Grandmother Cardinal

Over lunch, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

He described a day with a tightly knit web of meaningful moments, all tying back to a quote from Whitley Strieber he'd read that morning, "...the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark." Seconds later, he heard a woman on the radio describe seeing a red cardinal, she said it was "grandma winking back from the beyond." When Joe told his wife about this little coincidence, a red cardinal landed on a branch just outside the closest window.

That caught my eye because that particular quote from Whitley Strieber -- a man who has written many books and produced many quotable lines -- gave its name to my own Strieber blog, Winking Back from the Dark.

The red cardinal is a North American bird, not something I'm going to see in Taiwan, but when I went to pay for my lunch, I saw a somewhat cardinal-like plush toy at the counter.

It's red, with a beak and a crest, but I thought maybe it was supposed to be a pterodactyl rather than a bird. After a bit of searching online, I determined that it is neither a bird nor a pterodactyl but some Japanese thing that's supposed to be an anthropomorphic carrot or something.

Anyway, it was sufficiently cardinal-adjacent that it reminded me of the Christopher Blythe video whose thumbnail I had posted in "Owl and deer" (June 26). I hadn't watched any of it, but I remembered that the title mentioned a woman named Cardinal -- synching with the cardinal in Stories from the Messengers that was "grandma." I went back to his channel to find the video. I found that it was actually the second in a two-part series called "Sherry Cardinal Talks Chief Midegah," so I went to the first one and started playing it. Just 47 seconds in, this appears on the screen:

I was watching this because I'd connected a woman named Cardinal with a cardinal that was "grandma." Now there's a specific grandmother reference. I brought up the video transcript and word-searched for grandmother. Sure enough, the grandmother is Cardinal:

Now Sherry Cardinal was the right-hand woman of a man named David Taylor, and her story is about her experience becoming acquainted with David Taylor and then eventually being appointed as chief grandmother of David's clan.

Bone screws that get loose

On Monday night, I dreamt that I had some large black screws made of plastic. You could screw them in without needing a screwdriver, just by turning the head with your fingers. I was considering using some of them to hold my clothing in place by putting the screw through the fabric and into the bone of my arm or leg. This seemed like it would be very easy to do -- again, I wouldn't even need a screwdriver -- and I had no sense that it would be painful or cause bleeding or anything like that.

What made me reconsider this plan was the thought that if I put screws into my bones too often, inserting and removing screws from the same hole repeatedly, the hole would get slightly wider over time, and the screw wouldn't fit as tightly as before. Finally, they would just fall out. Therefore, I should only put screws into my bones when it's really necessary, not for trivial things like holding my clothing in place.

I think this dream was probably inspired by a cat scratcher my wife bought may years ago, broadly similar to the one pictured below, where to assemble it you had to drive plastic screws into thick corrugated cardboard. The screws always fell out after a while and had to be put back in, and the more that happened, the looser the screws became. That was years ago, though.

The next day, Tuesday, one of my adult students showed up with her arm in a sling. She had broken a bone in her shoulder about a year ago but had long since fully recovered, so I asked what had happened. She explained that one of the surgical screws used to repair her shoulder had somehow become loose, no longer fitting tightly into the bone, and so she had had to have surgery to replace it.

The owl, the deer, and the time warp

On June 10, I posted "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which included this picture of a Hermit card with a white hart added to it and associated it with this sort of "portal."

That post also referred to "a space/time warp" and "portals or time warps."

One June 27, I posted "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals." Following links from Mike Clelland's book Stories from the Messengers, I discovered the blog of his friend Laura Bruno, and particularly her page "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal." Again we have the Hermit card of the Tarot associated with a "portal," and again an animal has been added to the card -- but this time it is not a deer but an owl:

Today I read in Stories from the Messengers the story of a man named Don who went deer hunting and experienced a strange sensation:

I began to get a strange feeling. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and everything in the forest went totally silent. It was extremely strange. It almost seemed like time itself stopped. It was as if myself and the area around me was in a bubble where everything had just stopped, as if the world was still going on around me but only outside that bubble that I was in.

While in this strange "bubble," Don sees a snowy owl flying right towards him.

As the owl glided by, I turned my head and followed it with my eyes. The owl, after looking me directly in the eyes, turned its head forward again. It flew straight down the trail I had been watching previously and disappeared into the trees. At that exact instant, a huge doe stepped out onto the trail right below the spot where the owl disappeared, and stood there.

Don shoots the doe but then has trouble finding the body. Eventually he finds it by following a red squirrel. When he finally finds the dead doe, he looks up, and the snowy owl is perched in a tree directly over the body.

Moving slowly, I began easing my way toward the doe. But the instant I moved, the squirrel ran away to a nearby tree about 30 feet away and ran up it, stopping and sitting on a limb, seemingly now oblivious to me. At the same instant the owl flew away, disappearing into the forest. The oddly silent, in-a-time-warp atmosphere went away gradually.

Don here uses that same expression, "time warp," to describe the strange atmosphere in which he saw both the owl and the deer.

This afternoon, an hour or two after reading this account, I was at the fire station filing some routine fire safety paperwork for my school. As I was leaving, I noticed that behind the fire station, some distance from the road, was an Indigenous Peoples Museum. (Taiwan is the original home of the Austronesian peoples, who later spread out to various islands from Madagascar to Hawaii.) I think I've noticed it there before, but today I felt a sudden, strangely powerful urge to go inside.

I walked through the very small museum, looking at the mildly interesting displays of textiles and weapons and musical instruments. I was the only patron, and the museum was dead silent -- a novel sensation in urban Taiwan, where true silence is a rare commodity. As I enjoyed the silence, I thought of Don's description of the "oddly silent, in-a-time-warp atmosphere" and wondered whether I would encounter any owl- or deer-related art in the museum. I didn't, though. The only animal motifs were snakes and wild boars.

Finally, as I prepared to leave the museum and go about the rest of my day, I noticed this on the wall opposite the restrooms -- not one of the exhibits, but some modern decorative art:

It shows two owls perched in a tree directly above a deer. Don also saw an owl in a tree directly above a deer. No other animals are depicted. And, due to the style of the art, the owls, the deer, and the tree all appear to be white, or off-white.

Thanks for The Art of Fugue

I was looking through some old dream logs and found this one, from January 18, 2016:

We’re saying goodbye to a young kid – blond, maybe 13 years old, who is J. S. Bach. Everyone says goodbye and thank you, and I say – because I feel like I ought to say it – “Thanks for The Art of Fugue.” It’s not very sincere, and he seems to know that, and accepts my thanks awkwardly, nodding. (It’s an afterthought. I was just going to say “Thanks. Bye.” or something like that.) I feel like I probably should have said something like “the Brandenburg Concertos” instead.

Later the same day, I read Laeth's latest post. His posts typically end with some jazz, but this one was different:

today’s musical portion is not jazz. or is it.

my favorite JS Bach is the stuff people considered as academic, exercises good for teaching, but not real music. i must have student ears. The Art of the Fugue is at the top for me. the more involved it gets, the more i like it. i prefer the versions with organ, but couldn’t find this specific one, so string quartet it is (rather than piano, which doesn’t do it justice).

it sounds to me half Wayne Shorter half Villa Lobos. Bach really invented everything.

This shares with the dream the idea that you aren't really "supposed" to like The Art of Fugue, and that preferring a different work by Bach would be a sign of better musical taste.

I've never pretended to have good taste.

Gardens of pomegranates

On June 25, I posted "Another book called the Tree of Life," the titular book being one by Israel Regardie. I quoted a Wikipedia reference to two of his books, though: "he wrote two books on the Qabalah, A Garden of Pomegranates and The Tree of Life."

Despite having read rather broadly in the "magical" literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, I've never read anything by or about Israel Regardie. I know him only as the guy who, in violation of his oaths of secrecy, published the Golden Dawn rituals. Commenter Wade, though, turns out to know his work much better, particularly the second title mentioned in my post:

To mention Israel Regardie brings back memories for me. . . . A juvenile infatuation with Crowley as a supposed transgressive figure led me to own a small library of books written or edited by Mr. Regardie. In my teens, his "A Garden of Pomegranates" was a veritable bible to me; I read it over and over. It's remarkable how little I can remember of it nowadays, several decades later; I remember next to nothing.

Today I was rereading Laura Bruno's post "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal" (May 2020), which came up in "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals" (June 27). She compares the Tarot image to "the God Odin, who often appeared on Earth in the guise of a traveling hermit," adding parenthetically, "Sometimes I think Tania Marie and I met him in Mendocino back in 2009, where I first learned Runes."

This story of Laura's meeting a "wizard" in Mendocino and learning Runes from him is briefly recounted in Stories from the Messengers, so I knew in a general way what she was referring to, but I clicked the link and read the longer account in her post "Mendocino/Fort Bragg Vacation" (September 2009). The post ends thus:

I have not done justice to the otherworldy feeling of this encounter. I suppose I could have begun, "Two fair maidens met a werewolf on Full Moon's Eve" or "the shaman and the faeries walked together and down the road" or "a person's word is bond."

But I think I'll just say, "we tiptoed into the Pomegranate Garden, tasted the fruit and smiled."

One more usually speaks of a pomegranate orchard, and that is the usual translation of the Ramak's book (to which Regardie's title refers) and of the Bible verse to which it alludes. So the fact that both Regardie and Laura Bruno opted for garden is an additional sync.

Google's Chicxulub Easter egg

Today I discovered that if you search Google for chicxulub impact crater, as I just did, an asteroid will fly across the screen diagonally, making the window shake when it hits the bottom.

No other asteroid- or crater-related search strings seem to trigger the animation. The key word is chicxulub (or any misspelling which will be corrected to chicxulub). Seems like an oddly specific feature to include in a search engine.

I discovered this after running across this painting of the crater in an old /x/ thread. The similarity to Plato's description of Atlantis piqued my curiosity.

I previously posted about the concentric rings of Atlantis in "The water is blue, and the birds are awake" (December 2025).

Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals

I recently read Shelby Van Pelt's novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. Despite the fact that there are no owls at all in this novel, the Acknowledgments at the end begin thus:

My grandmother collected owls. The china cabinet on the red shag carpet in her dining room was crammed full of them. As a kid, I spent a lot of time on that carpet. . . . 

This was the 1980s, and these owls were old-school, not like the twee pastel birds that now decorate baby showers. My grandmother's figurine owls had heavy beaks. Like real owls, they conveyed little emotion.

I never knew why she loved owls, but year after year, until she passed away, I wrapped gift boxes with owl-themed brooches or tea towels. In some ways, Tova is modeled after my Grandma Anna.

Tova, the main character in the novel, does not collect owls or anything else, though one of her friends, a minor character, "for some reason that has never been fully explained, has been collecting elephants since she was a bachelorette." So beginning the Acknowledgments with an account of her owl-collecting grandmother wasn't exactly the obvious choice.

Shortly after finishing Remarkably Bright Creatures -- I only read a few books in between -- I started the book I am currently reading: Mike Clelland's Stories from the Messengers: Accounts of Owls, UFOs and a Deeper Reality. I read his original The Messengers in 2022 and his novel The Unseen in 2023. Perhaps it was Van Pelt's random mention of owls that subconsciously prompted me to return to his work.

It goes without saying that the book is full of owls, but this passage I read today syncs quite specifically with what Van Pelt wrote about her grandmother:

Laura was raised in a house full of owls; the hundreds of pictures and knick knacks were there because of her mother's compulsive owl collecting. This is something I've heard a lot in my research. Someone who's had experiences with both owls and UFOs will tell me that their mother collected owls, often compulsively.

These obviously weren't real owls in Laura's childhood home, or the homes of many other young experiencers. Yet these children were surrounded by symbols, and it seems as if a subtle for on initiation might have been underway.

The Laura here is Laura Bruno, who, Clelland mentions in the text, has a blog called Laura Bruno's Blog. Since Shelby Van Pelt randomly mentioned owls in her novel about an octopus, maybe Laura Bruno, notable for her owl experiences, would mention octopuses. I searched her blog for that key word and found a December 8, 2013, post called "Whitley's Journal." That was a surprise. Whitley Strieber, who wrote the foreword for Stories from the Messengers, is another owl-and-UFO guy -- but octopuses?

In a blog that has been continuously active since 2008, only four posts contain the word octopus. One of them is also her only post about Whitley Strieber. His name is mentioned in a few other posts, but this is the only one that is about him and is tagged "Whitley Strieber." Here's how it begins:

Whitley Strieber’s “The Key: A True Encounter” offers much food for thought for these times of Awakening and the attempt to co-opt that growing consciousness. I first became aware of Strieber’s work in Madison when that book literally fell off a shelf after I mentally asked, “What else do I need to know?” It’s a short book that covers everything from a sudden planetary freeze to time travel to the prospect of an AI or alien race already controlling reality options and human evolution.

I didn’t plan to write about “The Key” today, as I was enjoying a bizarre rabbit hole of research related to octopuses and the new NRO logo people are so freaked out about. Perhaps I will share that partially written post another time, as it continues to fascinate me; however, the synchronicity train stopped firmly at Whitley Strieber station when I found the following journal entry by Whitley regarding unauthorized and secret censoring (post-proof-approval and pre-printing) of the first edition. Strieber’s careful documentation of the censored material does more to reveal an obvious agenda to co-opt and control the Awakening than anything else I’ve seen. It’s pretty startling and, imho, a fantastic sign of positive shifts that this new edition was allowed to go to print as actually submitted instead of as secretly censored.

So it's a post about discrepancies between the two different editions of Whitley's book The Key. I've posted about that myself, in "'Tim' and The Key" (November 11, 2023). I had a hunch that the exact amount of time separating her post and mine would be a significant number, so I checked. The main significance is that it can be expressed in two different ways using exactly the same digits:

• 9 years, 11 months, 1 day
• 119 months, 1 day

Those particular digits are interesting, given that Debbie, this blog's commenter laureate, has the number 1119 in her username.

I looked up the then-new NRO logo Laura mentioned. It looks like this:

I don't think I'd ever seen that before, but I instantly recognized it as the basis for what used to be the unofficial logo of /pol/.

Wondering if anyone had thought to dub that critter the Kektopus, I did an image search for that word. Apparently no one has, but one of the very few image results that came back hit on a familiar theme:

While I was at Laura's blog, I noticed that there was a link at the top to "divine doorways and porta-portals," which I clicked because "portals" had come up recently in the post "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10). One of the white harts of the title was this one from a Hermit card:

The page on Laura's blog features art painted on doors. You can see 27 of these doors on the blog, several of them named after Tarot cards -- and yes, among those present is  "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal." It features an owl:

Scrolling down, I found that Laura had written:

This portal also echoes the owl painting I did in 2010, which now hangs in our living room:

That very painting is reproduced, in full color, in Stories from the Messengers.

Okay, Laura is obviously into owls, which is why she's in Clelland's book in the first place. How much of a coincidence is it that her Hermit Portal -- the one "portal" of hers that caught my attention for sync reasons -- should include not only an owl but the very owl painting that appears in the book? To find out, I methodically clicked through and looked at every one of her "portals." Only one other -- "Door Number 24: The Two of Cups Equinox Portal" -- features an owl, and there is no mention of the 2010 painting.

The association of owls with doors or portals is not new on this blog. My July 2022 post "Break on through to the other side" -- which played a role in bringing WanderingGondola into contact with me -- I quoted Mike Clelland:

I understand how people take in a story, and how they need a symbol or a sign on the door. But the owl is meaningless to what is on the other side of the door. It’s just the doorway that’s important. 

The owl is the right symbol for the door. We are on this side, and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door. There is is a LOT more! We are in this little tight hallway here, and on the other side of the door is this vastness! 

Update:  Laura Bruno informs me that Mike Clelland had an aunt named Tova, which is obviously not a very common name in the United States.

So Shelby Van Pelt associates her character Tova (who does not collect owls) with her own owl-collecting grandmother. I post about that because I associate it with Mike Clelland's account of Laura Bruno's mother collecting owls. I share this post with Laura Bruno, and it turns out that she knows Mike Clelland well enough to know the name of one of his late aunts: Tova!