Reflective Journeys - Vitae

Book excerpt: What if our conscious thoughts are living forms: vitae. What is happening in the brain when a ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ are felt internally? Where does consciousness come from? Are consciousness and nature somehow interconnected? I cannot think of a more interesting thing to ponder, and so for over 2 decades I’ve explored concepts surrounding these types of reflections using a poetic shape: a type of mirror for the reader’s mind. Occasionally these pieces are directly and specifically aimed at the center of the inquiry, and often they were tangential or in the shadow of the central themes. In the shadow of a source we are sometimes able to see things that would otherwise not be seeable. The collections have approached the questions surrounding these vitae as such, each inspired by a unique living organism: Methuselah: an exploration of our journey through time, above all else we must consider the dimension of time. There are things that transcend the dimension of time, what does this mean and how can we, our lives so brief and fragile, comprehend this? Architeuthis: questions about things known to exist but unseen. Let’s think about this: “things known to exist but unseen” — empiricism is challenged! What do we make of the countless things that believed to exist? To “believe” is not exactly equivalent as to “know”, and this is no academic detour. Questions of faith surface quickly. Actias Luna: the incredible metamorphosis and transformation: the caterpillar and moth. An inevitable destiny understood in a manner apart from cognition. Here we begin to ponder what it means to ‘know’ something in ways having nothing to do with cerebral thought processes. Tuugaalik: the unicorn whale. What unfolds as we live out a dream is more transformational, more awe inspiring than we could have ever imagined. Notice the use of “live out a...” here and remember that thoughts as vitae do precisely this: they live. Questions about ‘knowability’ run deep – what we come to know often unfolds in ways we could not have imagined! It is thus the ambitious aim of these collections, to present the reader with an ensemble, a framework of mental mirrors to approach some of the most elemental questions. “In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.” - Marcel Proust We return to our vitae towards the end of this work and, for the first time in over 2 decades, attempt to assemble some of the puzzle pieces.