Red crows, white feathers, Whitley and owls, a man falling from the sky, and water as blood

Other errands having taken me to that part of Taichung, I stopped by a used bookstore. I didn't buy anything, but three books caught my synchromystic eye. First, this edition of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius:

This book actually came up back in September 2022, in "I'm being shadowed by a red turtle dove," when I searched my Kindle library for Tomberg's Meditations on the Tarot and got this:

That's the same edition of Marcus. At the time, I was just interested in the fact that there was a red bird on the cover -- synching with the red turtle dove of my post title -- though I noted, "Not a dove (it looks more like a red crow), but still!" and linked back to my December 2020 post "Red crows of the Sun." That symbolism has come back up recently; I mention the Red Crow of the Sun in both "I will follow you into the dark" (June 19) and "October 3 and 4, and white crows" (June 20). In both cases, the red crow was mentioned in conjunction with white birds (a white owl and a white crow, respectively), and the Marcus book shows a red crow and a white semiplume feather -- that is, a small fluffy feather rather than a long flight feather. Stories from the Messengers includes a story about such a feather:

Audrey leaned over the edge of the deck holding a small fluffy feather. She looked down at me and said, "An owl feather just floated down and landed right between all of us!"

This occurred in full daylight, an odd time for an owl to be in flight, and no one saw any bird above them. They described watching the little feather drifting down from high above, floating in from the direction of the lake. . . .

I got a few close up pictures of the little feather. It was white fluffy down and about two inches long. I showed these photos to a few bird experts while researching this essay. They all said the same thing -- they couldn't be sure, but they thought it was from a turkey.

Two inches is awfully long for down, even from a large bird like an owl or a turkey, so I think it must actually have been a white semiplume, as seen on the cover of the Marcus book.

Back in January 2024, I posted "White feathers, strange sights," the post taking its name from a song on Australian singer Whitley's 2007 debut album The Submarine. The last line in the song is "A white feather fell." The album cover features a picture of an owl and the name Whitley. Ditto for the cover of Stories from the Messengers.

Apparently (according to German Wikipedia) the singer chose his stage name as an homage to American blues singer Chris Whitley, with no reference to Whitley Strieber.

Coming back to today's bookstore visit, the second book to catch my eye was this one:

It's a Nigerian short story collection titled What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. Just yesterday I posted "The Tree of Life and the flesh and blood of Jesus" on my Book of Mormon blog, a more Book-centered discussion of ideas first broached here in "The white blood of Jesus" (June 18). In yesterday's post, I discuss Nephi's High Mountain Vision, in which the Spirit says to him:

thou shalt also behold a man descending out of heaven, and him shall ye witness; and after ye have witnessed him ye shall bear record that it is the Son of God (1 Ne. 11:7)

In other words, the Spirit tells him that he will see a man descend ("fall") from the sky and then tells him what it means. In the post, I note that, despite what the Spirit says, Nephi doesn't actually report seeing a man descending out of heaven and discuss a possible way of reconciling the discrepancy.

Both that post and its June 18 predecessor discuss the idea that the "water" that flowed from the wounded Christ's side, and the "living waters" he talks about, represent a second sort of "blood" that flowed in Jesus' veins. In yesterday's post, I connect this to the strange modern Mormon practice of drinking not wine, nor even grape juice, but water in remembrance of the blood of Jesus. All of which brings us to the third book that caught my eye today:

It's a novel titled Water from My Heart -- in other words, water as a type of, or substitute for, blood.