Leaving Salvador Dali's House

It is a long time now since leaving Salvador Dali's home.

Of course. How else would it be? At its most concrete, time is ephemeral; once an instant passes, once a breath passes, then the time of now is gone.

When that instant was,
when that breath was,
that is what time becomes.
Here and now
whatever time was
time is now ago
And there it will stay forever.

But is it gone?

The heads atop Salvador and Gala Dali's home still overlook the Mediterranean Port Lligat, even if the lens that captured this moment is not there.
They are there.
Now.
They are not ago.
This photograph is real,
right now.
Now.


Surrealism arrived about the time scientists started adding dimensions to the long held Reality of Three. Come to find out, as the 20th Century rolled along, Time, the absolute yardstick of Life, and thus of Death, was bendable.

Up until then Life was measured in what seemed a one-dimensional way, Time was so one dimensional it wasn't even considered a dimension. Then, Wham!
Not only is Time dimensional, it's such a flexible dimension it can verily double back on itself.

Freud,
whom Dali called "my father," found the same thing in the human psyche: Time stretches -- forward, backward, every which where. Memory, conscious and un-, overtakes even the all-powerful present and spills forward into dreams, and obsessions, carving out needs even before desire arises; shaping our destinies.

Perhaps, then, there is no true leaving of Salvador and Gala Dali's house which evolved around the eccentric couple from a fisherman's hut now among the hottest tourist attractions on the Mediterranean.

Like the artist, the house is unusual and the impact breathtaking.

Although shuffled in, shuffled through, shuffled out the door,
the timelessness of sea and sun and stone remains. Either in memory or planted by Dali whose so named "Paranoid Critical Method" called not only upon his own "irrational knowledge" but sought to provoke that knowledge.


The evolution of the home/studio grew organically into womb-like rooms of soft curves and sunlight. Narrow stairs and corridors in white. White, white, white, white, white and filled with Dali's outrageous genius and brimming also with Gala.

Just to convey again: The walls are white. They are white, white, white, white, white.

It is the same white hot light inside as out.

Egg atop the summer dining room
Anchors the courtyard.
Birth.
Sun, sun, sun.
Sea, sea, sea.

Then something else. Georgia O'Keeffe?

Then inside, a grand piano, nestled and defunct within crumbling rock.



Meanwhile, playing on the white, white, white stucco wall is The Magician himself.

It would be easy to dismiss Salvador Dali on so many levels -- as George Orwell tried in 1946 in an essay discussing Dali's promiscuous and distasteful subjects:

He is a symptom of the world's illness. The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations.

But by the next decade, as time warped and dreams became potentially more real than what had once been Reality, Dali added complex mathematics and Einstein and DNA theories into the visionary work he produced on canvas and in objects; seeking to provoke in others the "irrational knowledge" that layers our Reality and telescopes our vision into other Dimensions.

Perhaps, to try to answer Mr. Orwell from this more distant vantage, Dali is trying to warn us of something.

Still.
Now.

Cadaques

here it begins .... the bricks and stones of what passes for concrete reality with its tiny hints of what The Magician Dali saw. Up the hill from this small church ... less than a dozen worn wooden pews inside ... Salvador and Gaia made their home at Port Lligat.

Today I prayed the only two prayers inside the church: Help me Help me Help me and Thank you Thank you Thank you.

Tommorrow I climb first up from here and then far down and enter their home.

Manana.

I - The Magician - El Mago

I am packing for a journey to Dali's home in Cadaqués, Spain: How could it be anything but a day for The Magician?

Or in Tarot Universal Dali's Spanish, El Mago. No matter the language or the contrivances of this Tarot's creator, El Mago remains the opening card of the active Major Arcana.

By that adjective -- active -- I refer to a technique prevalent among Tarot readers and alluded to in the first post of this new venue:

0 - The Fool http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/06/fool-el-loco.html

The technique uses The Fool (-- El Loco in Tarot Universal Dali --) as the subject. The Fool is considered an infant, without imprint, an unformed psyche and proceeds to traverse the rest of the Major Arcana's 22 cards. (The full Tarot consists of 78 cards. This includes the 56 cards of the Minor Arcana which more closely resemble contemporary playing cards than do the 22 of the Major Arcana.)

Taken from the deck in this manner, this odd man out and carrying the number zero, this Fool, El Loco, faces the challenges of three rows of seven cards. Imagine it as a virgin psyche moving through three levels of self-awareness.

The first row of seven cards represent that which is Universal and beyond Human contrivance; the second row is that which Life imparts and imprints upon us; the third is that which we use to act upon Life.

The Magician is the complete and all seeing, the One, the Father; all knowing and thus the keeper and dispenser of the mysterious life-giving force of inspiration that powers creativity. It is this unknowable hugeness that first greets the innocent, unformed and uninformed who like The Fool is thrown naked into Life.

No surprise who Dali casts in the role of the Omnipotent, the Creator.

In her Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot (published by Element, a HarperCollins imprint), Tarot authority Rachel Pollack describes the first seven cards of the Major Arcana as representing higher consciousness, the next seven the unconscious and the final seven the conscious.

(This is a very abbreviated gloss of Ms. Pollack's much more profound elaboration in her chapter on Symbols and Structures that Tarot readers access.)


Ms. Pollack notes the typically open stance of the Magician depicts "the body as a channel for power. Artists and writers -- like ritual magicians -- know that the ego,
the conscious self, does not really create anything. Instead, all our training and preparation serves to allow us to get out of the way. Something moves through us. Something that wants to be created. This is what it means to experience."


In her Salvador Dali's Tarot, (published by the Rainbow Publishing Group Limited) Ms. Pollack reaffirms that El Mago "represents the creative principle, the spark of light that begins existence." But she notes in this card, one of two self-portraits in Tarot Universal Dali, the Magician Dali's "crossed arms, a sign that the artist retains his inner mysteries."

And she proffers a warning regarding another variance in Tarot Universal Dali from the more contemporary benchmarks, the Rider-Waite Tarot or Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot (shown, respectively, above).

The flames, she writes, "remind us that the creative, or 'masculine' principle ... perceived as a flame ... can either destroy or transform."

"On the table," Ms. Pollack continues, "... bread and wine, Christian symbols of transformation ... and Dali's famous melted watch, symbol of eternity."

This last bit first struck me as an odd take.
Dali named the work, The Persistence of Memory.

Then Realization:
Memory is as eternal as it is persistent.
Only cultural habits cast eternity as exclusively an Unknowable Future.
Eternity is now.
Our lives are played out in its midst.

This re-casting seems an important lesson from El Mago. A lesson I suspect passed along to La Sacerdotisa via the scroll she holds so similar to that upon Magician Dali's table.

The High Priestess, La Sacerdotisa, balances, conducts, guides the wild and untempered creative force; she is the channeler of unleashed flames.

The Magician is Fire.The High Priestess is Water. And they are connected by words. Words. Merely mnemonics once you get down to it.

Leaving The Fool

Still I tarry at El Loco.

It is a Don Quixote hang-up.

Not withstanding Raphael or Rider-Waite -- the "read" of this petitioner of the 0 - El Loco first card of the Tarot Universal Dali is "Don Quixote," an uncontested fool who lived a life fighting windmills. An old Don Quijote.

In old age Don Quixote knew himself for a fool, the butt of his neighbors' cruel jokes, living through the knowledge that his life had been spent in gallantry concocted from vanity and fantasy.


Here sits Don Quixote in Marbella, Spain -- Dali named his statue, Don Quijote sentado. It is the old man, not the self-deluded knight, Tarot Universal Dali depicts.

In Marbella, Spain the knight errant is El Loco.


Dali's countryman, Pablo Picasso, also fell prey to the "Eternal obsession of Don Quijote" http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/07/eternal-obsession-of-don-quijote.html, depicting the knight still a-mount Rocinante. Yet even upon this day amongst his questing, Picasso lets a tiny drop of the knight-errant's head suggest, just perhaps, he knew he was about a fool's errant.

If I were to accept this card I would want it to lead me toward then push me fully into what is next, forcing a full encounter, full force, without time for preconceptions, forcing me to become both a fool and crazy. I want to see that old man as a warning against the sin of windmill fighting, wasting life.

I am ready now to leave this card -- move on to I - The Magician. I wish to leave with another sketch of Don Quixote/Quijote, this one by Dali.

As with his Tarot cards, this sketch is something of a parody and a homage of his compatriot Picasso's Quixote sketch. Also, it seems aligned with the Rider-Waite Tarot standard-bearer's depiction of the Fool; certainly more so than the Raphael image. Even Rocinante's over-the-shoulder questioning is suggested.


El Loco is exhilarated, energized and young in this sketch, Rocinante awaits only the word from his knight and they will leap into a world anew.

This is a good image to carry into the next card, I - The Magician, which Dali adorns with a self-portrait.

And if, perhaps, as Tarot Universal Dali's 0 - El Loco suggests, some of us facing yet another blind and naked leap into the unknowable future are not exhilarated, energized or young, then, how foolish could it be to plead before the Madonna seeking guidance and protection?

The Eternal Obsession of Don Quijote

Since the last blog, which is to become the first of this newly directed exploration, this painting by Darwin Leon -- which came to me through cyberspace while researching O-El Loco -- The Fool from Tarot Universal Dali -- has demanded my attention.

So here it is.

Here it is better http://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-eternal-obsession-of-don-quijote-darwin-leon.html -- no endorsement intended.

What is our eternal obsession with lost causes? Is this Dali's message with his fool?

As we age, Tarot Universal Dali suggests we are still offered opportunities to be filled with pure hope. It is even possible that we gain from the fall. Certainly we gain insight more quickly from failures than through day-by-day evolution.

How to navigate through a world of temptation and fear and still hold onto hope? And how to regain ourselves to once again brave the knowledge we can fail with the conviction that we will survive the fall.

Let go, cries El Loco, Let go.

The Fool - El Loco

The Fool is the only unnumbered card of the 22 cards comprising the Major Arcana of the standard 78-card Tarot deck.

Many contemporary Readers and Seekers use The Fool as a tool to explore the other 21 Major Arcana cards which, absence this odd man, can be arranged in three rows of seven,
a rather perfect blend of numbers, actually.
Indivisible.

To begin: The Fool of the contemporary Tarot standard bearer:

Rider-Waite Tarot: The Fool

The traditional read is of naiveté, innocence, youth stepping blithely, blindly into life. Innocence perched upon the edge of the unknowable. The little dancing dog nips at the Fool's heels, chasing him on, perhaps, but even so, The Fool embodies freewill, youth with the sun at his back. Untested faith. "The Fool leads us to take risks," writes Rachel Pollack in "Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot." "He calls to the child inside us, the part of us that wants to follow our instincts..."

Or it could be said, given the suspected cliff, He's cruisin' for a bruisin'.

Dali appears to capture his Fool at a different stage of the game.

Tarot Universal Dali: The Fool - El Loco

This man does not look unaware, nor does his steed, nor does his hovering androgynous ectoplasm complete with genitalia and iconic crutch. They all look like they've been around the block before.

Indeed, and not unexpected, from the start Tarot Universal Dali frees each card from tradition by the prism of Surrealism. Dali's crutches prop open the blinding layers of our sight, offer us glances into other worlds and realities. It is the Zero card. The Nothing Card. The No-thing. Already the crutch appears.

Each card also honors tradition by paying homage through style and form and texture to the symbols that have evolved through the centuries of Tarot. The expression on El Loco seems nearly to mimic Rider Waite and the crutch balances somehow parallel to The Fool's stick.

And still, again, Dali digs yet deeper, infusing the archetypal messages from Tarot with snippets via something akin to postcards from the epic human battles and grandest god-myths. He plucks these snapshots to drop into Tarot Universal Dali from the greatest of the known artistic masterpieces.

He plucked El Loco from Raphael.

The Sistine Madonna by Raphael.

Raphael painted this man as St.Sixtus -- a Roman-ized Greek name meaning 'polished' -- worshiping at the feet of the Madonna. Madonna will always be in Salvador Dali's world, Gala.

-- more than muse or wife or model or inspiration -- Gala connected Dali's genius to the World.

Salvador Dali created Tarot Universal Dali for Gala.

The Fool transforms, draped in butterflies which transfigures El Loco into Don Quixote upon Rocinante. Don Quixote, who after all his adventures, died of a return to sanity forced by cruel practical jokers. It was a return he never wished.

Dali claimed Gala kept him from madness and early death.

The Fool still represents risk taking in Tarot Universal Dali, but Tarot Universal Dali does not predicate ingenuousness with innocence. The lack of knowledge, the innocence of youth, these are not the only conditions bestowing the blindness needed to risk.

Still the sun shines upon El Loco -- although perhaps from his Madonna and no longer at his back as with the traditional Fool.

Nor do symbolic dogs nip at heels his heels. Those nibbling impulses, more pronounced in other decks with cats and dogs biting The Fool's leg, are trivial to Dali who instead splashed a bloody crutch wielding ectoplasm down the card, revealing explicit impulses. Impulses which do not avert El Loco's gaze to his Madonna.

And though El Loco does not carry a youth's face, which arouses a suspicion of guile in place of innocence, Tarot Universal Dali portrays his face as serene, as trusting of life as are the traditional youths. There is a richness in this: Serenity despite the fear pulsating through his mount, the blinding impact of the sun, the full bodied awareness of carnal impulse and all of the psychology imbued.

Knowledge intact does not prevent us from being The Fool. Risk is life long.

Note: Raphael, with Michelangelo and De Vinci, is of the Trinity of the High Renaissance period of 1450 to 1527. Raphael died young, at 37. According to Giogio Vasari, father of art-historical writing and a contemporary, Raphael died from a too energetic night of sex which was subsequently misdiagnosed and thus mistreated. The result was death within a couple weeks.

Fours of Swords and Cups, the King of Oros and Knight of Bastos

A spread of four randomly selected cards were chosen to accommodate the upcoming gypsy weeks -- living from cars and trailer/tent.

The spread began with the return of the card of that Muse of Mine: Cuatro de Espadas.http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/04/siete-de-oros-y-cuatro-de-espadas.html

Indeed, this Muse is part of this annual trek away from home and habits.
This Four of Swords is followed by another encore appearance -- the excessive

Rey de Oros. http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/05/rey-de-oros-with-circe.html The King of Gold wrapped in a self portrait. What is he doing on a trek away from the abstract and into the concrete? Now that is something to ponder.

Then new cards for the third and fourth:
Cuatro de Copas -- the card of something not realized, a prize overlooked. Such a sad card for Cups. Rachel Pollack links its sadness in this Tarot Universal Dali deck to the deck's Two of Cups. She sees them sharing the "darker side of sexuality."

It seems in its own way even sadder than the very sad The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (1793) whom Salvador Dali took for his Cuatro de Espadas. Here, in the Cuatro de Copas, the self proclaimed King of Pentacles takes from Hippolyte Flandrin (1832) "Study (Young Male Nude Seated beside the Sea)."

Whether sad or sexual or both, because the youth is not placed -- that is, there are no landmarks, no reference points -- this 1832 painting has been compared with Surrealism -- the 20th Century style brought to its zenith by Salvador Dali.

And followed by the Knight of Wands.

A premier appearance for Caballero De Bastos -- the Knight of Wands -- but not for Benozzo's Voyage of Three Kings which Salvador Dali also used to find his Knight of Oros -- the introductory card to this journey.

That seems enough for now -- a trek to ponder through the caravan travels in the weeks ahead. For it seems suddenly hugely obvious that this path must take a turn.

The Four of Swords. The King of Pentacles. The Four of Cups. The Knight of Wands.
All in the Minor Arcana.
Only two are pip cards -- both fours within a four card spread.
Every suit appears.

Ponder the path.

Tres y Sota de Oros

Such complicated cards. Such complicated paintings. Such complicated Masters.

Following last week's Pentacles, there is surely money somewhere near. Or, as these cards suggest, it is the more basic meaning of the suit enlivening this time. Pentacles are not merely the coinage of the realm, they are our realm itself -- the Earthly realm.

Swords are air. Cups are water. Wands are fire. Pentacles are Earth.

Tres de Oros, the Three of Pentacles, the balance of the threes with the twist of spirituality which is requently captured in this Three of Coins card. In Tarot Universal Dali this Savior image is taken from the Master of Genoa, an anonymous painter of Bibles from the 13th century.

Sota de Oros, the Page of Pentacles, symbolizes Youth beginning the journey of external life, Earthly life. But Dali chooses Sir Joshua Reynolds, painting three centuries later, and chooses' Master Hare, a painting designed to show the primacy of a child's world, the child'a disinterest in external matters.

Very spiritual messages this week, and noteworthy for coming again and again from the Earthly realm.

Three is the number of completion, of wholeness. The tension of one - two dissolves into creation of a third -- woman, man, child; mind, body, spirit; a three-legged stool; a musical chord; the Christian trinity. Completion. Balance. Harmony.

The Page of Oros -- the child within the suit of the Earth -- is coming new to immersion in the world, or immersion into a new world. The page, of any suit, is the student, the child, the learner.

So what to make of both completion and novice from this two-card reading suggesting that the new knowledge is spiritual in nature but worldly in pursuit. It sounds the best of all words. It sounds wonderful.

Although Italian, the anonymous Illuminator derives his name from the illuminations in a Bible now in Gerona, Spain. The influence of Byzantine icon painting is obvious as is his efforts -- prevalent at the time -- of creating three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional spaces in space. The efforts led to the later Italian Renaissance style.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, painting three centuries later would have captivated the Magician of the Tarot Universal Dali not only with his long and productive career as a portrait painter but with his theories of great art: "Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory."

But what does Dali mean growing an ectoplasmic seahorse -- the creature where the male gives birth -- above and behind this child? And what with the delicate dragonfly below? Watery and androgynous. Of course. How Dali.

Then this 20th Century Master adds an extra small Pentacle in the child's hand and two more in Tres de Oros at Christ's feet.

Comment: A momentous week of awakening to a new spirituality that touches so many elements. That seems enough with a single added imperative -- Remain open, as a child, to all that is offered. And then accept.

Rey de Oros with Circe

Unable to leave well enough alone I selected a second card before turning over this week's King of Pentacles. Who else is the king of riches but the Magician himself. This is the second self-portrait in Tarot Universal Dali.

There is The Magician, a powerful card of the Major Arcana seen above. And there is also the King of Wealth, of Reality, of Pentacles, as the suit is most commonly known in Tarot. And also known as Coins and in Tarot Universal Dali outright gold -- Oros.


Without knowing I held this King in my right hand I slid him still face down across the table and was pulled to draw another card, one that compelled my attention and then my hand and then turning it over again appears the Nine of Cups. For the second time in this journey. http://deedee-salvadordali.blogspot.com/2010/03/nueve-de-copas.html For the third time in this year.

There is something not getting past the Nine of Cups.

In Dali's hands the card represents not merely the traditional read of excess -- as so extravagantly Rey de Oros was already poised to endow this report.

Tarot Universal Dali adds to gluttony and excess the Dosso Dossi painting, "Circe (or Melissa)," she of either great goddess or great sorceress status and representing ageless myths and archetypes of the Siren and of Vengeance.

Judith Yarnall in Transformations of Circe: The History of An Enchantress writes,

“No matter what century or work Circe appears in,
she is associated with our bodily vulnerability and has power over that
– a power that is often presented as sexual allure.”

Paired, left to right, 1st drawn then 2nd, it seems the King of Gold shrinks from Circe as they face one another across the margins of their cards. Is he in pain? In anticipation? Is his right hand loose or clenched? His leg is crossed against his body, protectively.

Circe looks on calmly, her wand now alight in the fire at her feet. Her wand? But this is a card of the Cups, the suit of Love and Relationships and Emotions. Surrounded by them and at her head a silver wine beaker. A communion cup. Yet she holds a wand of fire. The Wands are such a male suit of action and invention, of fire. Yet this Goddess or Sorceress of Cups, this Vessel holds the power to melt the great king's gold. She holds the Wand of fire as he lolls delirious perhaps oblivious in his material wealth.

As these dual images of excess propped against the computer screen, failing yet to enlighten or to explain why Circe keeps visiting, word of newly crafted goddesses not yet fully formed reach me across many decades, awakening deep memories, deepening insights. Their creator asks why care taking continues after Love and even Responsibility end. She is looking for answers as she shapes and prepares her goddesses.

What is there we cannot get over? Will not. What is it that fails to satisfy? All Circe need do is step from her casual seat. There are breaks in this circle of Cups, a route out from all those Cup demands. It seems possible the King will not notice, his eyes are downcast. Content with his gold.

And even if that were the issue, what matter? The Goddesses and Sorceresses control fire. What holds us back? What are we afraid of?

Siete de Espadas - Again - and Cinco de Espadas Anew

You've seen her before, the Roman virgin huntress, Diane. But this past week's end she coupled with the Five of her same suit, Cinco de Espadas.




Anthony Van Dyck's 1634 portrait of Charles I shows the king as "master of his world" in the words of Rachel Pollack in her Dali Tarot. Except, she says, in Salvador Dali's re-casting there are the butterflies.

The Magician's butterflies migrate throughout Universal Tarot Dali. Here, says Pollack, "they represent the secret thoughts and emotions ... fantasies and unacknowledged desires ... undermining the pose..."

For them both, Charles and Diane -- as it were -- the ectoplasm seduces these indivisible numbered Swords and draws them each forward.

It is beyond even Renewal that these cards speak. It is Awakening. All is Anew. Untested. Not yet contrived. Something base and sexual and unacknowledged, calling us into our futures.

Are you listening? Are you hearing?

The journey -- and the cards seem to hint it has only begun -- appears to promise great difficulties. So say the swords upon swords. And also deep singularity exists in the coupling of mystical number 7 and 5, the card of loss. Both are prime numbers. Neither able to divide into equal quotients.

Using Numerology, as is the way with Tarot, the combination of the cards is the already heavily weighted and freighted number 12. 12 disciples, 12 virtues, 12 vices, 12 months, 12 gods of Egypt. Then the numbers 1 and 2 are added together. Three, 3, the number of harmony.

Harmony develops as the numbers progress; it is a future state. Rightly so. Harmony is not associated with Swords. There is no particularly pleasant state of affairs found amongst Swords. The suit bespeaks difficulties. But also resolutions in action.

Swords are the Element of Air, the very stuff of the words we speak, songs we sing, thoughts we think. The passions we express. Swords are the wildly swirling Element of Air -- they shriek: Alive! Alive! Alive!

The Magician chose that dark Van Dyke to say: No! to repressed "romanticism" -- plucking again from Pollack's work with Tarot Universal Dali. Dali, indeed, demands No! to all repression. Cinco de Espadas under The Magician's hand demands repression transform. These 12 Swords demand Metamorphosis.

These cards came to me from a woman whose randomly drawn Significator -- Sieta de Espadas, Diane -- appeared here Feb. 11, 2010. At my request, because of the duplication, she selected at random a second card. The famous portrait of Charles I by Van Dyke emerged.

Van Dyke's self-portrait at 15 shows him a prodigy as was The Magician.

Before week's end transitioned to week anew, http://www.metamorphosiscenter.com came to me, as unanticipated as Charles and Diane. Metamorphosis emerges. Investigate at your pleasure. Enjoy the layers upon layers of life; enjoy their laying and their lifting.

Dali chose amongst the other Masters in his lineage, the European Masters, to layer the Tarot he created for his Muse Gaia. The Magician used crutches on his own canvases. But here he used his ancestors' Christian, civic and mythological visages and visions to introduce new realities into the conventional symbolism of the Tarot. And The Magician did more. He used these Masterpiece troves to redirect, perhaps even deliver a pathway around a destiny better averted.

In the Cinco de Espadas, The Magician softens the blow of Rider/Waite's emphasis, which is upon the gloating victor, the defeated relegated to the background.
Thoth goes straight to "Defeat," erasing even the victor.


Charles does not gloat, though he is self-satisfied and self-absorbed. The Magician does not seek a lesson built upon that. He seeks the lesson of Metamorphosis from the butterflies. Surely, suggests The Magician, there is nothing gained casting ourselves into the game of Victory or Defeat.

It is a very difficult time, a very complicated time. Everywhere, for everyone. We must become butterflies, develop as our instincts instruct, accept metamorphosis as the true change that brings Harmony, which demands the 3rd leg, the teeter-tottering of victory and defeat cannot achieve balance.

Visualize the Chinese handcuff toy, feel the woven tube fitting both index fingers nail toward nail. Pull and pull and it tightens. Relax and all falls loose and free.
We must open ourselves to new worlds, frightening only from unfamiliarity. Just like the caterpillar, it is unlikely we always visualize what is to come.

Relax, Diane. Relax, Charles. Just Breathe.