written by CHRIS COLIN
photography by PETER BELANGER, except where noted

Go ahead and picture a Coscinodiscus.

Picture this microscopic phytoplankton bobbing aimlessly, adrift in the frigid churn of the Pacific. Left a ways. Right a ways. That’s pretty much all you can picture; the narrative arc of this organism is limited. Drift a while, die, FIN.

Except when Nate Dube comes around.

It was a cold summer day and I’d driven to the northwest corner of San Francisco. Dube, 31, greeted me at the head of a shady trail. We ambled through eucalyptus, discussing the order of operations, until we saw sand.

Mile Rock Beach occupies a misty sliver west of the Golden Gate Bridge, where the unruly Pacific meets the more-or-less ruly bay. Gulls glided above, shrieking mindlessly. A tow-headed boy kicked at a piece of driftwood, a family spread a blanket, a woman covered her phone to call her labradoodle. A few hundred yards offshore sat a squat and battered old lighthouse, a lonesome outpost erected after the SS City of Rio de Janeiro ran into hidden rocks and sank here in 1901. This was all the visible world, soon to appear garishly large, borderline crude.

We found a secluded spot near the surf. Dube—black tactical pants, black hat, black boots, black hair—began extracting tools from a stuffed backpack: a plastic tub, a toothbrush, a tripod, some plastic canisters, a bit of machinery that looked to me like a Discman but was a mobile microscope.

“And you’re sure we’ll find some here?” I asked.

“They’re pretty much everywhere—freshwater, saltwater, even public fountains,” Dube replied. “So my approach is just go somewhere fun. A nice beach is better than a parking lot puddle.”

With that, Dube began hopping from rock to rock, out to where the surf was washing in. Into the water went a plastic canister, out it came with what I previously would’ve called water. In fact, it was teeming with the unseen ingredients of a nearly extinguished craft. For the zillionth time in my life, and for the first time knowingly, I beheld diatoms.

Found in oceans, lakes, rivers, puddles and even damp soil, diatoms are a type of almost invisible marine algae. We live in their unacknowledged debt. Scientists study them not only to understand ecosystems but also to track climate change. Diatoms produce half the world’s oxygen, rivaling the output of all the planet’s rainforests combined, and serve as a foundational food source for countless marine creatures. When diatoms die, their remains sink down to the seafloor, forming thick layers of sediment that persist for eons, an eternal graveyard.

None of this mattered to us out there at Mile Rock Beach. Far more relevant were the silica shells that encase the diatoms. These shells, or frustules, come in an astonishing variety of shapes and sizes. Some look like spiky disks, others like delicate canoes, or cubes, or gears. Tens of thousands have been identified—Coscinodiscus, Navicula, Chaetoceros, Thalassiosira, Actinocyclus, Pseudo-nitzschia, Skeletonema, Cyclotella — and many more have yet to be named. For the purposes of a community of craftspeople that is itself rather microscopic, these organisms constitute a singular kind of palette.

The wind had picked up. Further back on the beach, I heard the labradoodle’s owner utter admonitions at the creature, now returned. Dube’s focus was on the toothbrush.

“I also like to scrape rocks and other substrates, where there’s a thin, mucusy layer…”

Dube plucked a small rock from the sand, peered at it appraisingly, and began scrubbing at it over the plastic tub; whatever came off would then go into a small vial. That vial, along with the vial of seawater, would go back to Dube’s apartment in Oakland, for the long, tedious process of separating diatoms from plankton, sand, and other random schmutz. Then they’d get cleaned. And then catalogued, and then stored. And then, when all of this was done, the work could finally begin.

MICROSCOPIC GEOMETRY

A few centuries ago, we humans—having muddled along just fine squinting at things—built ourselves a new contraption. With the invention of the microscope, entire universes became knowable. A drop of water would never again be just a drop of water.

By the late 1800s, industrialization had brought the price tag of the microscope down considerably, just as the public’s interest in science was rising. What had been the guarded province of the scientific elite became, almost overnight, popular entertainment. Microscope parties—half salon, half carnival sideshow—became all the rage. Guests crowded around the spectacle of zooplankton, and paramecia, and diatoms like those Dube and I had collected. Driving this new domestic spectacle was what the filmmaker Matthew Killip called “that particularly Victorian desire to bring order to the world, to display nature in a rational way.”

In 2014, Killip put out a short documentary called “The Diatomist,” in which he described a curious, almost improbable craft that had emerged within that setting. Not content merely to admire the newly magnified world, so-called diatom arrangers began manipulating it. Using eyelashes and cat whiskers, they would coax individual diatoms, one by one, into elaborate geometric patterns: snowflakes, stars, wheels, impossible rosettes. Those silica frustules made the diatoms the perfect raw material: tough, luminous, handleable. A completed arrangement would fit within the period at the end of this sentence.

Like so many of the era’s pastimes—Victorian hair art, silhouette-cutting, scrimshaw—diatom arranging required an inordinate amount of time and patience. A single creation could take months to complete. The precision and mastery involved were as central to the activity as the final product.

And then the world shifted. Science professionalized; the amateur naturalists who’d sustained this craze were nudged aside by serious laboratories. Photography arrived on the scene, and radio, and a horrible war, and then another. By the time peace returned, there was television to admire, and a quickening pace to sustain, and soon this once-thriving pastime had all but vanished from the planet.

Short of hopping into a time machine to the 19th century, seeing a diatom arrangement in person is a rare delight. Today, they mostly appear in fleeting museum shows—like last September at the Nevada Museum of Art—or in the dim light of a local microscopy club. Every few years, historic slides emerge for exhibitions, such as the 2009 show at Berlin’s Botanical Museum. For most of us, though, the art form lives online: as high-resolution images on sites like diatomimaging.com, or in colorful posters, some which can be purchased for under $20.

INTO THE HEART OF OBSESSION

We weren’t done, Dube and I. We’d collected ocean water at Mile Rock Beach, but the San Francisco Bay, three miles away, is home to its own cast of diatoms. We got in our cars, met again 10 minutes later, and soon were making our way out to an old concrete pier just east of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The bay was exuberant. Sailboats angled to and fro, sightseers gawked at Alcatraz, windsurfers zipped out toward the ocean and then thought better of it. Dube found a spot on the pier between two fishermen and began setting up the same equipment all over again. An elderly crabber behind us sneaked glances. A tattooed young fisherman stared openly. Bespectacled, focused, exacting, Dube had the air not just of a scientist but a bygone scientist.

We were harvesting from above this time, which involved a different set of tools. I watched Dube throw a fine-mesh plankton net into the bay below us, the kind measured in microns; attached was a plastic bottle to catch whatever wound up in the net.

Dube moved with an easy confidence, even though all of this had been entirely foreign just a few years earlier, when a chance encounter with Killip’s documentary flipped a switch inside. “Why do you think that film had such an impact on you?” I asked. “I mean, most people who saw it probably didn’t change their lives in such a big way.”

“I was in a place where I was obsessed with how things are made,” Dube replied. “It goes back to being a kid who took everything apart—TV remotes, toys, anything that got me in trouble. I always wanted to make things. Later I did a lot of paper craft, and woodworking, and furniture making. I got into electronics—stringing together batteries and lights—and then computers, and coding. At some point, after working with computers a lot, you want something real. I love coding, but it’s imaginary work.”

As we spoke, Dube had been getting ready to examine the haul from the plastic bottle. The tattooed fisherman could no longer contain his curiosity.

“Is that a microscope?”

Dube said it was, offered a look.

“I use one just like that for cooking hash!” the fisherman said.

Dube smiled politely (fellow craftsperson!) and gave a quick summary of what we were up to. The fisherman nodded, his bafflement barely submerged, then returned to his fishing.

Within half an hour Dube declared our invisible bounty sufficient. As we walked back to our cars, I pictured the fisherman going home and Googling the funny activity he learned about on the pier that morning. Maybe he’d chuckle and close the computer. Or maybe he’d feel that same jolt of curiosity Dube once felt, and decide to read just a little more.

THE CONTOURS OF IDENTITY

When I first started reporting this story, it wasn’t just Nate Dube’s arrangement of diatoms that interested me. The diatoms had rearranged Nate Dube, too.

I’ve so far described the easy part of this craft. Throw out a net, fill a vial, scrape some rocks. Every step after collecting requires vastly more time and technical knowhow; it’s here that those of weaker resolve fall away. And it’s here that Dube discovered something life-changing.

Dube is a self-described perfectionist. With previous hobbies and crafts, that trait tended to prove a hindrance. In the world of diatoms, an uncompromising need for precision is a feature, not a bug. But Dube hadn’t just found a suitable activity. A deeper rightness was clicking into place.

Every little success—a clean mount, a delicate placement—brought a shot of confidence. Those, in turn, began to accumulate into something new: a kind of internal coherence that had long been missing.

In 2024, Dube came out as non-binary. Looking back, Dube, who uses the pronoun “they,” told me the following:

“There was always some aspect of this, even in high school—just gender non-conforming stuff I made a conscious effort to quash, without really understanding what was going on. For me, it always felt like a strange state to be in. I only became more aware of it later, and maybe it’s just a coincidence, but the timing aligned with me starting this work—developing a sense of pride in myself, a sense of… honestly, feeling like I was doing something crazy. Turning the garage into a lab, spending hours staring into a microscope. I knew it probably looked like insanity. But there was a connection between the pride and confidence this work gave me—something I hadn’t felt in other kinds of work—and my feelings around gender, which were deeper and intrinsic.”

Dube began experimenting with their attire, their hair, their nails.

“I remember going to collect diatoms from fountains, people watching me scoop mud into vials. I’m a very shy person—something like that would’ve freaked me out before. But I just had to get these diatoms, I had a mission. I realized I didn’t need to care what people thought. It wasn’t a single moment; it was gradual. The sort of thing that needs reinforcement. You learn to accept the way you’re seen, and then to be seen the way you want to be seen.”

Maybe something about the work invited that kind of honesty. When you spend hours sorting tiny, intricate forms into their rightful places, perhaps it becomes harder to ignore when your own life wants arranging, too.

“So—I’m not saying diatom arranging makes you non-binary,” Dube continued—sly smile. “But it affects how you see yourself. It’s hard for me to disconnect those things from the work I’m doing here.”

REVERSE ENGINEERING HISTORY

As I made my way across the Bay Bridge to Dube’s apartment, I pondered their broader diatomical context.

This craft had come incredibly close to going extinct. But a few committed souls took it upon themselves to keep the craft alive: to recover the parts that had started slipping away, to adapt what they could, to build new tools where they had to. It was into this loose, scattered fellowship—perhaps a hundred people around the world, scattered as broadly as diatoms themselves—that Dube stepped.

Understanding why Dube had taken this step, I began to suspect, required an understanding of our current moment. Ours is an era defined by scale, by visibility, by virality. If it’s not big and prominent and extensively shared, its value is nebulous. I’m not immune to this moronic stuff—I swim in these waters, even as I abhor them. Coming across Dube, bent monastically over microscopic algae, something in me was shaken. They toil not for likes or money or a quick jolt of dopamine, but for the sheer and quiet challenge of it. It was, to me, as lovely and strange as a thing could be.

I took the elevator to the top of a mixed use building. Dube was again dressed in black—black V-neck dress over a black turtleneck—but the workplace I stepped into was a bright, sun-drenched loft. Handmade furniture and art and plants and books filled the tidy space. Their two cats sniffed warily at my ankles as the realization hit: Ah, they’re good at arranging non-microscopic things, too.

Dube gave me a brief tour of what’s essentially an inhabitable cabinet of curiosities. I lingered over a scorpion suspended in formaldehyde, then an antique microscope they’d been restoring. Here was a Japanese guide to diatoms, and a volume on alchemy, another on fashion jewelry, another on the architectural history of light and its physical, sociopolitical, and spiritual properties.

Hanging on a beam beside a wall of windows was a framed portrait of a man named Johann Diedrich Möller. Möller had been a maker of microscopes and optical equipment in Germany, in the second half of the 19th century. In optics, diatoms had been prized for their fine structure and consistency–an ideal medium for testing lenses. But Möller saw another possibility for diatoms. In 1864 he became the first to affix diatoms onto microscope slides. Excited, he sent his creations to a local physician.

“The biologist essentially said, ‘Stop that. It’s an amusing little party trick—but no serious individual would ever be interested in this,” Dube told me. “However, if you would at least put diatoms on slides, in nice rows, we could use them for research.”

From that dismissive suggestion Möller built a successful business creating scientific slides. Still, the unserious little party trick wouldn’t be subdued. In his free time, Möller continued to practice a more artistic form of diatom arranging, which led him to become what I can only call a diatom-arranging celebrity. At his peak, Möller ran a small factory, staffed for both processing diatoms and preparing slides. One of his more legendary slides (two words I’d never imagined together) contained more than 4,000 diatoms.

“It’s hard to make a hero out of an old wealthy industrialist,” Dube reflected. “But he did overcome a lot of opposition—people saying, ‘You’re cheapening science, turning it into pop culture!”

I looked closer and saw that Dube had added a faint halo to Möller’s head—not with paint or a Sharpie, I learned, but via the same thermal transfer process they use when creating microscope slide labels.

Dube had been an outsider, too. After discovering the universe of diatom arranging, they set about researching how it’s done. They promptly hit a wall. In a world where all knowledge sits at our fingertips, Dube had stumbled across a strikingly uncharted corner of it. (To be fair, the stores of information on diatoms had always been limited. Like a secret guild of Japanese swordsmiths, the original diatom arrangers often guarded their techniques jealously.) So Dube more or less reverse-engineered whatever the historical record left behind—deciphering fragments, cross-referencing diagrams, emailing strangers who might know a little more than they let on. Knowing from the outset that the answers would sometimes be scarce, they dived in fully nonetheless. “I was like, how bad could it be? And then I just went down an endless rabbit hole of suffering.”

The suffering involved dissolving organic matter without shattering the silica, regulating heat with the precision of a pastry chef, learning which household chemicals might annihilate weeks of work. There was a vortex mixer to find, a mini centrifuge, a used hospital microscope, a hydraulic micro manipulator, an optic stage. Unlike, say, collecting stamps, the entire operation can collapse from the slightest imperfection. Dube moisturizes before arranging, so microscopic dry skin won’t find its way to a slide. They avoid clothing that might shed. Still, peering through their microscope at one point, Dube suddenly sighed: A speck of cat dust had tainted the slide. (“Probably Echo. She’s the needier one when I’m working.”)

They are not one to take shortcuts, or even medium cuts. Dube led me to a stone countertop, separating the kitchen from the rest of the loft. Here, for the next three hours, I would bear witness to the hypnotic, almost liturgical sequence of steps that precedes the actual arranging of diatoms.

DEPTH AS DISCIPLINE

“Before we start, how many diatoms are in this apartment?” I asked. Dube had already attempted an estimate. “I figured I have maybe two dozen vials. And each vial contains 1 to 6 million individual diatoms. But…”

Dube went on to account for the fresh diatoms being processed. Plus the diatoms found in industrial products: kitty litter, kitchen mats, the soft abrasive element in toothpaste. Then there are the fossilized diatoms Dube gathered on a collecting trip out to Pinole—probably 6- to 8 million years old, by the way. Soon we were talking about bedrock, and how subduction can carry those diatoms far from where they initially settled.

If diatoms are everywhere, one might wonder, why go searching in particular places? The answer: Not all diatoms are created equal. Different waters yield different species; and different species mean different shapes, sizes, symmetries. A collector looking for long, needle-like forms heads one direction; someone hunting perfect disks heads in another. And beyond that, the hunt itself is part of the draw. Collecting trips are, perhaps, a kind of microscopic geocaching—an excuse to travel, to wander shorelines and quarries and forgotten cuts of land, knowing that something astonishing might be waiting.

I found it hard not to sense a deeper lesson here, one applicable to all craft, maybe all of life: Explore anything deeply enough and the world will continually open up. Sure, you could find diatoms in your backyard. But packing up your gear and going to see what Pinole is all about? Or writing to an utter stranger in another country about their diatom collection? Those choices are how you stop skating over the surface and commit to a deeper practice.

Having asked for a diatom count, I got instead a glimpse of Dube’s way of being in the world. When they get into something, they follow it down to the taproot. And then they start researching the atomic structure of that taproot, or its cultural history. Before we could get to the arranging of diatoms, for instance, there was the “ringing step”—the task of drawing a circle of ink on the slide to surround the diatoms, and function as a kind of focus aid. Charged with such a job, I’d have reached for the nearest Sharpie and been done in 30 seconds. Dube, however, searched out an old microscopy book. It contained drawings of how to make a 19th century ringing table—the small hand-turned table on which arrangers would spin a slide beneath a fine brush, laying down a perfect circle.

CAT WHISKERS, HOMEMADE GLUE, AND “ANOTHER PATH OF MADNESS”

A diatom arranger can spend years perfecting the tools required to work at a microscopic scale. But there’s one thing they can’t engineer: the human body. To compensate for the lumbering, imprecise machinery of our own limbs, arrangers come up with ways to shrink their movements down to the scale of the organisms they’re handling.

Dube ultimately settled on a motorized wheel, for more consistent speed and thus a better ring. (This choice was preceded by many experiments, in which the wheel turned too fast or too slow—catastrophe!) But what shall the circle be made of? This led to a months-long research project on inks. Dube described preparing a slide, aligning dozens of diatoms, lowering them into place—only to watch the ink spread outward as it cured, undoing hours of work in minutes. After experimenting with assorted paints and enamels, Dube settled on India ink. The ink can of course be easily purchased, but Dube mixes his own—from lampblack, distilled alcohol, and shellac—because even a slight excess of binder causes the ink to creep as it dries. That will ruin a ring that might have taken an entire afternoon to prepare.

Then there was the exterior black ring—and another few months of research to determine a coating that wouldn’t betray Dube weeks later with hairline cracks or a faint sheen (which only appears after the slide has already been sealed). Dube eventually learned that the original ring was made from asphalt. (It doesn’t help that the names for everything have changed since Victorian times.) Undaunted, they found someone who sells asphalt-based lacquer, but only in Europe; Dube now mixes their own, dissolving asphaltum in kerosene, vacuum filtering it, and ultimately stirring it for four days in order to achieve perfect dissolution. (Any dissolution that’s less than perfect leaves behind troublesome particles. And while the particles are small enough to escape filtration, they’re still large enough to ruin the ring—sometimes immediately, sometimes weeks later when the damage can no longer be undone.)

Then there was the fixative recipe, and matters of shelf stability, and ultra-fine gelatins that must be of bovine origin. And, of course, there were the needles for the actual arranging. Dube experimented with cat whiskers (locally sourced!) and found them sufficiently fine at the end, but a little too flexible—particularly when a diatom gets stuck in adhesive. They settled on tungsten wire, which they refine by dipping a piece in an electrolyte solution.

“The dipping motion means the tip spends more time in the solution than the rest of the wire, so it tapers down to a needle that’s sharper than any needle you could buy,” Dube said.

“How would that compare to, say, a sewing needle?”

“Maybe a hundredth the thickness? I’ve poked myself with them. You don’t even feel it.”

Next came the labeling of slides—something Dube confesses to having “really overthought.” But obsessing about labels was difficult for Dube to resist, for understandable reasons. For starters, Dube said, “It’s partly about tradition and pride in your work, and the beauty of the slide itself.” There are also practical considerations. “When I first started doing this,” Dube told me, “I’d hand someone a slide and they’d say, ‘It’s a microscope slide.’ It’s hard to feel excited. You don’t know it’s something special. So I wondered: How can I design it so that the second you touch the slide, you know you’re holding something interesting—something that should be protected? And something that will protect itself from time passing.”

If a label fails, the slide becomes anonymous—just glass, its history erased. All that work can disappear because you chose the wrong adhesive or stored it poorly. “Thinking through all the possible outcomes,” Dube said, “led me down another path of madness.” At first, the labeling issue seemed simple: Print something and glue it on. But that leads to…“What glue? I tried different things, and then experimented with silk-screening labels onto the slides.” Dube also tried printing the labels in resin, or using an etching process. “Right now I’m thermally bonding polyester labels into etched glass. But that device over in the corner—that’s what I ultimately want to do for my labels: micro-photographs…

Two hours into my tour of diatom arranging, we’d arranged zero diatoms. I was fascinated but impatient—I longed to see the craft in action. Embarrassingly, the truth only dawned on me later: This was the craft.

The final product was, in a sense, a byproduct. I don’t want to overstate it; Dube very much cares about the ultimate arrangement. But the research and the decision-making and the creation of the tools and the countless other preparations: These weren’t ancillary. It was all the work.

A diatom arranger can spend years perfecting the tools required to work at a microscopic scale. But there’s one thing they can’t engineer: the human body. To compensate for the lumbering, imprecise machinery of our own limbs, arrangers come up with ways to shrink their movements down to the scale of the organisms they’re handling.

Some set up a second microscope beside the main one and use its stage controls and focus knob to steer the arranging needle. Others harness their own heartbeats, letting that tiny rhythmic bounce nudge the needle along.

For Dube, the heartbeat created too much motion. Their workaround: binding their arm tightly with a Muay Thai wrap—essentially a tourniquet—to dampen the pulse enough to work. “I can do that for about twenty minutes before it becomes too much.”

Nearly three hours after I’d arrived, we had finally pulled up chairs at one of Dube’s powerful microscopes, which they’d connected to a large monitor. Dube flipped it on, slid a slide under the lens and suddenly this whole operation was real: I was staring at diatoms. They looked like shattered glass, shards of assorted shapes scattered across a black background. Each form was crisply bounded, latticed with pores and striations so fine they read like surface noise. Some were ovals or circles, others were triangles or rectangles or cylinders—I’d never seen natural forms with such artificial-looking shapes.

“I’m looking for a suitable candidate,” Dube said, picking their way carefully around the shards. The idea of making art from these shapes felt impossible, and indeed, the Mona Lisa of diatoms has yet to be created. Even the most ambitious arrangements are relatively simplistic, by painterly standards. But as I watched what goes into moving a single diatom—the equivalent, say, of gathering a drop of paint for the Sistine Chapel—a straightforward rosette or basic geometric pattern struck me as plenty. Dube seemed to be reading my mind:

“I’d love to do a flower bouquet someday. I’d love to recreate some of the works I’ve seen by other arrangers, just as a test for myself. But for now, I’m just responding to where the shapes are pointing me. People ask me if I plan out my arrangements, and I say no. The geometric shapes naturally lend themselves to wanting to be placed in certain arrangements. So, seeing this triangle next to the disc—it makes me think maybe I should go back and rework it with these. Or maybe I’ll look for the more slender species, the triangle, and try to finish that off.”

Dube ended up extracting three diatoms, two circular and one triangular. After all the elaborate preparation, I was struck by the modesty of it. But Dube explained that suitable specimens are rare, and each extraction carries risk. Precisely placing just a few intact diatoms in an arrangement can take an hour or more. As the arrangement takes a shape, a wrong move or misjudged breath can easily obliterate the whole thing.

Dube finessed the trio of diatoms onto a slide of their own and began nudging them around with what looked, under magnification, like a monstrously large needle. We zoomed in further and suddenly saw texture—pores, per Dube—comprising countless even tinier dots, a little like lizard scales. After a good deal of futzing, the triangle was made to sit just above the two circles. It looked like an orange with a smaller fruit overhead, and a jaunty cap hovering just above that.

Even this, Dube explained, wasn’t diatom arrangement. It was the very beginning of the endeavor—a first move in a process that might, over weeks or months, grow into something denser, riskier, and more fragile.

“I still feel very much like an amateur,” Dube said. “My holy grail would be a slide with a thousand diatoms on it. Or even like a few hundred. Huge arrangements like that are a massive technical feat. Every single diatom contains the possibility of error. Place one the wrong side up and it floats away, and that can have a cascading effect on the other diatoms…”

INVISIBLE CONNECTIONS

I was glad we didn’t attempt anything massive on this outing. For one, I don’t think I could’ve handled the risk of heartbreak—I pictured a thousand microscopic dominoes knocking each other over with a silent crash. But beyond that, I don’t think I needed to see more, given the attention, patience, and faith that went into positioning just three diatoms. By the time Dube walked me out that afternoon, I was living at the diatom arranger’s pace.

That evening, I found myself thinking about something Dube had said to me at the beach. Walking back to our cars, we’d passed a small puddle, which of course led me to ask about the miniature life lurking within. Dube isn’t garrulous, but they launched into an impromptu reflection:

“I feel like so many of us walk around depressingly aware of how out of touch we are, even with just the visible parts of nature. Or from each other. Theoretically, we’re more connected than ever. We have our phones, we have social media. But at the same time we’re distracted.

Engaging with the microscopic world, it reconnects you to nature, to the persistence of life, and to the joy of seeing something often overlooked. These are little jewels, hiding in sight. They’re all around us. It’s not like they’re in a separate world—we’re part of their world. The process of collecting and cleaning requires you to engage with something you can’t see. You have to trust that it exists. And that changes the way you think about life. It opens something up.”