Although we eat and breathe the world, until we enable metaphors, so as to achieve
a magnitude of meaning, it seems as though the nonhuman remains indifferent to us. The Chumash "seem to have lived surrounded by metaphors that made the world no less real; as when ethnographer J.P. Harrington reported "that his informant, María Solares, has seen

'rocks in the mountains that are the exact shape of human arms and hands: they are the remains of people who died in the flood'"

In the sacred rites of the Pueblo Indians, the dancers become identified with the spirits whose "masks of infinite possibility" they wear. In Western societies, the masks we wear are the gods we unconsciously face.

In a recent dream—

There is a set of large blank white cards lying face down on a table.
Each has something written on its hidden side. I must choose one.
On the one I turn over is printed: TRANSFORMATION.

The Transformation Mask donned from Ancient Greece to the Kwakiutl of Canada heals the rift between life and death, sentient and non-sentient being. Behind this mask, I remembered that when my 95 year old grandmother died in another state from her intended cemetery, her family had to cremate her (against her wishes to be buried) in order to transport her body home....I was in despair at that time, for multiple reasons, what's hidden is seen as a shadow
that cannot fathom its own darkness.

One evening—
When all is purple in the universe,
Then the rocks will launch again their mad trajectories.