I went yesterday with a visiting soulmate to a "Pennsylvania Dutch" market near Lancaster. People shopped and toured before the holiday and, instead of Amish, we found a mob of ourselves except for a young boy and girl with matching blond hair and blue eyes, brown shirts, and black overalls, who sold spray painted, "really used," horseshoes to passing suckers.

We also visited several shops, including one that sold dead Indonesian beetles and bats in glass boxes. Both of us found them exotically beautiful but a betrayal of instinctive contracts that the two of us hold with nature. (I remembered J.B.S.'s reaction when asked what Nature had taught him about God: "The Almighty has an inordinate fondness for beetles!" There were also languir skulls for sale...I thought briefly of Sarah Hrdy.)

Claire bought a brick of fudge for her children and visited a MAC machine; I sipped a coffee and studied passers-by. Most were too-well fed and most had passed their first 50 years...omigod, one lady had calves thicker than my thighs!

Every one of us makes his or her own world, including the protection and prisons of the mind.

I wondered how many of in the crowd noticed the bars, how many looked past, and how many had every broken free? How many of them had discovered their filters and receptors that let in some ideas but not for others. How many challenged those personal systems or merely accepted them as inevitable but "learned" attributes shared with mothers and fathers? Or how many took a default position that "what I think is fine and everybody else is strange?" And how many, instead, wondered at the abundant variation to be found in a mob of human skulls? Would they notice and apppreciate that same variation, that foundation for human defiance and freedom, that once existed inside one of the languir skulls? Or was I reacting within my own prison that I like better than any of theirs?

Claire returned. I asked, "What do you want to do next?"

"I don't care, I just want to leave this place."

We later sat, free, on granite boulders in the middle of a stream...