Welcome to The Mystical Underground

I’m not sure when my thing with frogs started. Maybe it was always there, a motif in my life that didn’t really make sense until I began to notice repetitive patterns with these little critters.

One year for instance, we returned from a trip and found one of our ceramic frogs in bits and pieces on the floor. Two days later Rob’s father died. Another year, we found a baby tree frog in our kitchen and Rob won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best YA fiction. In 2003, a tree frog appeared at the back of the house and I quickly scooped it up and set it outside. That afternoon, I found out I’d been nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. 

Time after time, the frog has accurately depicted the patterns that were prevalent in our lives.

I was reminded of this when our blogging friend Daz wrote a recent post about red-eyed green tree frogs . We met these little beauties during our trip to Costa Rica in 2011. They are exquisite, lovely in the extreme, and small. But  for me, they portended big things major changes,  transformation of some kind.

When animals are messengers – and they often are, particularly when our lives are in the throes of transition – synchronicity is inevitably involved. Over the last three plus years, we’ve done a number of posts on animals as messengers. In addition to frogs, we’ve covered owls as messengers between the living and the dead, as camouflage or shape shifters in UFO encounters, and as a kind of precognitive message about something that’s surfacing.

We’ve covered other types of birds – crows, geese, hummingbirds. And numerous types of animals: caterpillars, flies, mice, dragonflies, butterflies, grasshoppers, snakes, wolves, Paul the precog octopus, geese, dogs, cats, dolphins, whales, goats and even anteaters. I’m sure there are more that I didn’t tag. But I think we’ve been all over the animal kingdom. The point is that any animal can be a messenger for you and an agent of synchronicity.

When deciphering the message an animal brings, I usually start with the animal’s life cycle – how long does it live? That may hold clues about the timing. How many young does it typically have? Where did your encounter with the animal happen? What was going on in your life at the time of the experience? How did you feel when the encounter was happening – a sense of wonder or revulsion or something in between these extremes? Has this animal appeared in your life before at important junctures?

When I was 12 and living in Venezuela, the American newspaper, in conjunction with a local rum company,  ran a contest: caption a cartoon that depicted an alien holding a bottle of rum. The prize? A trip for four to the island of Barbados. So my dad entered. His caption read: Yes, we do deliver.  He won and off we went to Barbados for a week. It was 1959.

Every  afternoon at tea time, when a waiter from the hotel appeared with a tray of tea and crumpets, a hummingbird would show up. It would perch at the edge of the sugar bowl and alternately nibble granules of sugar and steal bits of our crumpets. At that time, I was clueless  about animal symbolism, synchronicity, or what any of it might mean. Now it’s 53 years later and I can still see the colors of that hummingbird’s feathers, can still see its delicate beak, and its eyes, its intelligence.

Fast forward many years, a trip to Ecuador. We stayed at a place in the mountains, where hummingbird feeders hung outside the dining room windows. The country has at least 27 different types of hummingbirds, and every evening, I swear we saw every type. Dozens of these gorgeous birds descended on the feeders, their wings moving so fast there seemed to be a perpetual hum in the air.

I flashed back on the Barbados hummingbird and suddenly realized that for me, hummingbirds symbolize joy, luck, and the most profound of mysteries.

As I have been writing this post, a frog suddenly appeared on my window, a tree frog.  That’s him (or her) in the photo above. See the suckers on its feet? There’s a moth on the glass, too, and that’s the frog’s target.  He has now been sitting here for about 20 minutes, slowly and patiently angling his body so it’s aimed at that moth just past the decorative bar in the window. I think patience is part of frog’s message.

We don’t see many tree frogs at this time of year. They tend to be spring and summer critters. But today, it was 85 here. In fact, it’s been in the 80s since our brief cool spell a few weeks back. However the rest of the winter unfolds weather wise,   I’m primed for the appearance of frogs, hummingbirds, owls, dragonflies, dolphins…

From the MacGregors to all of you!

It seems there are now apps for just about everything: fitness, travel, radar, games of all types, weather, divination….you get the idea. Think of something and there’s probably an app for it. Many apps are free or available for a nominal charge. The most I’ve spent for an app so far was $29.99 for an astrology app that does nearly everything my astrology program does and that program cost several hundred dollars. But the best app I’ve found yet, for $1.99, is a game called The Room.

Once you turn that knob in the image at the top of the post, you enter a room where an intricately carved, pyramid shaped wooden box rests on a table covered with a green cloth.

This box contains a myriad of secrets and appears to be connected somehow to alchemy. By zooming in and out on the image, you find clues, hints, strange figures, puzzles within puzzles and an array of “inventory items” that help you move deeper and deeper into the mystery.  The inventory items are things like intricate keys, a screwdriver, journal entries from a man who took on this alchemical search, shape-shifting objects, strange photos, symbols.

In many ways, The Room is a perfect metaphor for synchronicity. When you experience a synchro, the meaning is sometimes obvious, just as some of the clues and hints in the game are. Other times, you have to figure out how the pieces of a synchro fit together or connect with something else, and you’re led deeper into the mystery. It’s the same thing with The Room. Just when you have an aha moment in the game, you realize there are more layers to the box.

One of the inventory items is a telescope. When you press a button on the screen that activates it,  you suddenly see other details on the object you’re examining that aren’t visible to the naked eye. The power of this telescope is akin to intuition, a different kind of seeing you often have to employ to understand the larger context of a synchronicity.

At one point in chapter 2 of the game, the image froze and I had to restart the game. I lost the progress I’d made in that chapter. Rather than starting over at the beginning of the chapter, I cheated. I went to the Internet and found a step-by-step guide that got me back to where I had been before the image froze.  It’s the one thing you can’t do in figuring out the meaning of a synchronicity.

When you zoom in on various parts of the box, you sometimes notice details you missed before – like a symbol etched into a shadowed section of a wall. You suddenly recall seeing something else that may be connected to this symbol.  This is the same thing that happens when an image or scent triggers a memory or a snippet of a dream that you realize is an intimate component of the synchro you’re trying to figure out.

I’m only just starting chapter 3 of The Room, puzzling over a new box that was within the original and another metaphor occurred to me. Physicist David Bohm referred to an  implicate or enfolded order in the universe, a kind of primal soup that births everything,  even time. The explicate order is our external reality. Maybe this box, like synchronicity, exists along the border between the two, where the inner and outer coincide.

The minds that created this cool game should have called it Synchronicity!

One of the lesser known and secretive organizations within the Pentagon is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The agency was established in 1958 and was dedicated to expanding the Department of Defense’ technology usage, some of which included state-of-the-art, and top secret, research into the mind. It has also been called the ‘mad science’ division of the Pentagon.

Probably because of funding requirements, DARPA has listed some of its ongoing projects and they make for a baffling, head-scratching list. Among the strange stuff:

> Shape-shifting Bomber in need of Plow-sharing;

> You Can’t Hide from DARPA;

> Automated Mammalian Training Devices;

> Big Dog Robots;

> Shark Cyborgs.

> Superman underwear- Wearable undies that can help protect soldiers in warfare.

> Cyborg insects with nuclear-powered transponder -Radioisotope transmitter work is to power the insects.

> Bio-metrics at-a-distance – Demonstrate the ability to collect, localize, and evaluate physiological signals (e.g., heart rate) at distances greater than 10 meters.

> SMITE the wicked – Dynamically forecast when deadly moles deep within government departments will likely strike.

The list goes on and on. Reporters for the national media should be having a field day with this stuff, but I haven’t seen anything about it.

While SMITE the Wicked sounds interesting, the one that immediately attracted my attention was called ‘Silent Talk,’  a new project that which according to the description will “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals. An adjunct project investigates ‘wireless transmission of decoded thoughts.’

Isn’t that a long, round-about way of saying it’s a project exploring telepathy? Indeed it is. Yet, its a clunky kind of telepathy they’re talking about – ie. ‘mechanical’ or ‘synthetic’ telepathy, which probably is more acceptable to critics of the paranormal.

Note how it’s described:  Synthetic telepathy, the foundations of which lie in neuroscience and signal processing, is the subject of a $4 million grant awarded by the US Army Research Office. “DARPA wants to know if it is possible to map EEG patterns to individual words – for one person. Then, determine if everyone has similar patterns. Finally, decode the pattern and broadcast the words to team mates in the field.”

In essence, DARPA is spending millions of research dollars into building helmets to allow soldiers to telepathically communicate with one another on the battlefield. No intuitive skills required. 

I can’t help but wonder what happened to old-fashioned mind-to-mind telepathy and remote viewing (seeing at a distance) without the use of the weighty gizmos. Beyond that, it seems like a misplaced use of public money to apply ‘telepathy’ – if that’s what this is –  to war games rather than to the benefit of humanity. Besides, wouldn’t it be cheaper to install cell phones in their helmets?

But that wouldn’t be weird science.

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Postscript: Even weirder than DARPA’s public domain list of projects are articles on the Internet about a secret one not included on the DARPA list. Project Pegasus supposedly involves time travel, teleportation to a colony on Mars, and ET contact. But reading one of the articles made me think that these folks who write so knowingly about Pegasus are the other extreme from the moon-walk deniers. These folks have congressmen and diplomats taking trips to Mars. If we could only leave some of them there!

A worldwide event for 12/21/12, 11:11 AM UT. Take a look at the video. Hope to see you there!

12/21/12. It looks like some strange mathematical algorithm, doesn’t it?

It’s the end date for the Mayan calendar. It’s the date that made Jose Arguelles famous. It’s what sent true believers to some mountain in France to await pickup by the space brothers. It’s why I asked our daughter to come home for Christmas on 12/20 – not because I believe the world will end, but because wackos might believe that. Wackos with guns, eager to accelerate Armageddon. Wackos with  road rage in their hearts and nothing to lose.

Remember Y2K? All those dire predictions about computers everywhere crashing, the electrical grids going down, chaos and Armageddon? What happened? Not much. The new year was celebrated as it always is around the world, with cheers and champagne and resolutions that usually vanish within a week or so.

12/21/12 is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, when the hours of darkness outnumber the hours of light. That’s what bothers me about this date. And why does the Mayan calendar end on this date, at 11:11:11 UT? Given the power of these numbers, it’s a synchro at the very least.

But let’s say the Mayan elders are correct, that the date simply marks the end of a very long cycle – nearly 26,000 years. None of us can say for sure what life was like 26,000 years ago;  even history about time that far back is somewhat speculative. But perhaps history isn’t the point. Perhaps the real importance of this date is where we go from here.

It’s obvious that immense change is happening. Every industry and institution we once took for granted is altering in some way, transmuting, or dissolving altogether. On a planetary level, this means we’re struggling to deal with climate change that is happening in spite of the deniers. It means our oceans are rising, our sun is changing, and what we once believed to be true and inviolate may be based on lies. After what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it means America’s love affair with guns must change.

That’s what a paradigm shift is, a mass awakening, a realization that we, the people, have been duped, bought into an artifice that is breaking apart, breaking down, collapsing.

Who doesn’t remember the movie The Matrix? Keenu Reeve in his coolest role, his most genuine role. Well, science is beginning to think there may be something to it.

So is 12/21/12 our chance to bust free of the matrix?

Right now as I’m writing this, detritus from the March 11, 2011 tsunami in Japan is washing up on Hawaiian beaches – tons of stuff, refrigerators and shoes, plastic bottles and kitchen cabinets. A disaster in one part of the world doesn’t occur in isolation. It impacts all of us, everywhere, we are that connected externally and internally.  Radiation from the meltdown at Fukushima has entered the food chain upon which we all depend – not just fish, but the very essence of the ocean, down into its most intricate textures, into the complex interplay between water and air, oxygen.

Whatever it is that 12/21/12 portends, it’s already here. We are living it, seeing it, we are witnesses to monumental change. And how we, as a species, adapt to it – or don’t – may determine the quality of our lives from this point forward.What worries me most quite frankly, is a government blog I ran across recently that is supposedly assuring us the world WILL  NOT end, then they spelled it out.  At 12 minutes past midnight on the 21st, our version of why the world won’t be ending will be posted.

The other day, I ran across something on my simple gestures that encapsulates where we are now as a species, a global community. Take a look.

It’s like an updated (and shorter) version of Desiderata, which was a kind of blueprint for the Sixties, but fits even now:

Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its shams, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

Let’s take that with us into 2013 and beyond. See you tomorrow, on December 21. And  we wish all of you happy holidays and a prosperous, healthy and insightful new year!

With all the hoopla of the upcoming end to the Mayan Calendar, it’s not surprising that the ‘end-of-the-world’ scenario has turned up in Doonesbury. In doing so, Gary Trudeau has exposed readers to a bit of knowledge about the Mayan calendar and today (Tuesday) he mentions the Harmonic Convergence, the last major dates of significance in the calendar – Aug. 16-17, 1987.  On those two mornings, millions of people worldwide – including Trish and me – showed up at sacred sites and places in nature – from beaches to mountaintops – at sunrise for the two-day celebration – an awakening with the promise of great changes in the offing for the world.

Those days marked  a planetary alignment with the Sun, Moon and six out of eight planets – a grand trine – as well as the culmination of 22 cycles of 52 years each in the Mayan Calendar. In Trudeau’s strip, he jokes about the H.C. – it’s a comic, after all. Yet, he is so wrong in his denigrating what followed this event.

Change typically doesn’t happen in one day, but unfolds over time. For example, if assault weapons are banned in the U.S. as a result of the recent devastating school shooting, it will take weeks, months, maybe years for all the necessary changes to take effect. So in the aftermath of the Harmonic Convergence – that promise of great change – what took place?

Oh, how about the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the instigation of democratic institutions in Eastern Europe, the merging of the two Germanys into one nation. And, probably most amazing of it,  it was all done without firing a single weapon. No war, no violence. It just happened. Although skeptics, of course, quickly dismiss any connection between those dramatic world-changing events and the Mayan Calendar, they can’t deny that indeed astonishing changes took place in the months following the Harmonic Convergence.

This bit of mystical history, though, seems to have happened in an alternative universe, because most people don’t recognize it – or even know that it occurred. I was astonished on one recent Sunday morning while listening to a public radio puzzle program that included a question of the relationship between 1987 and 2012. (I mentioned this in an earlier post.) There is some numeric relationship between the two years, which I can’t remember, and several hundred listeners wrote in with the right answer. But a couple of dozen people provided an alternative answer – the significant link in those years related to the Mayan Calendar. Surprisingly, neither of the hosts – smart people – had ever heard of the Harmonic Convergence. So, of course, they would not have a clue about any link between the celebration and ensuing events that aligned directly with the promise foretold.

Seeing the Doonesbury mention of the Harmonic Convergence was a synchronicity for me because  – besides reading the comic page – I’m editing and rewriting my first novel, Crystal Skull, which will be coming out as an e-book through Crossroad Press. In the novel, the Harmonic Convergence is the ticking clock in events leading to the reunion of two sacred crystal skulls and the battle to possess them.

It’s actually a mystery novel with a private detective as protagonist, but it veers away from traditional mysteries, as you can see by this summary that will be used to describe the book.

Possessed by a myth, a killer will stop at nothing to re-unite two ancient crystal skulls at a momentous date in the Mayan calendar — the Harmonic Convergence. He intends to complete his quest, at whatever cost, to seal his quest to achieve immortality. But Nicholas Pierce, a private detective, is just as determined to find out who killed his client, the caretaker of one of the skulls. 

So, of course, taking a break from editing the final chapters of a story taking place in 1987 that focuses on the H.C., I couldn’t help but see a meaningful coincidence in the Doonesbury strip today.

I also noticed that Australian futurist-mystic Marcus Anthony, who has been a denier of the significance of 12-21-2012, has changed his mind in a new post. He offers an interesting perspective from Down Under.

I have to say I’m looking forward to the ‘end of the world’ and hoping it will bring a new vision for humanity in the days, weeks, months and years to follow with concrete results even more ambitious than the massive changes for the better that followed the Harmonic Convergence.

Here’s an essay by Stace Tussel that strives to link thought to mass and synchronicity to physics. You could say that it’s a rather weighty issue.

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An old friend asked me if I thought there might be a connection between fractals and synchronicity.  As we spoke I realised that our conversation was “fractalising,” or creating related branches of thought from which other little branches of thought sprouted, and so on.  I suddenly realised that our thoughts are capable of sending out dynamic neural impulses, resulting in cascading, near-infinite whorls of information exhibiting both independence and connectivity.

Now, in order to imagine how a “thought fractal” could be implicated in the seemingly-spontaneous creation of reality – which I think synchronicity quite effectively represents – we must agree that thought has mass, which is something we can’t prove, but we can imagine.  A thought fractal, or for that matter, any information fractal (e.g., in Mike’s post, one created and/or maintained and/or grown via the internet) would naturally increase in area, if not so much in size, just like any fractal does.

If we accept that thoughts have mass, we’ll also accept that a fractalising thought’s gravity would increase correspondingly.  The entire system of ideas or thought, and of each fractal “arm” within its matrix, would be an expansive area onto which outside information may be drawn by gravitational pull.  In other words, the more massive the thought fractal (i.e., the more complex – like an intense series of thoughts leading up to an epiphany, for instance, or the internet’s ever-growing reach and effect), the more likely that synchronicities, which are among reality’s most enigmatic creations, would result….

Synchronicity truly is a natural result of the scenario I’ve imagined, for all fractals return again and again to their original form. A Mandelbrot set, for example, starts out with a relatively simple shape, which becomes more complex through a series of chaotic manifestations of curves and angles, ultimately coming back to the exact form from whence it started, continuing on infinitely.  What I’m suggesting is that fractalised thought, through a similar process, draws toward it the very “ideas” or thoughts with which it began – thus, synchronicity.

As a very brief example, today at work I came across the last name “Roos.”  I often see names that are new or unusual, but in this case I spent a few extra moments thinking about the name – adding a bit of mass to the thought, perhaps – imagining that the surname might be pronounced “Rose.”  When, just this evening, reading a book published in 1966, considering this article that I’ve been so focussed on writing for hours, to read about an out-of-body experience by one Miss Roos didn’t come as a true surprise.

Once a thought begins to compartmentalise and branch off into new connections (much like the activity that takes place on the internet) it is thus “fractalised.”  The concept thereby becomes more massive, and its gravitational pull correspondingly strengthens – and sometimes this would conceivably result in a domino-effect cascade.  The source of the pulled-in information to which I refer is unknown; I can only imagine that it’s the product of some form of intelligence, innate or acquired.

That said, if we hold the concept that synchronicity may be a product of what we might call “the mass of thought,” we wouldn’t necessarily have to agree that synchronicity is exclusively caused by the gravity of dynamic information fractals, but only that gravity appears to play a role in some cases of synchronicity.

Likewise, intention isn’t a part of the equation.  Chaos reorders itself quite effectively without outside intervention.  I strongly feel that intention may distort or even completely disable, via an artificial attempt to insert order into chaos, a tendency toward synchronicity.  Yet, unlike mere coincidence, the unexpected collision of events in a meaningful way seems to involve more than mere chance.  Gravity seems to be a likely causal factor – but again, only if we allow ourselves to imagine that thought has mass.

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I wonder if some thoughts are heavier than others or is it all hot air? I guess the problem I would have with this modest theory is that it attempts to link synchronicity to causality, ie gravity in this case. In other words, Stace is looking for a way of explaining meaningful coincidence as part of our everyday world in which cause and effect, linear time, and three-dimensional travel rule. We prefer the concept of an underlying reality that exists outside of the everyday world, where everything is inter-connected in a great web of reality that doesn’t rely on the ordinary rules of physics.

But maybe I’ve got it all wrong and am fractally-impaired, and weighed down by my musings. If you found Stace’s essay interesting, you can read the second part here at Inter-Intelligence Communications.

I’ve been trying to figure out if the weird energy worldwide now is due to the approach of 12/21 and the end of the Mayan calendar. Or whether it’s due to an acceleration of time and an evolution of consciousness. Or if it’s because humanity has reached a significant tipping point where we realize the old ways are just that – old, they don’t work any longer. Or if it’s due to all of the above. Or none of the above.

Rob and I watched Obama’s speech this evening to the families of victims at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. There were more than 900 people in the audience and another 1,300 in a spillover area. His speech was moving, touching the right notes as commander in chief but also as the father of two young girls. He said something that gave us hope: this was the fourth time during his administration that he has comforted the families of the fallen, spoken at memorial services for the victims of mass shootings, and something, he says, has got to change.

“If there’s even one step we can take to save one child, or one parent, or one town from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try,” the president told the auditorium.

“In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators in an effort to prevent more tragedies like this,” he said. “Because what choice do we have?”

Does this portend, at the very least, a ban on assault weapons? Renewed funding for mental health facilities?

Twenty years ago, Adelita Chirino  and her husband produced  the video at the top of this post, about America’s love affair with guns. That, in itself, is shocking. 20 years. What has changed? Adelita, a dream student of Robert Moss, has called upon all Dreamers to change the status quo through heir dreams. A heady  challenge, for sure, but not impossible.

During one segment on MSNBC’s coverage this evening, an interview with the family of 27-year-old Vicki Soto, I heard what sounded like a synchro, communication with a loved one who has passed on. Vicki Soto used her body as a shield to protect her first-grade students. Her family talked about her love of teaching, of winter, Christmas, the color green, and snow. Her sister mentioned that when the snow started falling the day after her tragic death, everyone in the family felt it was a “signal” from Vicki that she was with them.

Is this akin to the white feathers that our blogger friend from the UK, Mike Perry, has  reported about communication with his deceased daughter? Is this similar to the red cardinal that Sharon Catley reported about what she felt was communication from her deceased father? Is snow going to be a communication motif for the Soto family?

In this community, Obama was – as far as we could see- the only person of color in a crowd of nearly a 1,000 people. If this is the tipping point, there’s a certain irony that the tipping point may have been reached because this is a wealthy, white suburb outside of NYC, where young kids were killed, and not some inner city gang war where young kids are killed daily.

You second amendment advocates? Fine. Keep your guns. But no more assault weapons that fire with a rapidity intended only for combat zones, for war. Personally, I would prefer to see the 2^nd amendment die altogether. The amendment was created in a time of muskets and slaves and has no place in 21^st century life. That probably won’t happen, but I can dream, right? I can dream of a time when we humans actually live in peace with each other despite our differences about religious and political differences and do what is right for the greater good of the American people.

But watch what’s going to happen if Obama signs an executive order for an assault weapons ban. Every 2^nd amendment wacko will emerge from his or her dark cave and scream that Obama is trying to take away their weapons. Really? With more than 270 million guns in the hands of private citizens in this country, guns aren’t likely to vanish any time soon.

Even our neighbors, Christian folks who are nice people, head to a shooting  range on weekends with their two kids to shoot – doves.

Yeah. Doves. The birds that symbolize peace.