I stopped at a red light, and the motorcyclist in front of me had something written across the back of her T-shirt. Her ponytail covered up part of the writing, though, so that all I could see of it was "TRY YOU."
Then she turned her head slightly, and the ponytail shifted, so that only "OUR BEST" was visible. Another slight shift, and the O was hidden from view, leaving "UR BEST." At that moment, I became aware of the motorcycle next to hers, which had a big box on the back labeled "Uber Eats" -- a perfect anagram of "U are best."
I mentally rolled my eyes and thought, "U R best? Come on, sync fairies, what kind of vapid feelgooderism is this?"
The ponytail shifted again, making "YOUR BEST" visible. Then the light changed, and that was the end of that.
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Later, though, I realized that there might be a slightly more complex message here.
TRY YOU OUR BEST UR BEST YOUR BEST
We will try you our best -- test you as thoroughly as we know how -- and then you will be "best" -- not in the sense of being better than anyone else, but being your best.
Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy (1 Pet. 4:12-13).
Many times now (see "More whiteboard telepathy!" and follow the links), I have had the experience of one of my young students -- always young children, and different ones every time -- writing, drawing, or saying something that seems to have been pulled directly from my own mind, something so specific and bizarre that chance seems to be ruled out as an explanation.
This one is not quite so specific as some of the others, but I though it was worth noting. This is from a highly intelligent nine-year-old I tutor in English. Not quite a child prodigy, but definitely what is called "gifted and talented" (though fortunately her parents, like my own, have been smart enough to keep her far away from those sinister "gifted and talented" programs). Basically, she reads a dozen or so English books every week, and then we talk about them.
For those who came in late, the background is that I have spent several weeks reading a book about owls, which brought with it a large volume of owl-related synchronicities. I have not discussed the book, or owls, with anyone except on my blog, which none of my students read or even know about. I read the book of Kindle, so there's no chance anyone could have seen the cover or anything.
Yesterday, July 30, we were talking about the border between the United States and Mexico, and she said, "I guess if people want to smuggle drugs from Colombia into the United States, they probably try to sneak across that border at night. It's probably pretty hard to guard the whole thing, especially after dark." I said that that stood to reason, and then she joked, "Soooo . . . the border patrol needs to invest in some trained owls!"
Later in the same tutoring session, the conversation had turned to the French and Indian War and how the British victory, and the need to pay for soldiers to garrison their newly annexed territory, had led the king to raise taxes, setting in motion the chain of events that led to the American Revolution. My student said, "So obviously in a situation like that, you're going to need a lot more soldiers -- and owls!"
Unlike the previous reference, this made no sense even as a joke. "Owls?" I said. "Why would they need owls?"
"Well, they could work as alarm clocks to wake up the soldiers, and they could also scare the enemy by hooting."
Owls hoot at night, when people are sleeping, not in the morning, when they want to wake up, so they wouldn't make very effective alarm clocks. However, in The Messengers, Clelland refers four times to owls metaphorically "playing the role of an alarm clock."
On July 28, 2022, I was stopped at a red light when I noticed the text on the back of the T-shirt of the motorcyclist in front of me. It was written in the style of an eye chart, and it said: "Stay with me boy. See the world through the eyes of Mickey. Don't stop looking." I assume this was some sort of mutant Disney knockoff, but in the current synchronistic context I figured "Mickey" (a nickname for Michael) was more likely to be a hawk-eyed archangel than a mouse. Anyway, I took it as an injunction to keep my eyes and mind open.
At the next light, my eyes were drawn as if by magnetism to a license plate that read NPH 421. That means Nephi, of course, an important name in the Book of Mormon, so my first thought was that the numbers were giving chapter and verse. There are four books of Nephi, and none of them has 42 chapters, so I looked up 4:21 in each of the first three books of Nephi. Fourth Nephi is very short and isn't divided into chapters, so I checked 4 Ne. 21. Of the four verses I checked, only one of them struck me as in any way noteworthy:
He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh (2 Ne. 4:21).
I thought that was an odd turn of phrase. In the Bible, the "consuming of flesh" is always associated with burnt offerings, destruction by fire, and horrible plagues. The verse from Nephi made me think of Paul's equally strange statement that "though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing" (1 Cor. 13:3). Paul's other examples of things that are worthless without charity include prophesying, having great faith, feeding the poor, and the like; how did "giving my body to be burned" make it onto that list of good works? How is that even a good work at all? I thought it might be a reference to submitting to fiery martyrdom of the type pioneered by Nero and taken up centuries later by the Inquisition, but 1 Corinthians was written before Nero's accession to the throne, and I don't think "being burned" would have been an understandable reference to martyrdom at that time.
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Then I had the thought that 421 was a year, not a scripture reference. AD 421 is, after all, the very last date in the Book of Mormon chronology, the year in which Moroni, the last surviving Nephite (NPH), finished the book -- an abridgment of the Plates of Nephi, with additions by Mormon and Moroni -- and buried it in the earth.
Then I remembered that in my July 2021 post "In the sync stream" had prominently featured Moroni (both the Nephite and the city in the Comoros) and even mentioned that the "golden plates are supposed to have been buried by Moroni in the Hill Cumorah."
In the opening paragraph of that post, I had written that "when I think Moby-Dick, I think 'The Whiteness of the Whale' and I think 'Loomings.'" Then at the end of the post, I noted seeing the number 142 and feeling it was significant, not knowing why until eventually I "realized that 1 and 42 are the numbers of the two Moby-Dick chapters I mention in the first paragraph."
But I had actually begun the post by mentioning first "The Whiteness of the Whale" (Chapter 42) and then "Loomings" (Chapter 1) -- not 142, but 421. Then in the same post I had gone on to mention, for reasons entirely unrelated to Moby-Dick, Moroni's burying the golden plates -- which is supposed to have occurred in AD 421. Not until now, a year later, did I make the connection.
Moroni, the last survivor of his people, passed on their history to future generations. This is precisely the role played in Moby-Dick by Ishmael, the sole survivor of the wreck of the Pequod. The epilogue begins with an epigram from the Book of Job: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."
One of the comments on my "In the sync stream" post began: "Interesting. The license plate post was also good."
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So satisfying was that interpretation of NPH 421 -- the last Nephite in the year 421 -- that I dismissed my earlier attempts at chapter-and-verse interpretations as barking up the wrong tree. Then I noticed my July 30 post "And then the message said, 'End of message," which ends with what I admit is a completely unrelated reference to spontaneous human combustion.
Spontaneous human combustion -- doesn't that very obviously sync with "He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh" (2 Ne. 4:21)? Also it's a little known fact that the name Nephi is not original to the Book of Mormon but appears in one of the apocryphal books of the Bible -- as the name not of a person but of a flammable liquid (2 Macc. 1:36). Nephi is the King James rendering; most modern translations have naphtha.
Why does my July 30 post have the title it has? I was posting about how I had just finished reading a book called The Messengers, so "end of message" seemed appropriate. The precise wording, though, is from one of Joe Biden's teleprompter gaffes.
In my December 2020 post "American politician spontaneously combusts!" I describe my absurd but persistent premonition about the spontaneous combustion of Joe Biden (without mentioning Biden by name). Later, in September 2021, I had a dream in which reference was repeatedly made to "Joe Biden, the Human Torch"; days later, Biden suddenly acquired the nickname Brandon, which is French for "firebrand."
My 2020 post quoted an excerpt from Unsong in which George W. Bush bursts into flames after someone hacks his teleprompter and makes him utter a magic word that has that effect. One of the comments to that post said:
After reading the George Bush excerpt, I think 'spontaneous human combustion' might be a metaphor for a politician 'melting down' during a public appearance. Justly or unjustly, Biden is particularly singled out among politicians as someone who relies on a teleprompter to keep on track.
Then, yesterday, without consciously making the connection at all, I published a post with a Biden teleprompter gaffe as a title, and although it is primarily a post about Mike Clelland's book on owls, I included a reference to Unsong and then one to spontaneous human combustion.
Well, I've finally done it: This evening I finished Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee -- a title which my readers are surely getting tired of having me mention and quote in every single thing I post here. I don't think I've had such a sync-heavy reading experience since Unsong.
At the end of the book (uh, "spolier alert," I guess?), Clelland relates what he calls his "confirmation experience." This involved seeing in a "psychic flash" of a map.
The only way to describe it is as an instantaneous visual download. I clearly saw a map in my mind with [a] straight yellow line running west to east with three distinct markers on it. I knew this map was southern Utah, the Four Corners area.
After seeing this map, Clelland thought of three extraordinary paranormal experiences he had had in the Four Corners area. Using Google Maps, he placed markers at the sites of these three experiences and found that a 231-mile straight line drawn from one site to the other passed right through the third site, just as he had seen in his "psychic flash."
And "right through" means right through. The precision is unreal.
This made me think of my post "Three in a row," posted while I was reading Clelland's book. On Clelland's map, the three points are not evenly spaced. The middle point is about twice as far from the rightmost point as it is from the leftmost. On July 21, 2022, I took a photo of three heavenly bodies arranged in a straight line, and in this case, too, the middle point (the Moon) is about twice as far from the rightmost point (Jupiter) as from the leftmost (Saturn).
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In unrelated news, I just checked The Higherside Chats today after a few weeks of not doing so and found that the July 21, 2022 episode is called "The Mysterious Reality of Spontaneous Human Combustion." I haven't listened to it yet.
Last night, I read this in Clelland's book about owls:
The woman I spoke with is Jacquelin Smith, and along with having UFO contact experiences, she is an author, psychic and animal communicator. Her first book from 2005 was titled, plainly enough, Animal Communication.
This reminded me that I had on one of my bookshelves a book with the very similar title Animal Speak, by Ted Andrews, which I had picked up for a dollar years ago at a used bookstore but had never so much as opened. Today I decided to take it down from the shelf and see if it had anything interesting to say about owls.
I opened the book at random -- a 383-page book which, the cover promises, covers "creatures great and small" and "includes a comprehensive dictionary of animal, bird, and reptile symbolism" -- and these are the pages I got:
That's right, I just happened to open up directly to the first page of the entry for "Owl." Either the book's previous owner consulted the owl article a lot, or else it's just one of those weird coincidences.
Skimming what Mr. Andrews has to say about owls, I don't find too much that's new to me. However, a few passages caught my eye. The first:
To the early Christians and Gnostics, [the owl] is associated with Lilith, the first wife of Adam who refused to be submissive to him.
In my last post, I said that Adam is (according to Joseph Smith) the same personage as Michael the Archangel, and the title of the post was "Immediate confirmation that Michael is Mr. Owl." One possible meaning of the title "Mr. Owl" would be a man who is married to an owl.
Andrews also mentions how owls blink:
Like humans, they blink by closing the upper eyelids, giving them a human expression which has added to the mysticism of owls.
In "The Locust Grove crop circle," where I first proposed that Michael was Mr. Owl, I said that Michael means "Who is like God?" I wanted to add a picture of an owl with the word "Who?" so I searched the Web for one. As it happens, I ended up choosing an animated gif of an owl blinking.
Finally, this passage suggests that "Mr. Owl" might not actually be an owl at all but a hawk.
Some owls have a balancing raptor. The owl is lunar and nocturnal, while some raptors are diurnal and solar. Owls and some hawks will share the same territory, one hunting and using it by day, and the other by night. They don't necessarily get along, but they do tolerate each other in varying degrees. These can be seen as balancing medicines, and rituals and meditations can be used with the owl and its solar equivalent. They can be used to balance the male and female.
There follows a table of owls species, each with its corresponding species of hawk or falcon.
Of all the Archangels, Michael is the head of this order. He is often depicted with sword in hand. He appears to me as bright and shimmering golden energy (this color is associated with the higher heavenly energy chakras located well above the head), as an image of a brilliant golden wing, in human form dressed in white with wings and carrying a sword or glowing with a gold aura, and in the form of birds of prey, such as falcons and hawks.
More syncs? More syncs. True player don't get no time to sleep. I see there are some comments on my last post already, but I haven't read them yet. I need to get this typed up first.
In my last post, I identified the constellations Hercules and Draco with St. Michael and the Dragon. I further identified the Dragon with the Metal Worm and Michael with Mr. Owl (as in the palindrome "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm") -- this latter connection being made on the rather flimsy grounds that Michael’s name means "Who is like God?"
Shortly after posting that, I went outside to take out the trash. I noticed a big gecko on a wall I was walking past, and I stopped to watch it for a bit, thinking, "Hey, it’s a dragon!" This is uncharacteristic behavior; geckos are extremely common in this part of the world, and ordinarily I would no more take notice of one than I would of a cockroach. This one felt like a significant "dragon," though, and I sort of expected something synchromystically relevant to happen with it. Nothing did, though, so after a minute or so I went on my way.
Later, I checked my blog for new comments, and then I checked the stats, which I don't do very often. I saw that I had had about 12,000 hits last month and about 10,000 so far this month. I used the calculator app on my phone to work out about how many hits per day that was.
Then I started reading, you guessed it, Mike Clelland's The Messengers. I came to a section with the heading "333 and orchestrated clues." Seeing that numerologically significant number reminded me that I wanted to check the gematria value of a particular word. I brought up the calculator app to do so and found that my last calculation was still on the screen:
So that got my attention. In this section, Clelland tells the story of a woman who kept running into the number 333 and the time 3:33. It seemed significant, but she couldn't figure out what it meant. Then, on what I infer from astrological clues given later in the text was January 24, 2003, she had a close-range sighting of a large triangular UFO with three lights on it, and the 333 syncs abruptly stopped. This woman was an astrologer, and later she was browsing her ephemeris and noticed this:
For the entirety of 2003, the number 3:33 appeared just one and only time for the Sun, the brightest and most important astrological luminary, and this fell on the very day of her triangle sighting.
Of course in the course of a year, the Sun will pass the 3°33′ mark in each of the 12 zodiac signs, but the standard Swiss ephemeris only gives the planets' positions for midnight Greenwich time each day of the year. That's how I inferred that her triangle sighting was on January 24 (Clelland only says "a winter's evening in 2003"); the emphemeris gives the Sun's position for that date as 3Aqu33′56.
The woman was still at a loss regarding the meaning of 333 until her epiphany finally came in the strangest way imaginable:
Kaye looked at a fish aquarium in the office. She was shocked to see that the little catfish Draco had been chewing on his favorite treat, an English cucumber. She said, "It was almost like a magnet drew my eyes to the cucumber!"
The fish had eaten out the middle of the cucumber slice, so there was now a perfectly formed hole in the precise shape of an equilateral triangle. Seeing this, she realized instantly how all the clues were related and couldn't believe that she had missed something so obvious.
Sounds like one of those koan stories, doesn't it? "At that moment, Kaye became enlightened."
This first caught my attention because of the name Draco (italicized in the original), since I had just posted about the constellation Draco. Then I noticed a really weird coincidence: Kaye saw that a catfish had eaten a triangle out of a cucumber. It just so happens that I have in my house a cat called Triangle and another cat called Cucumber.
And finally we come to the Michael part. Clelland comments:
While there is no owl in this account, it does show up indirectly. The catfish shares its name with Draco the Dragon, a constellation that wraps itself around Polaris, the North Star. In Greek legend, Draco was a dragon killed by the goddess Minerva and thrown into the heavens where we still see it each night. Minerva, as we know, has a companion little owl.
That's actually just one of many myths relating to Draco (others identify it with Ladon, the dragon that guarded the Golden Apples and was killed by Hercules). But Clelland identifies the (female) conqueror of Draco with the owl. That makes Michael, the male conqueror of the the Dragon, Mr. Owl.
Hercules killed the dragon in order to secure the Golden Apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. This combination of garden, serpent, and forbidden apples naturally leads one to identify Hercules with Adam. The Locust Grove crop circle was in Adams County, Ohio; and Mormonism holds that Adam is the same person as the Archangel Michael.
What time did I read this story in Clelland's book? Well, my calculator screenshot was at 2:06, and I took a screenshot of the bit about Draco and Minerva at 2:29. That means that at 2:27 -- exactly 3 hours and 33 minutes after posting about Draco in my last post -- I was reading this Clelland story about Draco and the significance of 3:33.
I was going to post all this last night, but it was already very late, so I decided to go to bed and leave it for the morning. I had only been in bed for a few minutes when my wife (who is even more of a night owl than myself) called me to come downstairs. There was a baby gecko in the living room, and she wanted me to catch it and take it outside before the cats killed it.
How's that for a nice synchronistic punctuation mark?
I really do have a lot of substantial philosophical and theological posts in my drafts folder, but the synchronicity fairies just won't let up with the fire hose. So my apologies to those of you who "just read it for the articles," but this blog is still in sync mode for the time being.
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In "Break on through to the other side," I mentioned that I had done a one-card pull from the Rider-Waite, got the Eight of Cups, and noted its similarity to the Flammarion engraving. In my own notes on the reading, not published on the blog until later, I mentioned a mental image of
the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram (forming the vesica piscis where Christ sits enthroned in the Maiestas Domini icon), and I associated this with the strange object in the sky of the Eight of Cups (a combined crescent moon and full moon?)
My next post was "The Green Door," and Debbie left a comment all about yoni symbolism in connection with the Door, not knowing of my recent mental image of a vesica piscis (a yoni symbol) in connection with the Eight of Cups (a card I had featured in a post with a Doors lyric as its title).
The thing is, the object in the sky of the Eight of Cups doesn't really look anything like a Venn diagram or a vesica piscis. I just connected it with that at a conceptual level because it seemed to be a union of opposites (Sun and Moon, or full moon and crescent).
My posts sent Debbie looking through her old dream journals, though, and her attention was drawn to one dream in particular, called Serpent Holes. Some convoluted but inspired train of thought led her from that to Serpent Mound in Ohio and to the Locust Grove crop circle, which was discovered on August 24, 2003, less than 2,000 feet from the Mound. Here's a schematic drawing of the layout of the circle:
In "The vesica piscis and the blue moon," I noted that the "moon" on the Eight of Cups is not actually a circle divided into two parts by an arc (like the bright and dark parts of a crescent moon), but is a smaller circle overlapping a larger one. If you look at the silhouette of the entire object, it's not circular but has a convex bulge on one side. The resemblance to the Locust Grove circle is uncanny.
What the Locust Grove formation also includes -- but which is absent from the Eight of Cups -- is an explicit vesica piscis. This is mentioned in the write-up I linked (originally linked to by Debbie in her comment):
So I intuitively connected the Eight of Cups "moon" with the vesica piscis even though nothing in the image really suggests that; and Debbie, following the thread of her own dreams, stumbled upon a formation (in Ohio, which is where I usually say I'm "from"; in 2003, I lived less than 100 miles from Serpent Mound) which combines the Eight of Cups shape with a vesica piscis.
In a similar way, Ben looked at the Eight of Cups and for some reason thought of the Archangel Michael of Panormitas, even though I can't see any connection between the two at all except for the Sun and Moon on Michael's chest -- which Ben did not even notice until after he had made the link. This led me to look up other representations of Michael with a Sun and Moon, and I ended up finding one that corresponds perfectly to the Nebra sky disc -- which disc had also been brought up by Debbie in connection with her dream journal. This is an unusually collaborative sync-stream that's emerging; Ben, Debbie, and I all seem to be "in sync," so to speak.
The Archangel Michael, of course, is generally shown with his foot on the defeated serpent or dragon -- which syncs with the crop formation being so close to Serpent Mound. The file Debbie linked to about the crop circle even says that Serpent Mound probably represents the constellation Draco, identified by the Sumerians with Tiamat. In D&D, Tiamat is the evil counterpart to the good Bahamut, the Metal Worm.
If the serpent is the Metal Worm, who is Michael? He's Mr. Owl, of course. In the de Vos painting of Michael, written around his hand is the Latin motto Qui ut Deus? -- a translation of the literal meaning of the name Michael. In English, it would be Who is like God?
In the sky, Hercules is depicted with one foot on Draco -- in other words, he plays the role of St. Michael. In Oswald Wirth's Tarot, the Emperor is associated with Hercules, and he has a Sun and Moon on his breastplate just like the depictions of Michael we have been discussing.
Wirth also identified his Herculean Emperor with the Hebrew letter Daleth -- the Door. The Emperor is numbered 4, and his throne is a cube -- adorned with, if not actually an owl, at least a bird of prey.
In a recent discussion I was having with someone about the Owl Door, the number 64 and the word Lionclad (from a dream) came up. Lionclad clearly means Hercules, and 64 is the cube of 4. (Also, if 4 = Daleth = Door, 64 corresponds to Six Doors -- called Six Owl Door in English.)
It's also worth noting that my posts on Oswald Wirth's Emperor card are what first led Debbie to contact me.
In the comments to "The vesica piscis and the blue moon," Ben linked to the (reportedly miraculous) icon of Archangel Michael of Panormitas, apparently because the Sun's face on the Flammarion engraving reminded him of it.
The Flammarion engraving includes both this Sun and a crescent Moon, as does the Nebra sky disc -- which was in the post because Debbie had referred me to it in connection with a dream of hers that prominently featured the number 132.
Only later did Ben notice that Michael of Panormitas has a Sun and Moon on his breastplate:
I had never seen St. Michael portrayed this way -- it made me think of the Sun and Moon on the breastplate of Oswald Wirth's Emperor -- so I did some searching to see if I could find other instances. I found many -- all from Mexico, all based on this original painting by Maerten de Vos -- currently in St. Bonaventure Cathedral in Cuautitlán, Mexico.
Quoting an article I had linked to about the de Vos painting, Ben notes the similarity of Michael's cuirass to the Nebra sky disc.
"Fundamentally respecting the chromatic code reserved and required for the graphic representation of this member of the Catholic body of saints, the Archangel Michael is depicted dressed in a blue cuirass, adorned all over its surface with gold stars, accompanied by a sun and moon on his pectorals, the former on the right one the latter on the left. His armor is further embellished with ruffled orange-yellow sleeves that stick out from his undershirt, and an underskirt of the same color."
Sounds just like the Nebra sky disc.
Debbie found a reference to the oldest version of the Nebra sky disc having 32 stars, which was a possible link to her dream about the number 132. On the same day, I received an email also featured the number 132: "Hebrews 13:2 Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
The allusion is to Abraham entertaining three guests prior to the destruction of Sodom. His guests are described only as "three men," but Jewish tradition, since at least the time of Rashi (1040-1105), identifies them as Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Two centuries after Rashi, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher solidified this tradition by pointing out that the Hebrew gematria value of "and lo three men" (Gen. 18:2) is 701, equal to that of "these are Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael."
So that's a fairly direct link between Michael the Archangel and 132.
I will never understand how the YouTube algorithm works, but last night it decided (correctly, as it turns out) that I wanted to watch this:
The video is aptly summarized by one of the comments: "I like how it was acting so mischievous. 'I'm not doing anything... Just sniffin' the wind... But now I'M CHARGING- ok ok... Backing away... Or am I-? Yeah I am...'"
Today, I was reading -- well, you know by now what I was reading, right? Am I ever going to finish that book, you ask? According to Kindle, I'm 76% of the way there. In this passage, one of Clelland's contacts reports a dream:
The dream started in a bland suburban setting, and I was standing out in the driveway of a house that I assume was mine. The other homes were spaced sort of far apart, it was summer and the lawns were green. The sun was low in the sky and everything was calm. Then I saw there was a grizzle bear poking around on the lawn across the street. At first I didn't feel nervous or threatened, it was something amazing to see. Then this big thing was lumbering towards me, and I retreated into the garage.
I hurried into the house using the inside garage door, only to realize there were about six other doors all lined up. The bear came into the garage and tried to break through each door. The doors, from one to the other, got progressively more flimsy.
Suddenly I was hearing the hooting cry of an owl, steady and clear. I could hear it as this bear was pulling at this thin sheet of plywood with its claws.
It was at that point I woke up, but the hooting continued. I lay there in bed, with the pale light of dawn easing through the only window in my bedroom. I was hearing the unmistakable call of a great horned owl, and it must have been on the telephone pole right outside my window.
Let me state this clearly: A real owl woke me up right as a grizzly bear in my dream was about to rip down a door!
Like the video, this dream begins with the bear just "poking around" in a non-menacing way, and then it suddenly charges. I was also astonished to see a reference to six doors in this book about owls, since a restaurant called Six Owl Door (in English; just Six Doors in Chinese) recently entered the sync-stream.
Here is how Clelland's correspondent interpreted his dream:
This dream was awash in symbolism. Maybe the bear is the truth and the flimsy doors are the crumbling barriers between me and that truth? The owl was saying -- quite literally -- wake up! Bear is bare, the naked truth. Bear also means to suffer a burden. Anyway, this was sure how it felt.
Later the same day he received this account, Clelland heard from a friend who related a very similar grizzly bear dream he had dreamed the same night as the other person. There's no owl in this one, but the recurrence of the grizzly, the door, and the garage is uncanny.
This guy's dream starts in an idyllic forest where he sees a grizzly bear on the opposite side of a river, it's jsut sniffing around and he feels no threat. The whole scene is beautiful and majestic.
The next thing he remembers is a small house, he walks up to the side door and knocks on it. He peers through a window into the house and sees a tiny woman walking up to the door, and walking behind her is this massive grizzly bear. She opens the door and the bear comes outside. . . . He continues moving away, and the bear follows him and they both end up right in front of the garage. The bear has done nothing threatening, it is just lumbering along and sniffing around, but Jack is very aware of the danger. Then the bear looks up at him, he thinks, "Oh fuck!" and he wakes up.
"I'm not doing anything... Just sniffin' the wind... But now I'M CHARGING!"
The "tiny woman" who opens the door is an interesting point, too.
This dream was entirely auditory; the visual field was a featureless black. I heard the sound of a small group of children singing -- I would estimate that it was a group of seven or eight small boys, and I knew that one of them was myself as a small boy. We sang:
I'm all made of hinges 'cause everything bends From the top of my head way down to my ends I'm hinges at bottom, I'm hinges at top But I have to be hinges or else I would FLOP!
I knew that we were singing this under the direction of some sort of very old nonhuman entity -- probably some kind of "gray alien" type of being, though it was covered in a big hooded garment that made it impossible to be sure. (I want to emphasize that I didn't see this in my dream but was aware of it as a sort of mental image or visual memory. I find it odd that even in a dream there is a difference between a mental image and a "real" one.)
As we sang, we danced around, bending all our joints as the lyrics suggest, and when we came to "FLOP!" we instantly let all our muscles go lax and, well, flopped. Somehow we were able to do this without falling to the ground, because we had practiced it many times under this being's direction.
(I, the dreamer/observer, was not dancing or flopping. The dream was as devoid of kinaesthetic sensation as of visual. I was simply aware that my very young self had done those things. Overall, the feeling was as if I were listening to an audio recording in a dark room, and the sound triggered a memory which brought back all the rest.)
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The song we sang is one commonly sung by very young Mormon children, from a children's poem by Aileen Fisher, the difference being that the real song ends "I'm hinges in front, and I'm hinges in back / But I have to be hinges or else I would CRACK!"
Thee two versions of the lyrics suggest two contrasting ways of not being "all made of hinges." A hinge is a specific point of articulation in an otherwise rigid structure. If we were entirely rigid, with no joints, we would crack. If we were endlessly flexible, with no rigid structure, we would flop.
The imagery of the dream clearly draws heavily on Whitley Strieber's book The Secret School, where children meet secretly at night in a "children's circle" supervised by the Sister of Mercy, an alien who wears a nun's habit to conceal her true form, and one of the things they learn is to dance.
Some hours after the dream, I realized that the idea of flopping also reminded me of something in The Secret School, and I thumbed through the book until I found it. It is a scene (p. 203) in which the young Whitley feels that he has traveled into the future and is watching television:
I saw children playing on a patio. They had floppy clothes on and black helmets that reminded me of the ones we wore in the secret school. These kids had dolls that looked like the Sister of Mercy. They were moving their arms very quickly and singing in shrill voices. I found this incredibly alarming, and was glad when the scene changed.
Dancing aliens also appear in the film Communion, recently mentioned in my post "Owls, aliens, Sesame Street muppets, and the Duke of Earl." In the movie, Whitley tells his wife that when he was with the aliens, "they danced." She asks, "What kind of dance?" Whitley bursts out laughing and says, "The bossa nova! How do I know?"
In my July 23 post "Break on through to the other side," I mentioned that the Doors song of that name had been running through my head. I looked it up on YouTube and listened to it. One of the comments below the video said "Bossa Nova + psychedelic rock = perfect sound."
I only have the vaguest idea of what bossa nova sounds like. ("The bossa nova! How do I know?") When I hear bossa nova, I think the Pixies.
Man, I'd forgotten how good the Pixies were. Now I can't stop listening to this one -- a song about a UFO landing, on an album called Bossanova.
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I've just discovered that Aileen Fisher, the author of "I'm All Made of Hinges," also wrote this:
All the recent owl syncs -- particularly those involving Mr. Owl eating things you might not have expected Mr. Owl to eat -- reminded me of this old cartoon I watched as a kid: a version of The Three Musketeers which, correcting this inexplicable lapse on Dumas's part, fills the owl-shaped hole in the original. It took some searching, but I finally dug it up. It's in French, but its genius transcends language. The part where the owl eats an abacus (certainly something Dumas would have included if he had thought of it) begins around the 29-minute mark. Be sure to keep watching at least until 32 minutes.
I ended my July 23 post "Break on through to the other side" with a one-card Tarot reading in which I expected to draw the Eight of Wands but in fact got the Eight of Cups. I didn't post much by way of interpretation, except to note that the mirror image of the card bore a certain resemblance to the Flammarion engraving.
In my own later notes on this reading, I wrote:
My impression was that there’s some other group of associates I need to open myself up to, without leaving the Romantic Christian circle behind. The mental image that accompanied this thought was the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram (forming the vesica piscis where Christ sits enthroned in the Maiestas Domini icon), and I associated this with the strange object in the sky of the Eight of Cups (a combined crescent moon and full moon?).
The "moon" on the Eight of Cups is really quite strange. At first it looks like a crescent moon with the dark side illuminated by earthshine, but if you look closely, it's actually two objects: a crescent and a disc, or perhaps one disc partially eclipsing another.
In mirror image, the waxing crescent corresponds to the moon in the Flammarion engraving and the disc to the sun. Even the proportions look roughly the same, with the solar disc only large enough to fit the inner curve of the crescent.
I sent my comments on the vesica piscis to the anonymous email correspondent mentioned in "The Green Door" but did not discuss them with anyone else or publish them on my blog. It was therefore something of a surprise when the first comment on that post, by Debbie, was all about yoni symbolism and its relevance to the idea of a door. One of the forms yoni symbolism takes is, of course, the vesica piscis.
After reading Debbie's comment, I received another email from my anonymous correspondent. Referring to the Eight of Cups, she wrote, "having the moon there (even in a strange form) feels like a good omen, although it would suit better were it blue." She did not elaborate on why blue would have been better.
I then received a follow-up comment from Debbie. The Eight of Cups had reminded her of a dream and sent her looking through her old dream journals. In the comment she also mentioned a dream she had just had on July 23 of this year -- the same day I posted the Eight of Cups (or maybe not quite, given the time difference between America and Taiwan).
In my recent dream, my father gave me a silver half-moon shape pendant necklace. I recall the pendant had a beautiful blue inlay. I recall looking at the necklace and I saw a price tag of $132.00
When I woke from the dream, I googled 132, and found it interesting that in Strongs the number 132 in Hebrew means : Red , Ruddy. Also I found (just this morning July 25) this very intriguing website (2nd link below) of the Nebra Sun Desk which looks VERY similar to the pendant my father gave me.
A moon pendant with a blue inlay! Looking up the Nebra sky disc, I find that it looks like this:
The full disc on the left and waxing crescent on the right matches the mirror-image Eight of Cups I posted. According to Wikipedia, "These symbols are interpreted generally as the Sun or full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars." I had noted this same ambiguity -- Sun or full moon? -- in my thoughts on the Eight.
The disc also suggests a smiling face with the Sun and Moon as eyes. Actually, what it reminds me of is a symbol used by the late Roger Anthony: a lion with a plus-sign in its right eye and a minus-sign in its right. The lion's mouth was a smile with an arrow head at one end, so that it was an arcking arrow pointing from the minus to the plus. When Roger shared these and a few other symbols with me, in or around 1999, he said, "Once you've learned these symbols, they'll be in your memory forever, and when you need them, they'll come back."
I received an email from an anonymous stranger, about how some of my recent posts have tied in with synchronicities she has been experiencing regarding the Green Door.
She relates how she ran into a reference on a message board to "a glimpse behind the green door," which she said is "intelligence slang for restricted information and locations," and then later the same day overheard the 1956 pop song "Green Door," which was part of the soundtrack of a movie her housemate was watching. Looking up the song on Wikipedia, she discovered that it may have been inspired by the 1906 O. Henry story "The Green Door," about a man named, of all things, Rudolf Steiner. Wikipedia opines that "O. Henry uses the eponymous green door as a symbol for everyday adventures which he encourages us to seek out," and the emailer said that my recent exploration of an abandoned restaurant (described in "Owl time, and cold noodles") seemed to be an example of that.
She can't have known, because I didn't mention it in my post, that in order to enter that restaurant I had had to pass through a literal green door.
My own syncs, of course, have not been about the Green Door but rather about the Owl Door. Nevertheless, I thought I might as well look up the O. Henry story and read it. When I ran a Google search on o henry the green door, one of the first results was this:
Apparently, Owl Eyes -- named after the Great Gatsby character -- is a website that has various literary texts with annotations. I had never heard of it until today.
My own first association when I hear "green door" is Bilbo Baggins. In the first chapter of The Hobbit, Gandalf "scratched a queer sign on the hobbit’s beautiful green front-door," later explaining that the sign meant "Burglar wants a good job, plenty of excitement and reasonable reward."
I suppose that by "breaking into" the abandoned restaurant, and even pilfering a few figs, I have officially become a burglar.
(Note: Original post modified after discovering that the anonymous emailer is actually female.)
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!
Ere I knew, I had walked to the door, and seated myself with my ears against it, in order to catch every syllable of the revelation from the unseen outer world. And now I heard each word distinctly. The singer seemed to be standing or sitting near the tower, for the sounds indicated no change of place. . . .
Hardly knowing what I did, I opened the door. Why had I not done so before? I do not know.
-- George MacDonald, Phantastes
There's a subtle but discernible sense of frustration from the synchronicity fairies these days, as if they have been trying and trying for some time to nudge me into taking some particular decisive step, and I keep not doing it because, in my mortal obtuseness, I haven't the slightest idea what it is that I'm supposed to do. (Honestly, I don't think they know, either, which is why they can't spell it out for me.) And if the sync fairies ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
Last night, a bit before two in the morning, I was out walking through the dark neighborhood, with the old Doors song "Break On Through (To the Other Side)" running through my mind. The combination of the lyrics and the band name ("There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors") made me think of Mike Clelland's owl as a symbol on the door, "and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door." At the very moment I was thinking that, I turned my head and saw this:
It's the front door of one of my neighbors. I've passed it thousands of times without ever noticing anything. Can you see what I saw last night -- the stylized form of an owl, complete with facial disks, ears, beak, and folded wings? -- and perhaps, dangling from the beak, a playful hint of a metal worm?
During my lunch break today, I read a bit from Clelland's book. Specifically, I read this:
I've listened to a lot of people tell their owl experiences, and even though these are just stories of people seeing a bird, they almost always get described as a blessing, an honor, a gift, or an outright spiritual event. Almost all the accounts I receive have a similar mystical undercurrent. For me, the consistency of these stories represents a kind of confirmation, that these experiences go way beyond just owls and tap into something much deeper.
In the afternoon, I opened an English textbook to see what pages I needed to assign for homework. The first page to assign was this one:
Clelland wrote that people always describe seeing an owl as "an honor." Here, on a English test, the word honor is missing from a sentence, and one of the possible choices to fill the gap is owl.
Just after writing the above, I had the sudden thought that I ought to do a one-card pull from the Rider-Waite deck -- but then I immediately thought, Why bother? I already know it's going to be the Eight of Wands (the decisive action, strike-while-the-iron-is-hot card), and that's not helpful.
I ended up doing the pull anyway, though, and surprised myself by getting not the Eight of Wands but the closely related Eight of Cups.
That's an interesting twist, anyway. The sync fairies always do have a few surprises up their sleeves. I'll have to think about that card for a while. For starters, what comes to mind is how much its mirror image suggests the Flammarion engraving.
I don't think I'd ever made that connection before. It seems obvious now.
Please don’t eat me, Mr. Owl! I’m just a friendly owl like yourself -- definitely not a delicious metal worm!
-- suspiciously worm-like metallic object
Yesterday I posted "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm," having thought of that palindrome while reading Mike Clelland's The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee. The associative link was, of course, owls. Little did I realize that a metal worm was also shortly to make an appearance in Clelland's book!
Today, I read a few pages and then came to this:
Metal object says it's an owl
I heard this from a woman who described a very odd nighttime event that happened when she was about five years old. She was awake and lying in bed alone in her room when she saw a metal object zip down from the sky and clamp itself onto the outside of her window. She tried to scream for her mother, when a voice spoke in her head, "Do not be afraid, I am only a friendly owl."
She knew it was no owl, but all the fear left when she heard those words. She stayed still in the bed and stared at it. She was looking at a round lens on a curved metal stalk. . . .
The association of an owl with a metal object would have been a mildly interesting coincidence by itself, but Clelland includes a sketch of this object by the woman who saw it, and I'm going to call it like it is. This isn't just some generic "metal object" -- it's what you would call a metal worm.
I snapped this photo at 2:18 on the morning of July 21, 2022. As usual, the image quality is terrible, but it at least shows the configuration of the heavenly bodies.
That’s the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn. I suppose it’s fairly obvious which is which. If you draw a line from Saturn to Jupiter, it passes right through the Moon. Although you can’t see it in the photo, it’s a third-quarter Moon, and the terminator runs perpendicular to the Jupiter-Saturn line, with the Saturn-ward side illuminated. The whole configuration is as geometrically precise as a crop circle.
Things like this always feel meaningful, though I struggle to conceptualize how anything as mechanical and predetermined as the motion of the planets could be meaningful. It’s the old Shining Buddha Problem, still unresolved.
Some months before all this owl business started, one of my students noticed that racecar spelled in reverse is racecar. I told her that this was called a palindrome and gave another example: the sentence "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm."
This morning, while I was reading Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee, that palindrome came back into my mind, and it occurred to me to wonder if it might mean anything.
For starters, what's a "metal worm"? Well, worm can mean "dragon." In D&D, "chromatic" dragons (black, blue, green, red, etc.) are evil, and "metallic" dragons (gold, silver, bronze, etc.) are good. The king of the metallic dragons -- the Metal Worm par excellence -- is the Wyrmking Bahamut. The name Bahamut is taken from Arabic mythology and is cognate to the Hebrew Behemoth. In the Arabic version, though, Bahamut is a giant fish, and Kuyutha (generally assumed to be a corruption of Leviathan) is a giant bull, reversing the Hebrew identities.
So the Metal Worm corresponds to Behemoth, but Behemoth-as-Leviathan, Behemoth as a whale. The name Bahamut evokes both of these mythical monsters as one.
Regular readers will get where I'm going with this. In my April 1 post "Call me Ishmael," I discussed a D&D monster called a behemoth, described as "a killer whale with four stubby legs," and connected it to the then-ongoing sync-stream relating to the many-eyed whale of John Dee.
This little train of thought, taking me from "Mr. Owl" to a killer whale, had taken place while I was reading The Messengers. At this point I returned my attention to the book, turned the "page" (virtually; I was using the Kindle app), and saw that -- completely unexpectedly in a book about owls and UFOs -- the next section bore the heading "Orcas in Puget Sound." It related a story about how "approximately three dozen orcas surrounded a commuter ferry as it crossed Puget Sound . . . carrying sacred tribal artifacts" from a Seattle museum back to the homeland of the Suquamish tribe. What was this story even doing in this particular book? The owl connection was tenuous indeed:
The orcas, like the owls, are animals considered devoid of any higher consciousness by the watchdogs of our consensus reality. But nonetheless they are showing up as totems at an important moment, they are presenting themselves as a beautiful example of this attuned symbolic power. This wasn't a dream vision of orcas, they were physically there, playing the role of escort for something sacred on its journey home.
In other words, this story is inserted more or less randomly in a book about owls. Whales are never mentioned again, although their similarity to owls may be deeper than Clelland himself notes. The book is called Messengers because that is one of the traditional roles of the owl in mythology: The owl flies into the dark, representing the unseen realm, and returns with a message. Likewise, the whale dives deep into the sea and, unlike most marine animals, returns regularly to the surface. It, too, would make a good mythological "messenger."
If the Metal Worm is Bahamut, alias Leviathan, the statement that "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm" takes on an added significance -- because one of the things the Bible says about the Leviathan is that God will give it to his people to eat. "Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness" (Ps. 74:14). "Rabbi Johanan says: In the future, the Holy One, Blessed by He, will make a feast for the righteous from the flesh of the leviathan" (Bava Batra 75a).
Those who eat the Metal Worm are (a) the people inhabiting the wilderness and (b) the righteous in the Messianic Age. The owl is a proverbial creature of the wilderness in the Bible. The Psalmist laments, "I am like an owl of the desert" (Ps. 102:6). Jeremiah says, "Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein" (Jer. 50:39). And who shall inherit the Messianic Age? According to Daniel, "they that be wise" (Dan. 12:3).
Last night I stopped at a coffee shop on my way home to buy something for my wife. The cashier gave me a receipt saying that my order number was 259, circling that number with a sharpie.
This is a significant number to me.
Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) assigns numerical values to words and phrases by adding up the ordinal values of their constituent letters (A = 1, B = 2, . . . Z = 26). In this system, the value of the string "two hundred and fifty-nine" is 259. I am only aware of two numbers that have this property, the other being 251.
Furthermore, 259 is seven times 37, and 37 is a highly significant number. Twice 37 is 74, the S:E:G: value of the words simple, English, and gematria, as well as that of Jesus, cross, gospel, and Messiah. Twenty-four times 37 is 888, the value of the name Jesus in Greek gematria. Eighteen times 37 is 666. Seventy-three times 37 is 2701, the Hebrew gematria value of the first verse of the Bible.
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This morning, I prayed the Rosary in my chapel, as is my habit these days. At the end of my prayers, a phrase popped into my mind unbidden: "to evade this world's snares and penetrate its mysteries." My eyes then fell on two books that I had left on a shelf in the chapel, having forgotten to take them out when I converted the room to its present purpose: Moby-Dick and Strieber's The Secret School. About an hour before my prayers, I had read a few pages of Mike Clelland's The Messengers -- a passage that mentioned whales, and another that said, "An example: a hologram of an owl would appear. When I would see something like that, that would tell me it's time for school."
The number 259 came back into my mind, and I had the distinct impression that I should check the 259th page of each of those books.
In my copy of Moby-Dick, page 259 is the last page of a chapter and only has a few lines of text on it:
This seemed highly relevant to "to evade this world's snares and penetrate its mysteries."
Page 259 of The Secret School is part of the afterword by journalist Ed Conroy. Here is the first paragraph on the page:
The juxtaposition of this with the Moby-Dick page, with its heading "The Albatross," struck me because in my July 2021 post "In the sync stream," I had connected an angel on a temple spire with the albatross and Moby-Dick.
I thought of how the angel Moroni [on the spire of the Nauvoo temple] was occupying the place that would traditionally be given to the cross, which made me think of the Coleridge line “instead of the cross, the albatross.” And this brought me back to Melville: Ishmael’s recollection of the first albatross he ever saw, which he repeatedly likens to an angelic being. “Its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark” — “flew to join the wing-folding, the evoking, the adoring cherubim” — “as Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself.”
Conroy mentions "four-winged angels" -- i.e., cherubim as described by Ezekiel (in contrast to the six-winged seraphim of Isaiah) -- and cherubim is the precise word used by Melville with reference to the albatross.
Last night Jupiter was even closer to the Moon, and again an even cover of cirrostratus made them the only visible heavenly bodies. This time I saw the faintest halo imaginable -- certainly nothing I could pick up on my phone's camera -- but it was enormous. It looked to have about the same radius as a rainbow, which would be 42 degrees. Actually, it must have been 46, since 46-degree halos are a recognized phenomenon.
According to Wikipedia, 22-degree halos occur around either the Sun or the Moon and are quite common. The article on 46-degree halos says they are rare and only mentions them occurring around the Sun -- so I guess 46-degree lunar halos must be quite rare indeed. Certainly I had never seen one before.
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That night, I dreamed that the appearance of the sky had suddenly and permanently changed. There was a rainbow in the sky now all the time, even at night, but it was not really arc-shaped, nor was it a smooth continuum of hues. It had more the shape and texture of a rainbow-colored spectrogram of human speech, made up of many lines of bright color separated by dark spaces.
I was the only one who was not surprised by this change. I told a few people, "I read a book that said this was going to happen. The author predicted it years ago and said that it would be a sign of the Second Coming. Later scientists will discover that it's caused by the fact that there are now two Suns, a red one and a green one, though we can only ever see one of them at a time and it always looks white."
It wasn't long before the entire world had discovered the book I mentioned, and it was all over TV and the Internet. It had a plain yellow-beige cover, with the title and author's name printed in black and a very simple rosette design, also black, between the two. The name and title were not well-defined in the dream, but it was clear that the author was a French Catholic philosopher -- not Jacques Maritain, but someone of that general breed. The title, which was English (presumably a translation), included the word Rosary, and one of the things the book implied was that people praying the Rosary would be a contributing factor in causing this pre-apocalyptic transformation of the sky.
I was standing outside with a few family members, looking at the new sky. Someone pointed out to the horizon, where an enormous dark figure was looming, and said, "Look at that! Isn't that -- Godzilla?" It wasn't Godzilla exactly -- more mammal-like or even Permian-looking, I think, with a face vaguely reminiscent of Dimetrodon -- but it was a gigantic monster of that general type. "Yes," I said, "the author predicted that as well."
On July 18, I noticed this printed on the pencil case of one of my young students.
I always wonder how products like this come to exist in the first place. What on God's green earth makes a designer think, "Hey, let's decorate it with an owl looking at a set of bullet points that say 'time's up,' 'quickly,' and 'mmm . . . .'"? Perhaps the sync fairies have a hand in it all.
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After work -- okay, this is a little weird. There's a restaurant in my city that went out of business about seven years ago and was just completely abandoned. The city put a perfunctory wall of corrugated metal around it to keep people like me out and just let nature take its course. I used to eat there ages ago. It was quite a large place, with a little courtyard with a pond and some banyan trees. Suddenly, about two weeks ago, I suddenly began to feel a magnetic attraction for the old abandoned restaurant and a strong urge to somehow get inside. This turned out to be easier than expected. There was a gate in the corrugated metal wall, and the latch was extremely rusty but not actually locked. I got a clipboard and some spray lubricant (tip: if you wear a tie and carry a clipboard, people always assume you're authorized), and I was in.
The place was all overgrown with foliage, but I managed to get through it into the restaurant proper. It was as if everything had been abandoned in haste. All the furniture was still there, and many of the tables still had menus and dishes on them. There were still pots on the stoves in the kitchen and big rusty tins of cooking oil in the back. The cash register had been gutted, of course, but aside from that it appeared as if one day everyone had just stopped what they were doing, walked out, taking nothing with them, and never come back.
Over the next few days, I returned to the abandoned restaurant two more times, at which point I figured I had about exhausted the interest of the place. After work tonight, though, I felt an urge to go back. I got the gate open, stepped inside, and just stood there, not actually entering the building. The brick wall in front of me was overgrown with what I had before taken to be some sort of ivy-like vines, but tonight, once my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I saw that the wall was covered not only with leaves but with hundreds and hundreds of what were unmistakably figs -- still green, but quite large. The wall had been overgrown not with ivy but with banyan epiphytes! I had seen that wall three times recently, always in daylight, but I hadn't seen any figs on it; those were new. A line from the Gospel of Mark popped into my head: "and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet" (Mark 11:13). Well, now the time of figs was here -- yet another synchronistic message saying, The time is now.
I stood there staring at the fig-covered wall for several seconds, and then I went back out, latched the gate, and went home.
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When I got home, I used a phone app to search the Bible for the word figs to confirm that I had remembered Mark correctly (I had), and then I thought, Why not search for owl as well?
The Bible doesn't have much to say about owls, but I was using the Mormon "Gospel Library" app, which includes not only the Bible and the Mormon scriptures but also many decades of church-published magazines. One of the search results was about a baby owl, which caught my attention because my original mention of "THE TIME IS NOW" had been in a post about videos of rehabilitated baby owls. I tapped the link and read "A Friend in Need," from the October 1983 issue of the Mormon children's magazine The Friend. It was about, yes, a baby owl that had been rescued, rehabilitated, and returned to the wild.
The ground where the baby owl had fallen was cold and very hard. Grandpa figured that the owlet had lain there for about twenty-four hours. He and Uncle Bruce fixed up a plastic ice-cream bucket with some straw. Then they carefully wrapped a warm towel around the baby bird, placed it inside the bucket, and waited.
For about twenty minutes nothing happened. Then the little owl started to move and to make a tiny peeping sound. Half an hour later it was actively wriggling about, so they decided to feed it something—but what?
What indeed? I certainly didn't see this coming!
Most birds like worms, but the ground was still frozen. Then an idea struck them: Perhaps the baby owl would think that noodles left over from their supper were worms. When Uncle Bruce dangled one before the little bird, it opened its beak and gulped it right down. Then it opened its mouth wide for another one. Soon the owl had devoured almost a cupful of noodles. For dessert it ate a teaspoonful of hamburger!
That's right, they fed the baby owl cold noodles. On July 17, just an hour and a half after posting "The curving corridor, the owl door, and the time is now," I had posted about misreading "odd noises" as "cold noodles." The book I was reading when I made this error was, of course, Mike Clelland's The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee.
Baby owls and cold noodles -- not exactly a juxtaposition you run into every day!
Apparently the sync fairies want to inform me that the time is now -- but the time for what? That message by itself isn't actually very helpful.
