It was one week ago last Friday, my day of departure from the Rebels of Disclosure conference in Grafton Illinois that was going to provide the opportunity to perform some magick this day. As cool as the idea of that sounds, my morning was going to start out anything but magical.

First of all Grafton IL is in a unique location close to the St Louis airport, but light years from the immediacy of transportation options we’ve come to expect while traveling. Perhaps conference attendees caught an Uber from the airport to the venue. But after trying a few times to book a return ride from the resort to the airport – yeah Uber doesn’t come out here.

Now, why does any of this matter? Because my perfectly executed plans to return to the Sedona area were about to be interrupted. I woke at seven this morning to not one – but three emails from Southwest Airlines advising me of changes in my departure time from STL. My original departure time was scheduled for 11:40 AM, and the emails I received indicated varying departure times. The first one being 1:15, the second being 2:40 and the third being 1:25. The immediate challenge was going to be contacting the ground transportation company that was scheduled to take me from PHX back to Cottonwood. My flight was no longer going to arrive in time to catch my scheduled shuttle pick up. So I threw an imaginary dart at the three emails and decided I would use the final one as the one I would begin to reschedule the rest of my transportation arrangements with.

I found the confirmation emails from the ground transportation company and phoned just before 8AM. The voicemail greeting suggested that the office hours of operation were from 7 AM to 9 PM. I thought great, I’m in the queue contacting the company to get their assistance to make the necessary changes.

I’m on hold for the next 45 minutes before it’s time for me to head from my cabin to the reception center where I’ll meet the taxi I was able to make arrangements with yesterday for a 9 AM departure. As I walk over, I’m beginning to look for my rideshare companion as our departure times coincided and we decided to share the taxi to the airport. After the driver loaded my bags in the back of the car, I continued on hold for the next 10 minutes waiting for Lynn to show up. Something finally hit me at 8:55 when she stepped out of the reception center and I finally realized I was in Central time zone and the number I was trying to reach is in Pacific. I just wasted the last 55 minutes on hold, but the good news is that in five minutes the office officially opens. Chalk it up to the haze I found myself in as a result of the vibration from the event that I was still assimilating.

Well we made it to the airport without incident and clearly plenty of time. There are lots of things during travel that make me giggle with the perfect synchronicities to see if you’re paying attention and I’ll share this one.

The speakers were given a gift bag with several tokens from the event. Mine included books from Aaron Kuhn, Lisa Demartino and Sherri Divband. When I went to check my luggage at the curb, it weighed in at 52 lbs – 2 lbs over the limit. The skycap asked if there was anything I could pull out and put into my carry on to avoid a $100 excess weight fee. Sure enough, when I reached into the suitcase and pulled out the first thing I felt – out came the gift bag containing the books. The resulting weight = 50 lbs. exactly. 🫨

The rest of my actual flight experience was pretty smooth once the actual departure time was locked and loaded. My new expected arrival time at PHX was 2:25 and my rescheduled ground transportation was 3:20. Barring some kind of delay retrieving my luggage, I should be able to meet the shuttle with time to spare.

When the shuttle arrived, the driver got out to account for all of his passengers and loaded their luggage. At quick glance, he looked familiar to me but over my hospitality career I’ve come across a lot of people and from time to time they certainly look like I’ve met them before. But it turns out I DID know Andy and he’s going to demonstrate it on the ride home. There are eight passengers on this shuttle, heading to the Sedona area.

I was the last one to board the shuttle, so I ended up sitting on the bench seat immediately behind Andy and next to a woman who had just returned from Boston. Andy likes to engage with people sitting nearby and he and she were having a conversation about a variety of things. Normally, I’d be listening to music through my EarPods to keep occupied but I’d had them in my ears for the last two hours or so during the flight and I needed a break from that. So I would just focus on the ride and the things to see along the way, but before I did Andy would recall when we met among his conversation with the woman next to me. This would be the 3rd time I’ve ridden the shuttle from PHX to Cottonwood, the second time was last Sunday when I left (and that driver wasn’t Andy) and the 1st time – the time Andy would remember was back when I first arrived late October. 😎 Apparently I leave an impression.

I can only imagine the number of times Andy has made this drive and he knows the alternate routes, should the need arise for such a thing. By now it’s about 4:30 and the swell of traffic you can tell is being influenced by rush-hour. Although there’s a lot of traffic on the freeways, it seems to be moving right along and Andy finds the seams in between the slower traffic lanes.

But when we get to I-17 all of this is about to change. The section that we’re on is straight enough that you can see the road off into the distance quite aways. And up ahead there seems to be a slowdown that Andy points out. Someone in the back row of the shuttle shouts out what Google Maps is showing and he claims there’s an accident ahead. It’ll turn out that at the time, we’re probably 10 miles from the scene of this incident which is parallel on the freeway to a rest stop location up ahead. Andy radios into his dispatch at the office to see if they have an update on these traffic conditions. The dispatcher comes back a few minutes later with an update claiming that because of the accident the road is being closed. The outside temperature is 99°. She suggests, considering pulling off and finding a place to stay cool until the scene is cleared. It should be noted, there is nowhere for us to turn around to take another route at the moment.

Until now, I hadn’t been paying attention to much of it as my day was already delayed and it didn’t really matter when I got back to Cottonwood as long as somehow I could get back to Cottonwood. We would learn that there was another little snag in the plan – myself and two other passengers were actually going to transfer vehicles at Camp Verde into Cottonwood for the last leg of the trip. There were concerns about that driver’s availability and that timing when we arrived.

So I picked up my phone and I decided to look into the situation myself. We did have connectivity so mapping programs should work and I tend to like to use Waze so that’s what I fired up. Now If you use this app, you know it shows a variety of conditions all contributed by the other Wazers that you can actually see on the app. So when I logged on, I immediately reported the standstill conditions we were in on the app. If you’re familiar with Waze, you know that that adds a red line for as long as the conditions exist on that stretch of road in front of you. When I zoomed up to the presumed location of the incident, it appeared as though two disabled vehicles and police were on scene. Before that location, as well as after on I-17, you could tap on any of the other Wazers and see their status. The status shows what their handle name is, their current location and the estimated speed at which they’re traveling. Normally, it will say something like greater than 25 miles or greater than 45 miles, in this case, the vehicles between us and the scene reported they were moving greater than 25 miles and the vehicles beyond the scene were moving greater than 45 miles.

By this time, we were approximately 7 miles away from the scene and off in the distance, it looked to me as though the traffic was not standstill, but crawling along. That’s when I suggested to the rest of the shuttle that I didn’t think we were at a standstill – and I didn’t think given what I saw that the road was closed. We were moving along very slowly, but we were moving and so I took this time to explore more on the Waze app to understand the conditions more.

While I was looking over our route on the freeway, I was zooming in on what I could to see if I couldn’t comprehend what was down the road. While I was playing with this, I had a vision in my head of what Merlin might do to clear this traffic jam. Merlin and I have some history and I’ve seen him perform alchemy and some magick and there’s a hand gesture he uses that I never forgot. When he waves his hand over something, his fingers rotate one after another as though he’s pushing his intent through the energy of his hands and fingers. So I tried it. I thought, what the heck – let’s see if Merlin can clear this accident. I waved my hand over the phone in the manner described while looking at the Waze app at the alleged scene of the incident. I mean, it couldn’t hurt right? So not expecting anything, we could see that the traffic ahead of us down the road was starting to accelerate. I have no idea of knowing what actually took place at the accident scene nor the resources required to clear. We understood the accident was such that it was going to close the road. So you can only imagine my surprise when we reach the alleged scene and there was nothing there that implied any accident had taken place. No disabled vehicles, no tow vehicles or wreckers and no police presence. Nothing was here to stop traffic in any way. When it finally struck me about a mile past this location with absolutely nothing there, I was stupefied by what had just taken place. When the thought occurred to me that it may have been because of the actions I took, I had to stop a moment and remember what kind of magick I’ve been taught. This shit works. 😎

Welcome to multidimensionality, this is your Captain Starbuck speaking … I just can’t tell you when we’ll be landing soon. 🫨