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certain that there were no stones or roots to obstruct the functioning of the metal device. Lastly, I took a stake and, rock in hand, pounded it again and again, driving it into the ground. This was my mistake. I was still so engaged, I didn’t notice anyone approaching, so I was thoroughly startled to hear:
    “What are you doing?”
    I looked up to see Mr. O’Donnell standing there, his eyes carefully inspecting the ground, slowly and inquiringly, until he spotted the trap. I said nothing, trying to restrain myself from crying.
    “Give me that trap, child,” said Mr. O’Donnell, “and come with me.”
    I was much too afraid of him to refuse compliance. I did as I was told, and followed him into the shop, a strange new world crammed with all manner of tools and chimes of different shapes and sounds hanging from the ceiling. Against the wall was his forge, opening into the center of the room. Starting the bellows, Mr. O’Donnell tossed the trap over the coals and a tiny fire appeared underneath, getting hotter and hotter, until, with a sudden puff, it burst into flame.
    “This thing can injure dogs and even children!” said Mr. O’Donnell, poking the coals with a toasting fork. When the trap was red hot, he took it from the forge, and pounded it into a little square with his hammer.
    For some little time he said nothing while the metal cooled; I meanwhile was thoroughly engaged in looking round, and eyeing all the metal figurines, chimes and weather vanes. Proudly displayed
on one shelf sat a sculpted mask of a Roman warrior. At length, Mr. O’Donnell patted me upon the shoulder, and then held up a few sketches of a dragonfly.
    “I tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give you fifty cents for every dragonfly you catch.”
    I said that would be fun, and when I parted I was so excited I forgot about the woodchuck and the trap.
    The next day, freshly wakened, I set off to the fields with a marmalade jar and a butterfly net. The air was alive with insects, the flowers with bees and butterflies. But I didn’t see any dragonflies. As I floated through the last of the meadows, the long and fuzzy spikes of a cattail attracted my attention. A huge dragonfly was humming round and round; and when at last I caught it, I hopped-skipped-and-jumped all the way back to Mr. O’Donnell’s shop, a place so recently transformed from its so recent existence as a haunted structure of terror and mystery.
    Taking a magnifying glass, Mr. O’Donnell held the jar up to the light and made a careful study of the dragonfly. He fished out a number of rods and bars that lined the wall. Next, with a little pounding, he wrought a splendorous figurine that was the perfect physical image of the insect. Though he was working in metal, it had about it a beauty as airy and insubstantial as the delicate creature. But he did not capture all of it. What I wanted to know, even then, was how it felt to be that dragonfly and to perceive its world.
    As long as I live, I will never forget that day. And though Mr. O’Donnell is gone now, there still remains in his shop that little iron dragonfly—now covered with dust—to remind me that there is something more elusive to life than the succession of shapes and forms we see frozen into matter.

5
    WHERE IS THE UNIVERSE?
    M any of the later chapters will use discussions of space and time, and especially quantum theory, to help make the case for biocentrism. First, however, simple logic must be used to answer a most basic question: where is the universe located? It is here that we will need to deviate from conventional thinking and shared assumptions, some of which are inherent in language itself.
    All of us are taught since earliest childhood that the universe can be fundamentally divided into two entities—ourselves, and that which is outside of us. This seems logical and apparent. What is “me” is commonly defined by what I can control. I can move my fingers but I cannot wiggle your toes. The