My heart is full

I imagine everyone has their idea of perfection. An image of a perfect world where the setting is ideal and the people of your heart are right there.

I was pretty close today.

Two of my grandchildren and their mother came to visit. I only see these grandchildren for a few hours every other year and we never fail to make the most of it.

This time we went out for pancakes and came back to my apartment to visit. We were going to play mini golf, but even they thought it was too hot, so we stayed home and built a fairy garden, played with my dollhouses with their tiny books, and just talked.

My grandson, who will be in second grade next Fall likes to play math games and I'm being honest when I say I don't consider myself any slouch, but I had to stop and think when we played the doubling game. What is 1046 plus 1046? He beat me and went on at top speed. What is 2092 plus . . .

My granddaughter took one of the empty tiny books home with her. She's going to write this one!

I might see them again before they go home and if I do it would be lovely, but we didn't waste a moment of the quality time we had today.

It's a small world

I cannot tell you how much I love my computer, my iPhone and modern technology.

Today I spoke with Bestest in London, my son in North Carolina and made plans with my grandchildren from Seattle.

I also had breakfast with six friends I met three years ago on a computer meetup club. Without a computer we could not organize this fifty woman club so that small groups of us can gather together and enjoy all our different interests.

I love the coffees at local coffee houses, the different restaurants we go to for lunch or dinner, the puzzle room we signed up for, the book clubs and there are many other options for people who like to get together in the company of women just for fun.

I play a sort of computer scrabble with my aunt in Indiana, a young speech pathologist in Springfield, a teacher in Memphis, my son and my retired chaplain friend and sometimes even my granddaughter.

I find out when concerts and plays are happening so my granddaughter and I can attend them. All without chopping down a single tree to make paper.

Even the Ironwood Ladies have moved into the computer age, texting each other to plan lunches and trips together.

Our technology brings us together in ways not even possible nineteen years ago. Had it been around I think my father might have lived a lot longer and had a much richer life. Who could have imagined that a grandmother in Illinois could read picture books to her grandchildren in Seattle, or a Canadian aunt living in Illinois could play with her twin nephews in Vancouver!

My Little Professor

Oxford. England that is. Not Mississippi where one might be more likely to find a young Professor of Southern Literature hanging out at Faulkner's home.

But at the University of Worcester where you can go to the Bodleian library for real and live in a dorm famous people may have inhabited before you.

A place where field trips might include castles and cliffs and towers filled with romantic stories, and ghosts, and even Will Shakespeare's house.

That's where Bestest is heading on a long trip across the pond tonight. He won't be home till morning in August and I'll miss him.

But then he'll only be home a month before he leaves for Bogliasco in Genoa, Italy. That's the problem with having a Bestest who is also a world class author and teacher. I don't get to see him very often.

I will however get to be the nanny who cares for his Maddie while he's in Italy and I'm looking forward to that. I'll slather all my love on her as we keep each other company walking the flower filled avenues of an Alabama suburb.

Who will walk a mile with me

I went out to walk at Parklands yesterday. I haven't been there in ages mostly because I had internalized the fears of other people about ticks and snakes, neither of which I have ever had a problem with in the past.

I probably should have paid more attention to the weather. It was hot and very muggy, but I only intended to walk fifteen or twenty minutes in and then back. That would accomplish my goal of walking thirty minutes a day.

Right after I arrived a  deer came leaping through the woods on my left. At first I thought it was a dog, but dogs are not allowed in Parklands and this was huge. Leaping four feet in the air in great bounds it was there and gone in seconds. I don't even know if it was a doe or a stag, but I do know it was a deer.

There were little black and yellow butterflies, lots of monte casino and humidity. Did I mention it was almost unbearably hot and muggy. I was panting away when I saw another person coming down a trail that runs along the river.

I really did not want to talk to anyone so I tried slowing down. It became obvious that no matter what I did, we would intersect, so I sat down on a bench and pretended to be very interested in something on the ground behind me. A voice said, "Hi."

Turns out he was a young professor who did some kind of creative film or television work. He had just come from New York and was interviewing in two different places nearby. He said his parents also lived locally and he wanted to be around them before it was the bitter end and they couldn't do anything. I told him where my children lived. He told me about some of his camping adventures. I told him about the time I stood so close to flying geese that I could feel the wind beneath their wings.

He referred to people in their fifties several times. His old landlord, his parents, one of his professors and I finally said that I spent the first fifty years of my life as a fairly traditional sedate person, but the last twenty had been more fun.

He was shocked that I am nearly seventy years old. I was thrilled he felt that way! We reached our cars and I left as he went to find his camera before going back in.

Bed of nails

There are facts of life that I may not like, but which are very real.

Number one among them is that there are people in this world who are toxic to me. They believe, act and feel in ways I feel are not realistic, or beneficial to me or anyone else and while they might be basically nice people I do not want to be around them in thought, word, or deed.

They cause me to waste my time alone trying to come up with words that will make them see the light. They interrupt my sleep with nightmares of evil creatures behind big smiles. They make my chest literally hurt between seven and nine at night.

I have a little meditation pad I call my bed of nails and I actually go lie down on it, in the dark, while contemplating nothing more than breathing to stop the pain in my chest.

It works, but obviously it is temporary because it tends to keep coming back, same time, same place, same people.

It is not easy to end relationships of fifty years, but looking back I realize I have always had major differences with some people and now is the time to end that.

I tried just letting them be them, but that still does not work for me. I feel too strongly about the things we disagree on. If these people are considered friends then I don't need enemies.

So now I am practicing letting go . . .

It might be a matter of life and death.

It is certainly a matter of life and breath.

Thrive

Most of us have a foible or two.

And if we don't there are still bound to be other people who believe we do.

The secret to happiness seems to be becoming accustomed to our own particular craziness and learning to use it to thrive.

Because if we didn't need it, it wouldn't be here.

That doesn't mean to tell the world. Only tell those special folks who deserve to know.

Find the balancing point and it is amazing how good life can be. The cracks start to fill in with sunshine. The fear starts to fade and the darkness slowly slides away.

Baby talk

I believe in a power too ineffable to begin to describe. It is almost easier to say what it is not than what it is.

I believe it is the essence of the universe and everything that is.

I do not believe that it is a man, or father, or mother. All the faces of god are just baby talk for this ineffable power that I do not believe has a personal interest in each and every one of us. I do not believe that it is jealous, or needs to be worshipped, or begged, or any of those human characteristics that egos have attributed to it for thousands of years.

I do believe that somehow, in ways I will never understand, it set in motion what I know today as the universe, the earth, and what inhabits them.

I do believe I am part of this power, as much or maybe more than my son is a part of me.

It is awe inspiring, really incomprehensible to believe anything so extraordinary exists and even defining exists is iffy here. We are because it is.

I believe that people are as important as ants and trees and dolphins and maybe even stones and wind and rain. I also believe we have been separating ourselves from this power and the wondrous things that evolved through it since we began thinking and trying to control things. We are small and imagining something this large is difficult.

I believe prayer works, but not because some distant being decides to raise his hand like an ancient lord in a castle and say, "So be it." It works because we are made with energy and when we inadvertently use that energy as a group, or even as just one, it can make a difference. It is not hubris to believe this any more than it is hubris to believe I can breathe, think, reproduce, create . . .

I find this ineffable power miraculous.

I do good because it is the right thing to do. I try to do as little harm to every single thing on this planet as I am capable of, which is often pitifully little. Partly because it is also the right thing to do, but also because I am connected to everything else and hurting it will hurt me and those I love in the long run.

Matter is neither created nor destroyed. It is constantly transforming. I am one pebble on the beach and some day I will be a million grains of sand in the ocean. I find both comfort and glory in that. I do not have to pray that I am one with the universe, because I am. We all are. Like it or not.

Beauty and the beasts

I have a niece who has been in trouble all her life and all her life her parents and friends have made excuses for her, enabled her, and basically taught her over and over again that anything she does is okay, because if people really love you, you are not responsible for yourself. Not even responsible for your own children. You can just do whatever strikes you in the moment and someone will rescue you, or your children so you can move on to whatever strikes you next.

She came out of prison a while ago and gets her ankle monitor off in days.

She looks beautiful for a nearly forty year old woman, but her Facebook and her posts to me indicate she hasn't learned anything. She is merely counting the days until she can go back to what she knows and loves best.

Hoarding clothes and junk, relying on pills to make her happy, needing other people to help her do things most girls of fourteen can do for themselves, being proud of and working at being a scatter brain, looking for love in all the wrong places. These things are all learned and it is going to be very difficult to unlearn them when even her good role models use a legal, more or less acceptable form of the same things.

It makes people feel good about themselves when they pay her rent, bail her out, take her children to her, make her feel like everything is hunky dory whenever she does something harmful to herself or others. She never gets to suffer long enough to find her own way out of trouble. They deny her the right to grow and learn.

This may be her last real chance to have any kind of quality life. It is up to her, but it is going to be twice as hard if well meaning people keep getting in the way.

Brunch with nature

I drove out to Dawson Lake and ate my egg and cheese bagel this morning. It is my kind of nostalgia. I've been going there for over forty years, mostly with my children in tow to swim or hike, or just play. It's one of the few places I know where there is no hum of traffic at any distance and everything you hear is softly soothing -- except sometimes the voice of adult humans.

I parked at a fishing overlook for a while and just sat there watching. I saw a very old person at the edge of the lake fishing. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, but it was a pleasant looking human who was very intent on what s/he was doing. There were  four poles sticking up out of a five gallon plastic bucket and one big on in his/her hands. I mean really big, like maybe for catching marlin!  I don't know what all is in this lake, but I don't want to see anything that big come out of it!

Two older people pulled up in their SUV and got out with cameras boasting big fancy lenses. They talked loudly about all the lenses they had in the cars, opened and closed the car doors a hundred times, took pictures of the distant lake and then the bark of the Pin Oak right in front of them, barely taking a breath long enough to push the buttons of their cameras.

While they did this a gorgeous black and white heron flew right in front of us and landed in the cattails nearby. There was an air show over the water as a swallow swooped and dove after some big insect it was trying to catch. This went on for several minutes and was fascinating to watch.

And the people  missed all of it talking about how many lenses they had and what they were.

Eventually they moved on and so did I. I drove through the old swimming beach and came out just as a squirrel ran out on the road. I waited since there was no traffic and of course the squirrel waited too. Finally I decided to try to drive around it in the direction it had come from. The squirrel immediately darted back that way and disappeared under my car! If I hadn't been going so slow I would have killed the squirrelly thing, but he lived to torment another squirrel lover.

Rounding  the corner to Honkers Beach I found baby geese in all stages of growth from downy infants to almost grown goslings and also a gorgeous red winged blackbird sitting there backlighted by the water and trees.

Leaving the park I saw a beautiful doe, her big brown eyes seemingly unafraid of me as she stood there in the grass watching me watching her.

I can't think of a finer place to go for brunch.

Paper towel syndrome

Down for another day! It is as if I am connected to this awful gray weather. I can't seem to feel really good this summer. If it's not one thing, it's another.

After being sick all weekend, I have spent today with some kind of digestive upset.

Of course there were the six gluten free waffles I had for dessert last night. Complete with butter and syrup.

Once, when my dog, Chauncey was a puppy, there were all these long gray coils in his stools and I thought, "Oh my gosh, worms!" And promptly rushed him over to the vet.

Later on I got a call.

Not worms. Paper towel.

Chauncey had no portion control. He ate whatever was in front of him until it was gone. That time a paper towel.

I have paper towel syndrome.

Six waffles.

With butter and syrup.

Long day today.

(Might be funnier if it was less debilitating.)

Developmentally delayed

Adolescence. A time when hormones are raging. Behavior is erratic. Over reacting is rampant. Very physical, lots of pushing, bumping, hitting, getting even. Denying disagreeable things whether they are true or not.  And the list goes on. Most of us are very familiar with adolescent behavior.

On the other hand, most people outgrow it.

The people who did not are acting out now even if they are twenty, thirty, seventy. Frustrated by their own incompetence, or lack of power or understanding, they are trying out their ideas for how to get their own adolescent way and make themselves happy. Not realizing it isn't the world they need to change, but themselves.

If you have enough money you can do anything, even become president of the United States, but the rest of us need to live by a moral code that says other people, ALL other people, are important and should have the same basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That means food, healthcare, education and the right to live unmolested and not be made into scapegoats by those who have enough power and money to abuse them.

Without these things we are no better than all the other people in history who lived under regimes that led to the deaths of millions of innocent people.

Pools of light and ache

I know many many people are into nostalgia. They seem to love it as much as it depresses me and until today I had a hard time understanding that.

One of the things I thought was wrong with my maternal grandma was her lack of attachment to things my mother and other people found hugely important like antiques and things kept purely for sentimental value despite how you feel about them now. I think I feel much the same way she might have.

To me the past is dark, highlighted in pools of yellow incandescent light. Melancholy permeates the atmosphere as I remember both the good and the bad things about it.

When you hear a song from the sixties perhaps you think boys and parties and swinging down the lane in an old Dodge with the radio blaring while you eat M&Ms. I do too, but I also remember that vast sense of not belonging, of being mostly at sea with my feelings and thoughts and the ache I had for what I thought was supposed to be.

The same goes for my marriage in the seventies. Dark wood and macramé, friends and siblings still using drugs and alcohol to medicate themselves, and the nagging sense that something was not quite right with my marriage. Pools of light and ache.

Then came the eighties and the closest I ever get to pleasant nostalgia. My children lit up my life more than anything I've ever known before or since, but along with that came the terror of feeling I had to protect them from the monsters in the world. blinding love over a crater of darkness.

I have discovered that there are people so full of themselves there is no room in their lives for anyone else, except as receptacles who provide a repository for what they need from them. They carry the darkness like a lantern that drives me away.

To me, nostalgia is a lopsided remembering of something that wasn't as good as it seems in retrospect. It may be your candle on the water, but I am content to stay right here in the light of the present.

Lucid

I was having a perfectly normal dream that my siblings and I had been relocated to the city, a sort of upgraded slum part of the city where people lived in kitschy little rooms or homes perched along art nouveau balconies. A block away were lots of shops and stores, and it was pretty much okay except for the looming threat of gangs who might come to exact some sort of toll on us.

The ladies here were stereotypical Jewish moms, drinking coffee, talking about their sons and one had a saguaro cactus. I looked at it and told her it was probably 300 years old since it had arms already. My siblings were wandering up and down through these balconies and homes and I realized I had lost them all!  I began madly looking for them and ended up on a bleak cloverleaf interchange with no buildings in sight.

Suddenly I knew I was dreaming! I think this is a first for me because I decided to play with that. I saw a train engine coming down the highway and I decided not to move because if I was dreaming it wouldn't hurt me. At the last minute I panicked though and stepped aside, but I noticed the train engine swerved in a blur to the other way to avoid me!

Somehow this made me brave and I thought, I can fly or swim if this is a dream. I just have to believe. There were huge jagged rocks on both sides of the highway, but I threw myself on my back (because in real life I am a better floater than swimmer) and using my arms propelled myself out over the rocks towards home. It was hard to maintain my belief that I could do this and several times I almost crashed on those pointy rocks!

After I woke up this morning I found out Bestest had been negotiating some really sharp rocks in order to go swimming!

What an interesting experience.

Sipping water

I've been sick. Probably sicker than I've been in a very long time and I don't know what it was/is although it's better now than it was. I was just coming off a course of prednisone and I had just cleaned off a Brazilian geode for the first time since I've had it and My daughter informed me as we ate breakfast Friday that a lot of people she knows are sick and I had eaten a funny tasting takeout sandwich from a fast food restaurant the night before, so it could have been anything.

I was spending a lot of time in the bathroom Friday when suddenly at 6:30 pm I was enveloped in a dry cold like nothing I've ever experienced before, which is what made me think I had somehow gotten some kind of chemical or poison off the geode into my system, because I had just cleaned that.

Thus began a long miserable couple of days where I felt constantly nauseous, but never threw up and had cramping in my abdomen and the bones in my feet became ultra sensitive. I slept and I sipped water and I slept more. Pretty much all I've done since Friday is sleep.

Today I began having horrific nightmares. I was living in a huge white Georgian home that I really lived in until I was three, but now I was grown up and Becky lived there with me. The town outside had grown into a city and this was obviously prime real estate, but I was so tired and Becky was being passive aggressive, more like my sister than herself. There were things of great beauty in the house, but something was not right. I finally went up the front staircase and went into my room. As soon as I shut the door I realized I could not find the light switch, or the door knob. I was stuck! Then the unbelievable happened. I saw a ghost sitting on the window seat looking out. She looked a lot like my sister in junior high, but she was a ghost and her hair was so thin in the back I could see her scalp.  I was terrified, but I thought, I'm just going to keep looking until I see her face. She got up and walked into the other part of the bedroom and I panicked.

I could hear my mother talking to my sister on the other side of the door and she was angry about something, but I didn't care. I just wanted her to get me out! I kept trying to find a door knob and calling for help. My voice seemed stuck in quiet mode and nothing I could do would make it loud. I screamed and screamed and screamed.

And finally woke myself up when it came out loud enough. I was disoriented and had no idea where I was. It took some time before I realized I was in my own bed here in the apartment.

The good news is that I think I am much better today.

Who, who, who are you

Who a person is depends on how we look at him.

If we see an important person then everything he says takes on meaning, important meaning.

But if we see a fool, then nothing he says makes any sense.

The most frightening thing in the world is that people see things differently.

One man's hero is another's villain and chances are pretty good that men are both sides are willing to kill, or die, to promote that vision.

Our mothers see the good in us. To them we are always the seven year old child wanting to do good.

Other people are often not so kind, or so blind to what the world has beaten into us. Our nooks and cranny carry a lot of residue in them, blinding everyone to the truth.

Very few people are as good, or bad, brilliant, or slow as we see them. We are not archetypes painted in triptychs for contemplation. We are people on good and bad days, facing problems no one else knows about and willing to do more than any one dreams possible for things we care about.

Looking. Seeing. Caring. So many variables.

With a little help from my friends

I tend to think of myself as something more than my family does. I am more than a large, homely, eccentric woman.

I also tend to think of myself as a fairly intelligent, very lucky human being, open to all sorts of possibilities.

I do realize that some of the people I call friends are so much more than any of this. They are teachers, professors, chaplains, artistic souls who do better than most when it comes to making this world a better place. These people actually do what many people only talk about in vague idealistic ways.

With a little help from my friends I am learning more about myself as well.

If their prolonged interest in me means anything, and since most things in their lives do mean something, it must, then I must have some traits that are valuable, worthwhile, or important enough to maintain our friendship over the years.

That is a comforting thought in the chaos of a mind that is constantly barraged by thoughts, ideas, feelings, doubt and discomfort.

Apple pie and motherhood

I just read a prologue for a book that has yet to be written and I am filled to overflowing with thoughts that leave me bubbling.

Boiling.

Frustrated and yet proud.

I feel as if my eyes have just been opened to a tiny focal point that has been a very unfocused part of my life.

Injustice abounds in this world, but the systematic injustice of a country built on shaky pillars has never been as clear to me as it is now.

The unspoken way our forefathers have manipulated our core values and woven them in among the so called Christian beliefs, and privileged moralities of both class and race prejudices that create the fabric of our entire justice system and personal beliefs is outrageous.

It shows how easy it is to mold the minds of people swayed by catchy phrases and comfortable acceptance of what greatness is. Apple pie and motherhood! But only for those people who we deign deserve it.

We want to live on high ground in the garden of good and evil, but we want it at the expense of an awful lot of good people caught up a fairy tale that does not exist.

Missing pieces

I often write about the things that have felt like negative aspects in my life. They have had a profound affect on me, but not just in bad ways.

I think I have been lucky because there has always been a voice in my head saying there is more to this than I am seeing and a niggling need to find out what that is.

The missing pieces have caused me lots of anguish, but they have also led me to an incredible amount of beauty and mystery and that mystery, that not knowing, has given me enough courage or ignorance to get out there and stumble into other things.

Had I never been divorced I doubt if I would have ever discovered big pieces of myself that thrive being alone. Born into a large family, always living surrounded by people who aren't just related to me, but more or less forced to be there for me, aloneness only meant being a room away from security.

Having my children grown and gone, my husband gone, and my friends all dispersing about the same time, I found myself reaching out for new paths. The sorrow of losing that great confining security blanket made me just reckless enough to explore the parts of me that were there, but hidden under a veil of learned responsibility, primordial morality and ancient ethics that were really not as important or valuable to me as I had been led to believe.

Chilvary is dead and so is my belief that dancing around fires and making sacrifices will garner gifts from the gods. Mostly what I have discovered is that extraordinary is really very ordinary.  It's the individual people and the light shifting beyond the clouds that make the real extraordinary.

And I have met some truly great people in my life. People who do the ordinary in extraordinary ways that add a burnished luminescence enhancing memories and beliefs in ways I would not trade for anything else in the world.

If I were writing fairy tales and folk lore, these would be the jewels in the dragon's lair, the holy grail that appears in the hidden cavern, the lady in the lake rising up to meet me, or the story of the green knight.

Ephemeral and difficult to describe, these give me sustenance during my darkest hours and envelope me with their light when I least expect it.

Breaking the cycle

The last thing anyone wants when they are not feeling good is to do something uncomfortable.

But if you are already uncomfortable you need to change something, so it's worth a little more discomfort if that would help.

Most people wouldn't balk at taking some nasty tasting medicine if they thought it would help, but that is a modern way of dealing with our problems. Swallow a magic pill and life will improve.

If you have an infection, or broken bone, or ulcer, that is very true.

But what if you have a sad soul, or dispirited spirit, or feel betrayed? Any pill you take for that is probably only dulling the feeling and giving it time to dig in deep enough that you can ignore it.

You can fake happiness with inane action. Clean the house at a madcap pace. Run fifteen miles a day. Drink until you fall over. Sleep perchance to dream of better things 23 hours a day. Eat until you are too large to fit in your clothes. Surround yourself with so many people you have no time for yourself.

Any of those might be easier than the discomfort of doing something new to really change things.

Sometimes I've found myself breaking one cycle only to fall into another. When I quit smoking, I ate! Now I need to stop medicating with food.

But when I was ineffably lonely I went out and found some people who like to do things I like and that has turned out to be a wonderful thing. It wasn't at first. I was really scared the first time I showed up at a restaurant to meet people I didn't know, but I kept it up long enough to become comfortable and have met some new kindred spirits because of it.

The same goes with volunteering. I volunteered at a hospital, at a YWCA daycare and an airplane museum before I remembered how much I like to volunteer in an elementary school library.

Maybe if you look at life as an adventure it will give you the courage to do somethings that feel uncomfortable so you can find the things you love that you didn't know you loved.

Bad day

I spent the morning waiting for the people who bought my daybed to come pick it up.

I spent the afternoon waiting for my doctor to call the pharmacy because he had ordered a medicine they did not have.

I spent the evening waiting for my new bed frame to arrive.

The people did pick up the daybed.

My doctor never contacted the pharmacy, so I did not get my prescription.

I will be sleeping in my chair tonight, or on the floor, because the bed frame did not arrive.

And thirty three years ago today my mother died.

June 4th is not a good day for me.

She shall have music wherever she goes

There are people who live very calm lives of utter contentment with almost no upheavals, or out of the ordinary concerns. They grow up, get married, buy a house and eventually die peacefully, probably in their sleep and go to whatever place they expected to go after that.

I am not one of them. I had my first existential crisis at three and went on from there.

While my life has not been Indiana Jones worthy, it has had a few adventures. Not like my friend, Mack, who wind surfs with dogs, rides camels along the seashore, drops out of airplanes and lives to tell about and not like Bestest who hobknobs all over the world eating exquisite cuisines and visiting world famous landmarks while writing books and attending Broadway plays and not like Kathleen who once unearthed Anasazi pots in old Mesa Verde.

I have experienced a bit of freedom that allowed me to stand inches below thousands of migrating geese flying so low I really could feel the wind beneath their wings.  I have walked the invisible paths of ancient Americans and heard the sound of flutes echoing through their ruins. I have stood beneath the terrifying gaze of a mountain lion in the mountains of California and seen bears among the redwoods, hearing nothing but the leaves rustling overhead. I have participated in sweat lodges and once attended a Wiccan wedding. I've journeyed to the sound of Native American drums and done breath work that gave me incredible visions.

I have heard the mellifluous sound of a Native American flute reverberating in a great cathedral and John Denver in a small auditorium. My life has been fueled by music of every sort for every reason from sea to shining sea, but I've never left this country since I was a child of three and it seems that this is to be my path.

Whether it is nature blowing through mountain crevices, or musicians performing, or my children playing their hearts out on guitars and keyboards I have had music wherever I've gone.

The second coming

I dream that I am going into someone else's dream. There is a large roaring lion whose face takes up all the space there. I get right up in the lion's face and tell the dreamer to let it go.

I walk away and discover I am encased head to foot in a hard crusty rock type substance. It totally encompasses me, leaving no breathing holes, or eye holes, or any openings at all, but I am not afraid. I have no feelings at all. I just crack it open to discover there is another layer inside that looks exactly the same. When I crack that open, I step out.

I feel as if I have emerged from a chrysalis and yet I look the same.

It seems the changes are all on the inside.