Phoebe is tapping her screen with a rhythmic, frantic intensity that mirrors the pulse in her neck while the hawk-a red-tailed juvenile with a ragged primary feather-completes its second wide arc over the sunroof of her idling sedan. She doesn’t look at the sky, not really. She looks at the reflection of the sky on the Gorilla Glass, waiting for the search results to load for “hawk circling car twice meaning.”
The first site tells her it’s a messenger of the spirit world, a sign to take flight on a new project. The second suggests a warning of impending conflict. The third, a slickly designed “spiritual wellness” portal, claims it represents a deceased grandfather reaching out. By the time the hawk catches a thermal and drifts toward the interstate, Phoebe has opened 12 different tabs and feels significantly more anxious than she did when the bird was just a bird.
Everything is a prompt, everything is a notification from the divine, and because we have no tether to a singular tradition or a community of practice, we are drowning in a sea of contradictory data. Last week, I spent trapped in an elevator between floors four and five. There was no cell service.
For those , the flickering light and the faint smell of hydraulic fluid weren’t “signs” of my astrological transit or a karmic debt being paid; they were mechanical failures. Yet, the moment the doors pinged open, I found myself checking my transit app to see if Mercury was doing something annoying. I criticized the impulse even as I performed it. We are addicted to the “why” because we have lost the “how” of living in a world that doesn’t always owe us an explanation.
The Taxonomy of Truth
Orion J.D., a seed analyst who spends his days peering through high-powered lenses at the dormant potential of agricultural exports, once told me that a seed is the ultimate sign. But to him, it isn’t mystical. It’s morphological. He identifies 42 different varieties of noxious weeds by the microscopic hooks on their husks.
He doesn’t ask the seed what it “feels” like; he knows what it is because he has a relationship with the taxonomy. He’s a man of who believes that the modern obsession with symbolic “vibes” is a direct result of our inability to look at a thing for more than two seconds without trying to monetize its meaning for our personal narrative. Orion is grumpy, sure, but he’s also right. He understands that a sign only carries weight when it exists within a system of accountability.
The Vending Machine of Omens
If you ask 102 different people what a white feather on the sidewalk means, you will get 102 different answers, most of them involving angels or “path-clearing.” In a marketplace of instant interpretations, the cost of the sign is zero, which means the value of the discernment is also zero. We have replaced the slow, arduous work of spiritual maturity with a vending machine of omens.
In older traditions-the ones that didn’t have TikTok or push notifications-discernment was a skill you built over of sitting with the same elders, the same landscapes, and the same liturgical rhythms. You didn’t interpret a dream in a vacuum; you interpreted it against the backdrop of a communal memory.
When we strip the symbol from the system, we aren’t being “spiritual but not religious.” We are just being consumers in a boutique of fragments. We take a piece of Kabbalah here, a bit of Norse mythology there, and a heavy dose of pop-psychology, and we wonder why the resulting map doesn’t lead us anywhere but back to our own confusion.
The “Unseen” becomes a Rorschach test for our own existing biases. If I want to quit my job, I’ll find a way to interpret a spilled cup of coffee as “the universe telling me to let go.” If I’m afraid of change, that same coffee is a “warning to stay grounded.”
This is where the work of groups like the
becomes vital, though perhaps uncomfortable for the casual seeker. They represent the movement back toward the scholarly, the rigorous, and the historically grounded. They remind us that symbols have weight, and that weight comes from a lineage, not a Google search.
To look at a symbol with precision requires an admission of ignorance. It requires us to say, “I don’t know what this means yet, and I might not be qualified to decide.” That’s a hard pill to swallow for a generation told that their “intuition” is an infallible compass. Intuition without training is just a loud ego wearing a robe.
Sign Logic
Superstitious, self-centered, and designed to make you the protagonist of a cosmic drama. The elevator is stuck because you didn’t email your sister.
Mechanical Reality
Boring, factual, and indifferent. The elevator is a broken machine, and you are just a human waiting for a technician named Gary.
I remember standing in that elevator, listening to the cable groan. I had this sudden, irrational thought that the elevator was stuck because I hadn’t replied to an email from my sister. It was a classic “sign” logic-superstitious, self-centered, and utterly useless. It was a way to feel in control of a situation where I was actually powerless.
If the elevator was a “sign,” then I was the protagonist of a cosmic drama. If the elevator was just a broken machine, then I was just a guy in a box waiting for a technician named Gary. We prefer the drama. We prefer the burden of a cosmic “why” over the boring reality of a mechanical “is.”
The Barnum Effect of the Soul
The marketplace of signs is structurally designed to be undeliverable. It promises clarity but provides noise. Because the apps and the oracle decks are sold to everyone, they must be vague enough to apply to anyone. This “Barnum Effect” of the soul ensures that we stay in a state of constant seeking.
We check the app, get a vague prompt, feel a momentary rush of “connection,” and then, 12 minutes later, the feeling evaporates, and we need another hit. It’s a spiritual dopamine loop.
Orion J.D. once showed me a seed that had been found in a dry cave, dating back . It didn’t look like much. It looked like a pebble. But because he knew the context-the soil it came from, the climate it needed-he knew exactly what it was capable of. He didn’t need to ask the seed for a sign. The seed was the fact.
We treat a global pandemic or a climate shift as a “sign” about our personal growth rather than a factual reality that demands collective action. We treat the hawk over Phoebe’s car as a “fact” of her destiny rather than a biological reality of a predator looking for a field mouse.
We have forgotten that true mystery isn’t a puzzle to be solved; it’s an atmosphere to be inhabited. When everything is a sign, nothing is sacred. If the divine is screaming at us through every license plate and every repetitive digit on a digital clock (11:11, we see you), then the divine has become a telemarketer.
Real discernment is the ability to filter out the 92 percent of noise to find the 2 percent of signal that actually matters. And that signal usually doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. It doesn’t usually confirm your existing lifestyle choices or tell you that you’re a “starseed” with a special mission to buy more crystals.
Work, Not Magic
Authentic discernment usually tastes like salt and feels like work. It’s the realization that the strange dream you had isn’t about a past life in Atlantis, but about the very real, very boring resentment you’re holding toward your neighbor.
“The ‘meaning’ of your life is found in how you treat the person at the toll booth, not in how you interpret the flight patterns of raptors.”
I’m still guilty of it. I’ll see a specific bird or a weirdly timed phone call and feel that old itch to “know” what it means. But then I think about Orion and his 42 types of weed seeds. I think about the I spent in total silence in that elevator, with no one to tell me what it “meant.”
In that silence, I wasn’t a seeker or a mystic or a client of the cosmos. I was just a human being, breathing in the dark, waiting for the door to open. And maybe that’s the only sign we actually need: the fact that the door eventually opens, and we are expected to walk through it and do something useful with our day.
Missing the Moment
The cost of this constant questioning is our presence. We are so busy looking for the “meta” that we miss the “matter.” We miss the actual hawk because we are looking at the phone. We miss the actual elevator ride (and the chance to practice patience) because we are looking for a karmic loophole.
We have turned the universe into a giant search engine, forgetting that the most profound truths are usually the ones that can’t be indexed. Discernment isn’t about getting more answers; it’s about becoming the kind of person who can handle the silence.
It’s about building a relationship with a tradition or a practice that is bigger than your own ego, one that has the authority to tell you “no” or, even worse, “this doesn’t mean anything at all.” Until we can accept that most things are not signs, we will never be able to recognize the ones that are.
We will just be like Phoebe, sitting in an idling car, looking at a screen, while the real world circles above us, magnificent and entirely indifferent to our need for a notification.
When we finally stop asking “why is this a sign,” we might finally hear what the world is actually saying. It’s usually saying something much simpler and much harder than we want to admit. It’s saying: Pay attention. Stay. Don’t look away just because it isn’t about you.
The hawk didn’t circle twice to tell Phoebe to start a podcast. The hawk circled twice because there was a thermal. The “sign” isn’t in the bird; it’s in the fact that Phoebe lives in a world where hawks still exist, and she almost missed it because she was looking for a definition.
We are starving for meaning in a world that is already overflowing with it, if only we would stop trying to translate it into a language we already speak. Truth, real truth, is usually untranslatable. It’s something you feel in the 22nd minute of silence, when the apps won’t load and the only thing left to do is wait for the light.