Best friend and faery twin Tania Marie and I are never apart in spirit. We keep in nearly constant touch via anything from texts to telepathy, and even if we have longer times without contact, we find our lives have either synchronously paralleled or gone into exactly opposite complementary experiences. Our own mothers have mixed us up in photographs, and our lives really do seem like those stories of twins separated at birth.
We both have our North Nodes (Destiny) in Capricorn, and we both have David’s/Dave’s with Cancer North Nodes. We’re roughly the same size and height, and our haircuts seem to parallel each other. Tania’s a two-fish Pisces, and I’m a twin Gemini. Tania has a special needs bunny, and I have a special needs yard. When Tania and her Dave downsized last year to start full time RV living, I simultaneously upsized by renting the house next door as an office/classroom/guesthouse filled with my David’s parents’ furniture they needed to move out of their old house. Despite the miles between Tania and me, we often giggle to discover we’ve made the exact same thing for dinner, or that one of us is out shopping for the very ingredient the other one just chopped.
All these long distance connections and synchronicities go into life-changing hyperdrive whenever life permits a fun and magickal in-person adventure. We went to the San Francisco Veg Fest Together in 2008 carrying bunny Nestor’s ashes and then learned about a bunny rescue that eventually led to Tania adopting Joy; I picked up her Joy with Tania and held her on their first road trip together; we’ve had many Cafe Gratitude binge fests where the waitresses actually looked under the table to see where we’d hidden all our food; we braved a spooky and synchronous Halloween 2008 in Bodega Bay with our friend Karen; have enjoyed multiple vegan Thanksgiving’s together; took a crazy, wild, and life-altering visit to Mendocino in 2009; did a silly, but potent faery reclamation of Chicago in 2010; and had a joyful reunion and birthday celebration in Goshen in 2015 when Tania first got to meet my David.
We’ve been planning this year’s gathering with “both our D’s” pretty much since Tania and her D took off in the RV. As timing and plans coalesced, we originally thought we’d meet over Samhain/Halloween as they drove East through Canada and then down through Michigan to Goshen, IN then wintering South and continuing their East Coast travels next Spring and Summer. These plans morphed all over the place until we finally decided to meet in Viroqua, WI on Autumn Equinox.
Yes, Wisconsin, the land of giant mice, cheese and brats:
Readers of this blog might remember The Sunflower Saga, Synchronicity and the NAPC, the first time tried to go to Viroqua amidst massive redirection, dreams and another head injury. I tried a second time for David’s birthday this year, but life strongly rearranged itself to send us to Turkey Run State Park instead. Apparently, I have a “thing” with Viroqua — a strong pull accompanied by a major block. When making plans with Tania, I mentioned that I was still a little nervous about that location, even though I’ve always wanted to go there, but we reasoned that since I’d be there with both Tania and my David, I’d be fine.
And so we made our respective reservations. While I harvested and prepped food for an Equinox Feast, we all gathered and prepared various gifts for one another. The afternoon before our trip, just as Tania and Dave neared Viroqua, I felt a sudden “flood” of energy. It was so strong that it knocked me back onto the couch, even when I tried to get up. Whenever I thought of our trip, I felt this powerful force field of energy so strong that it felt like a rush of water pulling me deeper and deeper. I texted Tania to say, “Wow, really potent energy for our trip in Viroqua. Almost knocked me out.” Then I checked the weather there, only to find a “Flood Warning.”
Hmmm …. I texted her not to set up camp too close to the Kickapoo River, as it might overflow, but we continued with our plans. We figured the potent energy came more from the intentional ceremony we had planned for that evening, the first time all four of us would be together, with Tania’s bunny Cosmo anchoring the center of our Circle. I had copied, modified and highlighted an OBOD Alban Elfed ritual, so that the five of us could personify the four directions and “the cosmos.”
All proceeded according to plan until …
…what I’ve come to consider “my Viroqua hex” reared its powerful head again.
Early Equinox morning, I received hurried texts from Tania that she and Dave were being evacuated from their camp site. A flurry of texts and phone calls followed as I tried to see if they could stay in the parking lot by our hotel, but people on their end urged them to get out of town while they still could. “Mudslides and flash floods would make it impossible” for David and me to reach Viroqua, and the Sheriff advised Tania and Dave to go to Madison. I knew she had little signal, so I located a KOA in De Forest, WI, just north of Madison, and it turned out they had trailers for rent, as well as a site for T and D.
Originally, we would have been staying about twenty minutes apart since we could not find any accommodations capable of housing both parties. Our trailer option meant a very different sort of packing, but it also meant we would be about twenty yards instead of twenty minutes away from each other! It meant we could hang out with Tania and Dave in their “home on the road,” while David and I shared our homecoming to the place he and I first lived together. A place with loads of vegan food options. A place we both love and had planned to drive through on our way home anyway to have lunch with dear friends there. A place which increasingly seems to be some kind of Wheel of the Year vortex portal for us, as demonstrated further by our potent Winter Solstice 2015 in Madison.
In any case, our plans rapidly morphed, and the synchronicities suddenly catapulted into crazy high gear. All of us dodged potential injury or death that day, between the rising floods on T and D’s end, and a rogue white van suddenly crossing and stopping right in front of us on the highway. As the day continued, Tania and I began to feel forces strongly opposing our visit, while even stronger forces protected and redirected us to safe communion. We eventually arrived, quickly got settled and then gathered in their “Magick Bus,” where we did introductions, hugged, changed into fun “Equinox costumes,” held our little ceremony and then feasted on the garden fresh white scallop squash “faux”lenta, pesto, tomatoes, leafy greens, raspberries and Sun Oven Lammas brownies, I had brought. It was so yummy and love filled that we forgot to take any photos that night.
Tania and I noticed that we “floated for hours” in some kind of altered state as our guys slept. The next day, Tania received word from our friend Dawn that she also felt floaty and interdimensional that night. We all felt we crossed onto a different timeline or alternate reality, as things eerily fell into perfect alignment, despite all the sudden twists and turns. I received texts from others confirming similar sense of shifts the night of Autumn Equinox, so we’re curious if anyone has other info to share in the comments below.
On Friday, we toured some of our favorite spots in Madison, including Willy Street Co-Op, of special interest to my D and me for green juice, and to T’s D for … vegan scones and donuts! Oh, yes, Dave is not only a vegan author, speaker, and animal rights advocate but also quite the junk food vegan connoisseur! He kept us well supplied with goodies throughout our trip, a bit of a shock to my “just harvested from the garden” norm, but also a fun and welcome treat! We enjoyed chocolate bark, donuts, scones and lots of wonderful teas from his extensive collection. We took them to our much missed restaurants Himal Chuli and The Green Owl Cafe, as well as to Roman Candle Pizzeria for vegan pizza. Here we are below on our first full, crazy windy day there, overlooking Lake Mendota, on the UW Madison campus. The wind was so strong it started blowing off my jacket and shirt, but we did manage to snap this selfie before wandering into more sheltered woods:
The whole trip continued to evolve moment-by-moment, and it seemed impossible to plan anything. Between road detours, missing emails, very specific weather guidelines, and more, we had no choice but to go with the flow. Saturday brought us to Cave of the Mounds, where we picnicked and then went on an amazing underground tour. I experienced such powerful and unshakeable déjà vu when we got there that I kept trying to explain it away by my early childhood visits to Pennsylvania’s Crystal Cave. The avalanche of synchronicities and slow motion time experience of our pre-tour time there convinced Tania and me that some other important time nexus or circular time event had arranged for us to be there right then. My David kept mentioning “the importance of getting you ladies deep inside the Earth so you can do whatever you need to do there.”
It truly was magical inside that ancient cave, but I’ll continue our adventure in Part 2.
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