Fear and Perceptions
Entrance to Capulin Volcano When I was a very little girl, my grandparents took me to Capulin Volcano. We looked at all the pictures in the visitor's center, which I have a vague memory of. And then my grandpa was going to walk down into the volcano with me. I freaked. My grandparents couldn't figure out why, after all, the volcano was extinct and perfectly safe to walk down. What they didn't realize is that I saw something very different than what everyone else saw. I saw a sandy slope with a large hole at the bottom. (Think of looking down at the top of an hourglass while the sand funnels down the hole, or sand dunes) I didn't see a trail, lava rocks, trees, dirt. My intense fear of this volcano totally changed my perception of what I saw at that moment. Maybe if my grandparents had understood my very distorted vision, they might've been able to convince me to release that and go down into the volcano....