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Okay, so while I just revised Enneads I iv, it seems I might as well revise the joke that went with it. Perhaps you recall how I was tired after work, but since I'm a burning-the-candle-at-both-ends kind of person, forged ahead to study this particular essay, but a bird flew overhead and pooped on the page I was reading, an obvious omen to just give it a rest already.

My daughter was asking me about my angel today, as I mentioned how they have a very playful personality. She asked for examples, and so I told her a number of my angel stories. I got to this one, and while she was laughing about it, I was telling her how that page of the Enneads is still kinda messed up since of course I had to wash the poop off. She fetched the book from the shelf and asked me to show her which page it was, so I turned to the beginning of Enneads I iv and pointed to the worn-out section near the top of the page.

As I did so, I realized that I had missed the joke's punch line!

See, in the edition of the Enneads I was reading, the essay on True Happiness starts halfway down the page; the top half of the page is the last part of the prior essay on Dialectic. Here is the relevant section, with where the poop landed (which is now half-erased from being scrubbed clean) highlighted:

And while the other virtues bring the reason to bear upon particular experiences and acts, the virtue of Wisdom [...] is a certain super-reasoning much closer to the Universal; for it deals with correspondence and sequence, the choice of time for action and inaction, the adoption of this course, the rejection of that other [...].

The bird didn't just poop on my book, it literally pointed out that it would have been wise for me to rest. Lorna Byrne says somewhere that "angels find it easier to move minds than physical objects," but it seems to me that they're plenty capable of fine movements when need be...

Normally, I keep a very orderly and focused mind; but as my health has declined, this has become more and more difficult to do: it is as if my grip on the leash has weakened, and the dog readily slips my grasp and runs off, and I have to chase it down and catch it again. In just that way, I was out for a prayer walk, and the dog had just slipped my grasp again and, rather than praying, I found myself musing, "but Hesiod says that the angels are the firstborn of the gods, which..." Just as I caught myself pondering rather than praying, I tripped over, you guessed it, a tiny, white feather.

I suppose I should be less hard on myself and my poor mind.

I've mentioned before that for the last year or so, my angel has liked to gift me bird feathers. I've also been talking about light lately. I was just thinking about these today and thought I'd share something nifty.

The prize feather from my collection is from a blue jay. (A distant cousin, perhaps—I'm a Jay myself, you know.) I didn't realize this until I was given the gift, but did you know that blue jays aren't blue? They're actually gray, but iridescent in such a way that, if the light hits them from the correct angle, they "shimmer" blue instead of show their normal color, sort of like moonstone or labradorite. I suppose we don't notice this on a live blue jay since their feathers are aligned in all sorts of angles, so some feathers are always hitting the light at the right angle and making them look blue—but with a single feather, it's very obvious: if you rotate it just right, it'll turn from dull gray to brilliant sky blue and back again.

If you haven't seen a blue jay feather up close, I hope you have the chance to, someday.

Summer lockdown season is always dispiriting, but Providence is still to be found. Just before being cooped up, I began to find dozen of feathers, and very pretty ones, too—like iridescent blue jay and striped hawk. Even now, when I am unable to leave the house, my angel still finds ways to deliver gifts to me: today, I find a chicken feather hidden beneath an egg in the egg carton—a very unusual occurrence in these days, when farms wash their eggs before packing them.

Also, rather than the single sunflower keeping me company last year, this year we have dozens. Nine are blooming right now.

Small things, but they help. May you find the good fortune and providence of your angels today, too.

I'm presently reading Angels at my Fingertips by Christian mystic Lorna Byrne—it's light, much easier than Plotinus, and I tend to only have a few minutes here or there right now. She talks about how angels often give gifts of feathers in unusual places to people who need hope:

I have seen angels give people feathers all of the time. It is one of the many signs that angels give us when we need hope in our life[. ...]

The angels work really hard, giving us signs, and it's not easy for them. They use the feathers of the birds of the air, so birds have to play their part too. They tend to use feathers because they are light. Angels find it easier to move minds than physical objects. I have described physical manifestations of angels in my books—knocking on doors or windows or causing winds to blow—but they are quite rare.

Most of the time when you ask for the sign of a feather you will find it in an unusual place, somewhere you are not expecting to find a feather. [...] We are just so slow, even myself at times, to recognise the signs the angels give us. We pass them by.

I had just put a bookmark in my book and got up to clean the kitchen from making breakfast. I was pondering what I had read—I see feathers often, albeit not usually in strange places, and never think of them even a little, perhaps because my parents always told me that they were dirty and that I should leave them alone or else I would get sick—and as I walked into my study in to put the book back on the shelf, what do I see but a feather sitting in the middle of the floor. How on earth did it get there? I'd just cleaned the floor yesterday, and I'd been through the study half a dozen times today already and hadn't seen it, and it's not as if our floor is littered with feathers...

I wasn't much in need of a sign, but I'm reminded of a Sufi saying, that you should "take what is voluntarily offered: it is the daily bread which God sends to you. Do not refuse God's gift!" How literal that is, today!

For a couple years now, I have written my daily, monthly, and yearly geomancy readings on little squares of paper which have been folded to demarcate the houses:

When my family left New York in a hurry last year, I destroyed all of the squares I had and switched to writing my readings in a diary; but once we moved in to our new house, I resumed folding my squares. I'm not really much for ritual, but I have long been fond of origami and I find the process of cutting and folding paper relaxing.

I realized, not so long ago, that the crease pattern in the paper is exactly that used for a traditional origami model—it doesn't have a widespread name in English, but in Spanish it is called a pajarita ("little bird") and in French it is called a cocotte ("hen"). (Personally, I think it looks like a sphinx, but my daughter says with a shrug, "It looks like a bird to me, daddy.")

Because the crease pattern is the same, the readings naturally want to fold themselves into little birds, so recently I've been letting them. I tend to keep my yearly, monthly, and daily readings upon the altar in my office and return often to meditate upon them... for some reason, the readings seem to have more of a personality when they're bird-shaped.

This week, I went through the stack I've been accruing all year and folded them all up. I've got a few hundred of them now, in all sorts of colors: a little avian army—air force?—carrying a year's dreams and experiences, crystallized.