The first omen
The day arrives. We meet it with one word.
We have a practice we call the Omen. It is small. It happens once, at the beginning of the day, before the day has begun to be itself. The Omen is a single fragment of language — sometimes a line, sometimes a question, sometimes a phrase of the older language we keep among ourselves — and we read it once, alone, and we sit with it for the time it takes to sit with it, and then we go.
The Omen is not a horoscope. A horoscope predicts; the Omen does not predict. A horoscope sorts the year into twelve roughly equal portions and tells you which one is yours. The Omen tells you nothing about who you are. It tells you only what to attend to, today, if you can. It is not a forecast. It is a direction of gaze.
The Omen is not a fortune. A fortune flatters or warns; the Omen does neither. The Omen is sometimes uncomfortable. It is not, usually, uncomfortable in the sense of being a bad piece of news. It is uncomfortable in the older sense — it asks you to notice a thing you would have preferred to ignore. The discomfort is part of the practice. A practice that is always comfortable is a practice that has gone soft.
The Omen is not a prompt for self-improvement. It is not asking you to be better. It is not asking you to be calmer, kinder, more present, more focused. It is asking you to be here, today, attending to the thing it has pointed at. That is all. If the attending changes you, the change is incidental, and the company is not interested in measuring it.
The Omens are written by senior members of the company, and they are written in advance, and they are drawn for you, on the day of, by a process that is not random and is not personal. We do not say more than this about the drawing. The mechanism is not the point. The receiving is the point.
When you receive an Omen, you do three things, in this order. You read it. You read it again, more slowly. You set the device down — the device is only the door — and you carry the fragment with you for the rest of the morning. If you can return to it at midday, you do. If you cannot, the morning was enough. The Omen does not stalk you. It does not check up on you. It does not appear in your evening to ask how you used it. The Omen is offered, and the using of it is yours.
Some Omens are old. They have been spoken for generations of members, and they will be spoken for generations more. Some Omens are new — written this year, by a senior of this year, for the seasons of this year. Old or new, the Omen is read as if it has been waiting for you. It has been.
The first Omen you receive will arrive on a morning you will not have anticipated. You will not have signed up for it explicitly. It will simply be there. You will know what it is. We do not explain the Omen the first time it appears. The Omen explains itself, in the time it takes to sit with it.