I love quilts. My mom makes them and I think they’re cool as shit. But that’s just the opener.

One night I decided to get real funky and made some too-much-weed-meets-too-much-psilocibin chocolate bars and ate a few chunks. Everything was all well and good until about an hour later when shit got real.

I was sitting on my bedroom floor staring at my favorite quilt hanging on the wall. The colors were breathing and rippling, taking turns of prominence and glowing in kind. Like hues flaring together, pulsing and waving. The fabric of existence (as sewn together by my mother) coming alive and having its way with me.

Suddenly, the green patches shot forward: luminous plateaus jutting geometric caprocks toward me and summoning something deep inside. I felt those greens. They roused and conjured some piece of me, something beyond words. Something strange and new and yet old and familiar.

The feeling stayed awhile. It was uncomfortable. Eventually, though, relief came and the emotions settled as the towering greens retracted back into the undulating patchwork.

But the respite was brief.

Soon the oranges pulled forward, floating toward me like neon sea anemones groping for the surface. Radiant protuberances swaying in an invisible current, kicking up the cosmic dust and agitating something new–-something orange--a cyclone lifting the dormant silt of my being against my will.

And so it went with all the colors: the greens and the reds and the oranges and the blues and neutral tans, switching back and forth, each taking its turn to stir the pot and show me myself before returning to the even plane of their threaded kaleidoscope.

It was weird.

But that experience reminds me of something: that we all have these pieces to us. We’re multi-colored. Our characters, complex. And you never really know how you’re stitched together until those pieces are provoked by your environment, your circumstances and the people you meet.

And I guess when you start to see that the rest is up to you.

---