“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.”— The Alexiad, Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1148.

Turn me into a wood. No longer a woman, beset by sorrow, but dewdropped all over, hung with cobwebs, cauled in fog and half-dreaming into winter. Perhaps Daphne, turned into a laurel tree as she fled Apollo, felt relief as her roots plunged into the earth and her leafy fragrant branches stretched for the sky. There was no more a woman, with all the troubles that plague her kind, only a being that lived on sunshine and rain, shaped only by wind.

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