Your mission, should you choose to accept it: take a mason jar (or even better, a glass canister or apothecary jar), go outside. Find some small rocks and put them in the jar. About an inch's worth. Then dig up random dirt from anywhere - absolutely anywhere - and dump it in, filling the jar halfway or a little more.

Take the jar home, spray a dash of water on the soil if you like, seal it up, forget about it and walk away. For awhile.

Soon you should start to see sprouts appearing, even though you haven't planted anything. All you did was move dirt from one place to another. Even the worst dry granular dead-looking soil contains dormant life, microfauna, roots, spores, moss, liverworts, fungi, seeds, rhizomes, insect eggs, etc.

Pig and I have a growing collection of such jars. We deliberately don't "vet" the dirt we collect because part of the point is to demonstrate that there's life hidden even in nasty urban poor soil full of pebbles, detritus, dead tiny twigs and sticks, etc. And we have beheld many strange and stranger things, something on the order of what Crosse must have felt when he saw his "acari" creatures seemingly spontaneously forming. Or what convinced ancient alchemists that the creation of a homemade homonculus was within possibility.

We tend to dig fairly deep soil, away from the rich topsoil. Cold, thick, dry, rocky, ugly, boring. And yet we have seen large adult spiders suddenly inexplicably appear in our sealed Mystery Jars, one already with a huge egg sac. We've witnessed a fully grown big juicy pink earthworm, the kind you'd see throbbing on a sidewalk after a summer shower. There's no way I could have scooped these up from deep soil without noticing and/or accidentally squashing them (did I mention I dig up the dirt not with a spade, but a spoon?) This means they had to have come from eggs that were down deep underground, only waiting for this moment to arise. But there's no way they could have grown from an egg to a giant adult so quickly, so what gives? Maybe a homonculus isn't so far-fetched after all.

Springtails are extremely tiny (1-2mm) greyish-white insects that are great for gardeners. They act as beneficial decomposers that eat mold, fungi, and decaying matter. Some people even order live springtails by mail to add to their fancy terrariums. We have them, in droves, without even trying. A large millipede has recently crawled out the depths of one of our jars, looked around, grumbled and crawled back underground.

Fungi are already everywhere on this planet, so it should be no surprise that you'll see fungal development almost immediately. Wispy web-like filaments of mycorrhizae and mycelium will emerge, making the best of their new environment and exploring what they have to work with. The largest known organism on Earth, Armillaria ostoyae, spanning nearly 3.5 square miles in Oregon's Malheur National Forest, is an underground fungus.

Once you've got the basic Mystery Jar techniques down, you can tweak it around, experiment. We have some jars that have never been opened since the day they were sealed. Others have been given occasional brief bites of outdoor air and sun, under constant supervision to make sure nothing crawls in (or, for that matter, out.) I sprinkled a little baking yeast into a couple of jars and the springtails seemed to really get off on it. I dropped a bit of my own earwax in one and they went berserk gobbling it up. Combed my beard into one, letting dry skin cells fall into it to feed the unknown. If you have one jar that is doing exceptionally well, you can do a transfer of some of its soil and spoon it into a less active jar to give it some zip.

But in all our jars, with soil from various sources, we've never had a jar that did nothing. There is sprouting life every time. It's effortless, it's easy. It will shock you how easy it is.

Gradually we've come to realize, of course, that there's goblin energy coming into play here. Your attention units, combined with the part visible/part hidden nature of the dirt in the jars, combined with microscopic and near-microscopic activity, all generates (or perhaps more accurately, *invites*) goblin business.

Pig has keener eyesight than me, and he peers into the jars and looks for results too miniscule for me to notice. I also take digital photos of what's going on in there, at varying degrees of zoom-lens. Subsequently, scrutinizing the photos like NASA moon imagery, you will see many wonders that raise many questions.

Study your jars well and keep ye an open mind. You will find creating your home mocked-up "alchemist's study den" or "wizard's laboratory" or "cosmic command control center" will greatly enhance the anomalous activity in the jars. Feed the setting, give it mass, mock it up. You might try to rationalize that's just your imagination. But what IS imagination? It's the point where consciousness and David Lynch's "unified field" connect.