Break on through to the other side

We chased our pleasures here

Dug our treasures there

But can you still recall

The time we cried

Break on through to the other side

Break on through to the other side

-- The Doors

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! 

-- Mike Clelland (under hypnosis) 

 

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.