The owl, the deer, and the time warp

On June 10, I posted "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which included this picture of a Hermit card with a white hart added to it and associated it with this sort of "portal."

That post also referred to "a space/time warp" and "portals or time warps."

One June 27, I posted "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals." Following links from Mike Clelland's book Stories from the Messengers, I discovered the blog of his friend Laura Bruno, and particularly her page "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal." Again we have the Hermit card of the Tarot associated with a "portal," and again an animal has been added to the card -- but this time it is not a deer but an owl:

Today I read in Stories from the Messengers the story of a man named Don who went deer hunting and experienced a strange sensation:

I began to get a strange feeling. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and everything in the forest went totally silent. It was extremely strange. It almost seemed like time itself stopped. It was as if myself and the area around me was in a bubble where everything had just stopped, as if the world was still going on around me but only outside that bubble that I was in.

While in this strange "bubble," Don sees a snowy owl flying right towards him.

As the owl glided by, I turned my head and followed it with my eyes. The owl, after looking me directly in the eyes, turned its head forward again. It flew straight down the trail I had been watching previously and disappeared into the trees. At that exact instant, a huge doe stepped out onto the trail right below the spot where the owl disappeared, and stood there.

Don shoots the doe but then has trouble finding the body. Eventually he finds it by following a red squirrel. When he finally finds the dead doe, he looks up, and the snowy owl is perched in a tree directly over the body.

Moving slowly, I began easing my way toward the doe. But the instant I moved, the squirrel ran away to a nearby tree about 30 feet away and ran up it, stopping and sitting on a limb, seemingly now oblivious to me. At the same instant the owl flew away, disappearing into the forest. The oddly silent, in-a-time-warp atmosphere went away gradually.

Don here uses that same expression, "time warp," to describe the strange atmosphere in which he saw both the owl and the deer.

This afternoon, an hour or two after reading this account, I was at the fire station filing some routine fire safety paperwork for my school. As I was leaving, I noticed that behind the fire station, some distance from the road, was an Indigenous Peoples Museum. (Taiwan is the original home of the Austronesian peoples, who later spread out to various islands from Madagascar to Hawaii.) I think I've noticed it there before, but today I felt a sudden, strangely powerful urge to go inside.

I walked through the very small museum, looking at the mildly interesting displays of textiles and weapons and musical instruments. I was the only patron, and the museum was dead silent -- a novel sensation in urban Taiwan, where true silence is a rare commodity. As I enjoyed the silence, I thought of Don's description of the "oddly silent, in-a-time-warp atmosphere" and wondered whether I would encounter any owl- or deer-related art in the museum. I didn't, though. The only animal motifs were snakes and wild boars.

Finally, as I prepared to leave the museum and go about the rest of my day, I noticed this on the wall opposite the restrooms -- not one of the exhibits, but some modern decorative art:

It shows to owls perched in a tree directly above a deer. Don also saw an owl in a tree directly above a deer. No other animals are depicted. And, due to the style of the art, the owls, the deer, and the tree all appear to be white, or off-white.