The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'closeup hawk eating a mouse.'
This afternoon in the parking lot behind my local coffee shop, a giant hawk showed up and landed on a nearby power line. The majestic creature was carrying a mouse, and proceeded to casually consume the tiny creature. This was a fine time for the hawk, but it was the end of the world for the mouse. On one level, a predator consumed its prey. On another, life consumed itself to perpetuate itself.
This was food for thought while I had coffee with an old friend. Someone I hadn't seen in years. He's a librarian at a private library housing a massive collection of antique books. The collection apparently includes Illuminati material and other esoteric stuff going back hundreds of years. My friend offered to give me the full tour plus access to the collection for my own research.
When I was a kid, I spent many hours in my grandfather's library. He was obsessed with petroglyphs, having realized in the '60s or '70s by studying them that the land bridge theory of the settlement of the Americas was wrong. His collection included a section on the religious and folk rituals of various peoples, which I found fascinating. Ever since then, I've been into mystery traditions.
Considering mystery traditions in general brings lucid dreaming to mind. I've often been conscious that I was dreaming while I was dreaming. When I was younger, I'd use these moments as opportunities for dream manipulation, taking flight or otherwise bending the rules of reality in ways that weren't possible in waking life. Over time, I learned to be the conscious author of my dreams' contents. And eventually, I came to understand that these contents are carefully scripted by the unconscious, so modifying them might mean meddling with processes best left alone.
I'm probably going to take my friend up on his offer. One thing I'm very curious about are cannabis rituals in history. I'm interested in the preparations as well as how exactly the preparations were used. It would be great to find some volume from the 1700s that gets into this. Identifying such texts might be tricky, but hopefully my friend will be able to help with that.
Seeing that hawk gobbling up that mouse, a superstitious part of me wondered what it meant. Of course, it meant nothing. I could invent any story about what it meant and it would be perfectly alright to believe this story, but the event itself was simply nature being nature. That should be meaningful enough.
Of course, the natural world is mostly a mystery. All of our knowledge amounts to very little in the grand scheme of things. This doesn't mean that we should abandon our pursuit of knowledge as unimportant. But it does leave space in the world for magic.
If there's space for magic in the world, there's space for magic in our lives too. Today I noticed this in a chance encounter with an old friend. Other days it's less obvious. But the unknown is always acting upon the known, whether we're paying attention or not.
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