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!