"And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: world of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it."

"In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest, and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid. Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers."

"But I wasn't simply going nuts, tumbling down a shaft into Wonderland. It was my misfortune--or salvation--to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality. I never "believed" anything I saw or thought I saw. not only that, I correctly understood each new weird activity."

"Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber."

"This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled."

"Something had been peeled back, a covering or shell that works to protect us. I couldn't decide whether the covering was something on me or something attached to every thing in the world. It didn't matter, really, wherever it had been, it wasn't there anymore."

"And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I'd accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think we mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn't, if I couldn't say for certain that a curtain wasn't a mountain range?"

live with intention.
walk to the edge.
listen hard.
practice wellness.
play with abandon.
laugh.
choose with no regrets.
continue to learn.
appreciate your friends.
do what you love.
live as if this is all there is.

-Mary Anne Radmacher