- there’s a deep down moment that shows he has learned the lesson.
15) final image – the opposite of the opening image
The midpoint, beat 9, seemed to fit that disastrous debate between Biden and Trump. And what followed was beat 10 – bad guys move in, which the trumpies did with a vengeance. This brought democracy – and Biden – to beat 11, all is lost, when he was pressured by members of his own party to pass the torch to Kamala.
What followed was beat 12, dark night of the soul, during which Biden and his family undoubtedly struggled to make the right decision for the country. It must have felt like a kind of death for him. From there, the story of democracy for this election entered Act 3, when Biden made a proactive decision to pass the torch to Kamala and how that changed everything for this election.
Now trump at 78, is the old guy, a blithering idiot who can’t seem to figure out how to disparage the Harris/ Walz campaign. And the Harris/Walz campaign has huge crowds and has ignited such infectious enthusiasm across the country that it has changed the tone of this election season.
In Save the Cat Writes a Novel, Jessica Brody adapted Snyder’s 15 beats to novel writing and added five points or sub-beats to the finale, beat 14.
As Brody writes: “The Five-Point Finale is a blueprint for what every third act is essentially all about: storming the Castle! The castle is a metaphor. It can be anything.”
In The Hunger Games, it was winning the Games and in The Martian, it was reaching the Area 4 landing site. In the story about democracy, let’s see how these five points break down.
1) Gathering the team – the Harris campaign did this when they selected Walz as her VP candidate and then through the convention, the country got to know more about both them and and their message of hope and joy for the future of the U.S.
2) Executing the plan – this seems to be where we are now, with less than 75 days until the election. At this point, as Michelle Obama pointed out, it’s up to us, the voters, to get out there and do something.
3) High tower surprise – This is where the bad guys pull off a surprise of some kind. In the 2020 election, this was where trump tried to convince his VP Pence to NOT certify the election and even put together fake boards of electors in various states. Fortunately, it all backfired and the 60 plus lawsuits he filed about a stolen election went nowhere. What followed, of course, was the J6 insurrection. What will it be this time? Will trump replace Vance in October?
4) Dig deep down- this is where democracy, represented by the Harris/Walz campaign, and all the voters in this country, use what they’ve learned to make sure that our country’s collective freedom remains intact. Brody calls it a “touched by divine” moment that doesn’t have to be religious or spiritual. It’s where the soul of democracy takes a leap of faith.
5) Execution of the new plan – the hero, democracy, puts the bold new plan into action and ends the threat to democracy that trump and his allies represent with Harris and Walz sweeping the popular vote – and the antiquated electoral college.
Beat 15, the final image, will be when Harris and Walz take the oath of office.
Join Trish for the September 2024 astrological forecast!
And here’s the link for the written version.
Here’s another excerpt from our new book: Mind-Blowing Synchronicities: The Latest Science, Stories & Research
Animals as Oracles
No surprise! Many synchronicities involve animals. I’ve already used several examples. But quite often they act as oracles, as they have numerous times for natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis.
In late December 2004, an undersea quake erupted in the Indian Ocean. This violent upheaval of the tectonic plates displaced an enormous amount of water and within a few hours, waves as high as a hundred feet radiated outward from the epicenter. A tsunami slammed into the coastline of 11 Indian Ocean countries and killed more than a quarter of a million people.
The wave that spread out across the Bay of Bengal was visible from space and enabled scientists to precisely measure the quake and the resulting tsunami. They weren’t able to predict it but from what we learned in the earliest reports and in the years since then, animals were aware of the eruption in advance – sometimes days in advance, sometimes in just a matter of hours.
On January 11, 2005, an online article in National Geographic featured numerous stories about animals that had survived the tsunami. Giant waves washed floodwaters as far as two miles inland to the Yala National Park in Sri Lanka’s largest wildlife reserve. This place is home to hundreds of elephants, buffalo, leopards, deer, jackals, monkeys. Yet, the deputy director of the National Wildlife Department, R.D. Ratnayake, said there weren’t any reports of dead animals.
“The elephants, wild boar, deer, monkeys and others moved inland to avoid the killer waves.”
Survivors described how, on the morning of the tsunami, elephants screamed and fled to higher ground, how dogs refused to go on their usual morning walks, how monkeys rejected bananas. Even a pair of tethered elephants broke free of their chains and ran to higher ground for safety. Flamingos that breed at that time of year at the Point Calimere wildlife sanctuary in India flew to higher ground beforehand and abandoned their breeding grounds.
Patanangala beach inside the Yala National Park was one of the worst hit areas of the 500-square-mile wildlife preserve, home to a variety of animals that include 130 species of birds. Yet, according to Ravi Corea, president of the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society based in New Jersey, only two water buffalo were found dead. Corea, who was in Sri Lanka when the tsunami struck, later walked that beach. He didn’t see any animal carcasses except the pair of water buffalo.
Along India’s Cuddalore coast, thousands of people died. But the Indo-Asian News Service reported that water buffalo, goats and dogs were found unharmed. Anecdotes like this were numerous in the aftermath. “Imagine what would happen…if, instead of ignoring the warnings given by animals, people took them seriously,” wrote British biologist Rupert Sheldrake in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.
Essentially, these anecdotes tell us that before disasters, animals are precognitive.
We first published this post in 2020, around the time that Covid broke out.
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Our friend Darren from Brisbane, Australia, who also blogs about synchronicity, sent us this radio clip with author Peter May and a rather significant synchronicity concerning his book Lockdown.
May wrote the book in 2005 in a kind of creative fever and finished it in six weeks. He talks about it in his introduction, how the book was rejected by British publishers for being too far out there, too implausible etc. Now here we are.
I think this is an instance of precognition through creativity. We have a chapter on that in our book Sensing the Future. Yes, it’s been 15 years since May wrote the book, but I don’t think the passage of linear time makes any difference.When May was writing this novel, he was in that timeless space where writers go when they’re really hooked into what they’re writing. The world. the characters. The circumstances. And sometimes, that timeless space lies in our linear future.
Most writers I know have experienced something like this, but maybe not with the accuracy that May did.
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Andy Selinger was a private investigator for 15 years before creating his YouTube channels. He’s also an FAA-licensed drone Pilot. He shoots drone promos for companies around the country and also does photography.
He started his Travel America TV channel July 2023.
https://www.youtube.com/@TravelAmerica-TV
Beowulf: the middle black & white cat. Waiting for rain to subside.
I’ve written about Beowulf before. Some years ago, my sister Mary took him in with his two feral brothers. For years, Beo and his bros lived in Mary and Neal’s massive cellar (in Georgia,) where there are windows and eaves and furniture. They were terrified of people. But in 2020, when I visited her during during Covid, she asked me to adopt one of these guys. So down into the cellar I went.
The cats were hidden. I found a container of treats and shook it. “Hey, guys, who wants to move to Florida?”
A gorgeous black and white cat peered out at me from behind a couch. I crouched and shook some treats into my hand and set them on the floor. The cat looked interested but wary. Yet, he strutted out and butted his head against my knee as if to ask, Hey, you a friend?
I stroked him, then he went over to the treats and gobbled them up. When he was finished, he returned to me for another head butt, then off he went into the secrets of the cellar. I snapped a photo of him and texted it to Mary.
I want him.
That’s Beowulf!
She joined me in the cellar and he came out to greet her and she nodded. “I’ll drive him to Orlando in a couple weeks. Can you meet me there?”
So that’s what we did. And I called him Beo, for short.
He hated the carrier and complained about it for three hours during my drive back to South Florida the next day. As soon as I brought him into the house and released him, he took off and spent the next 10 days under a bed. Once he saw open doors and windows and realized he had the freedom to go out into the backyard, it was his favorite place to be. Eventually he got braver and ventured to the front yard, the driveway.
Now, more than four years later, he’s still the most vocal cat I’ve ever had. When he has been in the house too long, he lets you know it and moves from room to room, complaining. If the weather is too hot or too cold or too wet, I keep him in. Or try to. But he’s a crafty guy and will dart through an open door before you even notice the breeze caused by his passage.
No cats or dogs or coyotes roam this neighborhood at night. There’s no traffic. I don’t think he goes far. I suspect he sits in our front yard or our neighbor’s backyard, curled up somewhere in his freedom, and watches the light of the moon and stars. I may get him a GPS just to find out for sure.
His name is interesting and I don’t know why Mary named him Beowulf. I never thought to ask. Here’s what wikipedia says:
Beowulf is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature.
Recently, Beo suffered congestive heart failure. Good vets and meds have him back up and doing his usual stuff. But he sort of avoids me now because I’m the one who gives him the meds. Chicken-flavored liquid diuretics (3 of them) and a blood thinner because he has a clot in his heart.
The vet told me he eventually would die of heart failure and advised me to keep him indoors from now on. But knowing his history, as a cellar cat to a free cat, I felt that would be cruel. He does sleep inside at night, especially now when there’s so much rain, and is the first out in the morning.
And just so we’re clear, J.D. Vance, I’m not a childless cat lady.
Join us on The Light Gate tonight to talk with Preston Dennett and Dolly Saffron about Mind-Blowing Synchronicities. It’s 5 PM Pacific, 8 PM Eastern
Here’s the link
