Today is Sunday 24 August, 2014 (today is actually Monday 13 April, 2020 – and I am revisiting the archives of 53 Fragments / in the spirit of a reload – time is both illusionist and illusion)

I now have a ‘launch’ date set – 2014 – Tuesday September 9 (which is a full moon – a harvest moon).

This feels right, and almost all the content for Part 1 is in place. There are a couple of poems outstanding and some pictures.

Part 1 (creation / birth) will be 17 to 18 ‘fragments’ / instalments. Taking us into 2015.

Much of my original thought, on what the content for this first part would ideally be, is in some way included in the poems and pictures as a whole. From the individual / specific reflection on birth (including degrees of the autobiographical) to expressions exploring creation myth.

Without a doubt ‘we’ are ‘here’ – the questions that join this are, what are ‘we’ and what is ‘here’. And as I read the poems poets have contributed, and look at the pictures artists have contributed, I get a feeling of loving the questions raised and entering them, without a feeling that any absence of conclusion is harmful or disturbing. We are born – no matter how we leave the womb – and we do die – no matter how we define death. Though defining both birth and death, creation or even its irrelevance is, for me, part of both the celebration of life and approaching its mystery.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

Dr Carl Sagen