Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of the series.
This event occurred on April 18, 2022, six days after the conclusion of Part 3, Fucking Balloons
During the spring of 2022, my 14-year-old daughter was doing distance learning and came with me to my downtown office space so I could work and monitor her at the same time. It was a magical time – two introverts being alone together all day!
We tried walking over our lunch break as much as possible. This often meant passing the local masonic lodge, North Star #23. It’s a couple of blocks from my office so, every time we passed by, we’d pull on the door to see if it opened.
Like – EVERY time.
It never opened. Until one day, it did.
The signal
The day started out normal. At one point, my daughter mentioned, “Funny, we’re starting a unit on Jerusalem the day after Easter Sunday.” (Hold on to this for later.)
Lunch time came. We prepared for our walk that day and stepped out of the office precisely at noon. The bells of the cathedral a block and a half away began peeling, at the same instant that a passing train activated the crossing arms a block and a half away in another direction.
Bells, to the left of us, bells to the right, the thunder of the train, its whistle sailing above all other sound – we knew.
My daughter yelled, “RUN!” and we both tore off toward the door of the masonic temple (guess how many blocks away?). I hollered, “We have to get there before the final bell tolls!” and put more power into my stride.
I don’t even recall which of us opened the door, but IT OPENED.
The first gate
Like most establishments in Minnesota, there is an airlock at the entrance of the masonic lodge. Which means we opened the first door – but the next door was still locked.
We stepped inside, snapped a photo, tried the doorbell, and eventually left, deciding that we’d done whatever magic required to unlock the first gate, but we needed to do more to pass through the second.
The ticket
We grabbed lunch from the (amazing!) Greek place nearby and walked back to the office. Just as we were about to reach the door, my daughter kicked at a piece of fiberglass insulation that was on the ground (why? Who knows!).
When the insulation flipped over, it revealed a raffle ticket – nothing terribly fancy, it was an Office Depot store brand ticket.
She rescued the ticket from the melting snow and brought it inside, asking if we could look up to see if the numbers had any significance.
I Googled it and the very first result was for a postal code in Jerusalem. (Remember that thing I told you to remember?)
The thing is, I don’t think this is actually a postal code that serves Jerusalem, based on the other searching I’ve done since then, but for this top result, it comes back as a code serving a street called Abed el-Aziz in Abu Ghosh.
I then Googled the street. It is less than 1,000 feet from St. Mary of the Resurrection Benedictine Monastery in Abu Ghosh.
Why is that of note?
The building we were in was built by the Edelbrock brothers, who were cousins with Abbot Alexius Edelbrock who built the Benedictine monastery of St. John the Baptist, which is where I grew up going to church, where I got married, where my daughter was baptized (and where I still spend a great deal of time in nature, in spite of separating myself from the institution of the Church).
That whole swirl of synchroniciteis is likely to be another post.
Addendum
As I was writing this up I realized I hadn’t run the street name through the ciphers, so I did.
In the NAEQ Abed el-Aziz equals 119, or Silver Star. Like the thing that mocked me in a previous post.
On his site, Shawn has added contextual notes to the results the cipher returns, and Silver Star is the English translation of Argenteum Astrum.
I can’t recall a time when I didn’t believe in magic, or that when I spoke with the trees they could hear me, or that one day I would see a unicorn.
I still believe all these things, but more than that, I have grown in curiosity over the years.
My path had largely been solitary, and while I do enjoy my alone time, I love supporting community and finding opportunities to support independent creators, artists, thinkers, and performers.
The Weirdo Collective is a passion project. The idea was sparked by two desires:
1. To keep up with the content my freinds create, regardless of how regularly they post
2. To have a searchable database of Weird thought so we have a better chance of building on ideas and learning from one another.
My personal favorite topics are: lucid dreaming, rocks, nature energy, teaching natural observation skills, and diversity in Weird spaces.
