Forget rabbit holes; it's these owl burrows you've got to watch out for!
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.
2 comments:
I was laid off from my job on April 19. The next day I went shopping with a daughter and was waiting outside a store for her. I found myself thinking about April 27th because it had been showing up in your syncs at that time. Into my mind came "It's go time."
That and some other messages to me completely changed the way I presented myself and interviewed. On April 27th I had a zoom meeting with the CTO of a particular company, having already met with other people there. That day I recorded the influence of the messages to me the past week, including "It's go time."
Another week later, a formal offer in hand from this company, I prayed to understand my hesitation. Spelling it out immediately showed it to be nonsensical: "I know what to do but feel afraid that I'm doing the wrong thing." If one knows what to do, then by definition that is the right thing!
I asked God what else He had for me, and I was strongly reminded of what had come exactly two weeks prior: "It's go time." I immediately cancelled some other interviews I had scheduled and accepted the offer.
During those two weeks I felt like I was walking hand in hand with my Father as He helped me create this opportunity.
It's go time.
Thanks for the story, Ben. It's always interesting to see my syncs having ripples beyond my own life.
The Chinese word for "dog" sounds just like the English word go, so when I hear "It's go time," I think of the Dog Days of Summer -- which are right now (July 3 to August 11). In ancient Rome, the Dog Days began on 7/24, which is just 4/27 backwards.
I can't think of anything obvious that I'm hesitating to do right now, but perhaps it will become clear in the next four days or so.
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