Gazing Toward The Unseen

7 AM on an overwhelmingly ordinary morning. Everything as it's expected to be. Suddenly, there is a brief, flickering moment when the uncanny crosses your path, or you've crossed it. The faintest breath of another world existing beside you.

It is always there, hidden in plain sight.

Soularoids

Sending bits of this world to live in other worlds.

Secrets

Last summer, I mentioned here my long recurring dream of mailing tiny letters to tiny mailboxes in hidden locations around town. I've never known what it meant, but as it happened, I was buying Valentine cards for my son's class when I came upon just such a mailbox, and what's more, these tiny envelopes with slips of paper inside them. They are very tiny indeed (see dime for scale) much like the ones I'd dreamed of.

Did I immediately hatch a plan to write secret messages inside and sneakily conceal them around town? Of course I did. Am I going to tell you what they were? No way.

Some secrets can only be revealed by the whims of serendipity.

Destinata

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Sometimes, no matter how much you would rather it be otherwise, the Fates are insistent that something unpleasant is in store. You can try to bargain, or plead, or witch your way out, but the Fates are having none of it. In that case - forewarned being forearmed and all that - you can hope  that it comes quickly and that things will be better when it's done.

If you are really lucky, in spite of obstinate Fate, you'll have a goddess at your shoulder to push you out of the way. To peek at the other players' cards when life seems like a game.

I'm really lucky.

Thank the Goddess.

Let Me tell You Something About Magic...

This may be the only lesson I will ever give, so listen close.

Magic is like water. If you put your hand in it,  it will disturb the flow. If you have a light touch, you can guide it. if you are too forceful, it will splash and go where you don't want it.

That's the thing that no one bothers to tell you about magic.

The Crocodile's Daughters

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On the night of February second, I had two most unusual dreams.

First, I was floating hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, looking up through seemingly endless gradations of dim blue light. I was telling the story - proleptically, I assume -  of how I'd made it to the surface, despite the odds. As I began to swim upwards, though, I began to wonder if this wasn't just a comforting story, one I was telling myself to disguise the fact that I hadn't made it after all.

There was music in the dream, very fitting:

The second dream was more complex. In it, it had been discovered that an author had left behind an unpublished manuscript when she'd died. It told the story of a researcher who'd become aware of a race of shapeshifters, the daughters of Sobek, the crocodile god of the Nile. The daughters, in their human form, blended seamlessly with humanity. The only clue to their true nature was their ability to disappear completely. Therefore, the researcher could only trace the presence of the shapeshifters through their absence. 

I woke up feeling uneasy. The dreams had seemed alien to me, profoundly foreign. As if I'd got someone else's dreams by mistake. 

The meaning is unclear.

Or perhaps it's that I don't want to know.