Took the girls to the Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson today. They loved it: beetles, fossils, prairie dogs, pumas, turkeys. They even got to hold a meteorite.
Then, the coolest part of the day (perhaps the decade):
We watched a snake shed its skin. We came upon her glass case and I noticed that her face looked a little funky--maybe some kind of snake-battle scar? Upon closer inspection, I saw that she was beginning to shed. So, we stood there watching her rub up against items in her case, not unlike a kitten on a pant leg--yawning wide to get that skin off her head and then dragging the rest off through the rocks. It was awesome.
Admittedly, Penelope was a little bored. But I made her stay and watch for the 15 minutes it took to slink off that skin from tip to tail. That providential 15 minute window that we happened to be there for. It really was beautiful. Well, that and maybe my affinity for peeling skin had some influence on my awe.
Anyway, it reminded me of a passage I'd read the night before in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He talks about how all of history and myth--the collective unconscious--tutors humanity in the essentialness of our own death and rebirth cycles:
"We have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."
