Unchanging, ageless, simple, resourceful, everlasting, efficient, hidden. Quietly building in strength and immunity with each new generation, healing the earth and recycling the old into new, better.

We are so unlike the cockroach.

With the beginning of each new dramatic change is a stage of vulnerability, beauty, and intense struggle with the emergence into an unfamiliar world and in new and unfamiliar skin. It becomes something completely new, but its past is what helps to make it into its final stage... what it's eaten, where it's been, its environment. Not becoming an adult until it's strong enough to make the transforming change into a communal, complex adult.

Perhaps we're not so different, after all.

Art from 2009. Cockroach form of Vera.