The Owls
I’ve only seen an owl in the wild on two occasions.
The first was on Long Island at my grandparents’ home. It was twilight in Autumn; the sun was still up enough that it cast an otherworldly glow, but I can’t be sure about the year; maybe 2019. The house is situated about 25 yards from the road in dense shrub and tall oak trees. The garage door had been left open, so the light was off, and for some reason, I felt compelled to go outside. As I walked from the house to the driveway, swooping very low overhead was a snowy white owl about 1.5 or 2 feet tall. It dove straight towards my head and then quickly flew upwards over the house behind me, I might have shocked the owl as I emerged from the darkness.
The second time was during a daytime investigation into high strangeness on Mt. Misery on Long Island in February of 2022, it was lightly snowing, and the forest was eerily quiet. There was what looked like a 2- or 3-foot-tall brown barn owl on a tree branch that then flew into the woods out of sight. I was in a group of three but only two of us saw the owl.
The significance of the 2nd owl sighting is that not only did it appear as we were looking for phenomena, but this investigation had yielded another personal synchronicity involving a purple balloon that influenced me into getting my academic master’s degree, and now my PhD across the ocean in Scotland. The sighting ushered in a complete change in my life, coinciding with my first Saturn return.
In mid-July 2024, a friend in an occult group I was video chatting with mentioned owls’ significance to the paranormal. Since then, I have had an onslaught of owl synchronicities. Every day, I am confronted with the image or representation of an owl. It’s gotten so out of hand that I’ve started taking photos and screenshots.
What’s interesting about this occult meet-up is that it was also facilitated by curious forces, not owls, but a tarot reading. I had a tarot reading that indicated a meet-up or celebration in the near future, then had a dream about these folks where we were all in a warehouse filled with purple balloons. In the dream, I said “oh, these balloons are here because this group is here.” The next day I reached out to tell them the dream and was promptly invited to this video call.
I attend a weekly Hellenistic astrology group, and as the image of an owl appeared on the randomly generated web browsing screen projected on the wall, the facilitator said perhaps the Goddess Athena was sending me a message.
I listen to audiobooks or podcasts on my way to campus every day, and one day, I had no synchronicities until I got to a chapter in the book ‘Bardskull’ by Martin Shaw about owls. Almost every line in the chapter is, the owl did this, or the owl is that. The nature of audiobooks is that you don’t know what is coming; you can’t even glimpse the type of language or structure of the prose on the page, so hearing the owls over and over was a shock.
I use synchro-mysticism in my academia occult research and am keenly aware of signs and by-products of the practice. But these owls or thoughtforms, in this particular case, feel like my subconscious directly affecting my consciousness way more than normal. I feel like every time I see an owl, I'm laughing or screaming, “OF COURSE! HERE YOU ARE.”
During this time, I stumbled upon ‘The Messengers’ by Mike Clelland, and I am currently listening to an audiobook.
