Strange Beauty and Dreams of Diana

Today's visual has nothing to do with written content ... or, if it does, it is so weirdly connected that my conscious has not yet beaten my subconscious into submission enough to figure it out.

Published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine as "Image of the Week," this is a greatly magnified slide of a pap smear in which -- somehow -- arrowwood found its way into the woman's cervical cellular content. Per NEJM:

"This harmless arrowwood contaminant was seen in a routine cervical smear of a young woman. Arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum) grows in the eastern and midwestern regions of the United States and Canada. The stellate structure has thick, transparent walls and stains a pinkish-gold color with the Papanicolaou smear. It is very fragile and is seen intact infrequently. Plant hairs (trichomes) originate from many different trees and are sometimes seen in Papanicolaou smears during the spring and summer."

One wonders how it got there, doesn't one? So strangely beautiful.

And my dreams: Diana, Princess of Wales, all night long. In most of them, she was an unhappily petulant presence. Not the heroic female archetype, just a restlessly unhappy royal.

Pap smear and a princess. If you discover the connection, please advise.

Variations on jasmine and rose move around me as I continue to test clearing's Wild series ... I have numbers written on my arms so I don't make a mistake. Numbers five and one on my right arm, number two on my left. Tough call. Three hours later: Number Five, it's Number Five!!!