On Noticing, While It’s Still There

There was a crow. We called him George.

No way to know if that was his name or whether “he” was one bird the whole time or several who looked alike and kept the same schedule.

He showed up early spring. Kept showing up. Fence post, then the birdhouse roof, close enough some mornings to feel he was watching back.

He’s gone now. Left sometime in the last few weeks. Not a departure. Just an absence that took a while to register as permanent.

Weeks went on like that. Ordinary weeks with ordinary things taking place. Nothing about a crow on a fence is a working. Not a sigil. Not a ritual in any technical sense.

And yet something was returning to the same roofline, on no schedule anyone set, for reasons that were never going to explain themselves. Not chaos as mess. Not chaos as static. Chaos as a thing already moving before anyone gave it a name to move inside of. Pattern isn’t imposed, it’s just noticed long enough to register as more than chaos.

“Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don’t.”
— Peter J. Carroll, The Apophenion: A Chaos Magic Paradigm

That’s the practice. Not casting. No performance. Just being present enough to notice the ordinary thing being a little ‘extra‘ ordinary.