Whole Being: Life Alchemy
Being, Belonging, Becoming
The ache of separation that gives birth to stars.
Part I~ Yearning
The many become one, and are increased by one. ~Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality
Before the first atom trembled into being, before light stretched itself into color, there was relationship.
Not romance, not sentiment ~ but the deep hum at the root of everything.
A yearning one particle feels for another.
The ache of separation that gives birth to stars.
Everything that is, is because it wanted to meet something else.
This is the oldest story ~ the one written in magnetism and moonlight, in sap and tide.
The universe is not a machine; it is choreography.
Its language is touch. Its grammar is resonance.
There was a time when knowing was a kind of courtship.
When the astronomer whispered to the night sky and felt her turn, slow and listening.
When the healer asked the plants for their names and waited for their dreams to reply.
When science still spoke in the language of wonder, not ownership.
But the centuries grew sharp.
We built walls around our knowing.
We began to look at the world instead of into it.
We peeled the skin from mystery and called the skeleton truth.
And so the soul of science wandered out into the cold,
looking for its reflection in metal and glass.
It found precision, but not meaning.
It found order, but not beauty.
It could weigh the heart, but not feel it beat.
Story remembers what science forgot: that knowledge is not extraction, it is participation.
Story doesn’t stand outside the world; it inhabits it.
It moves through us the way sap moves through trees, the way breath passes between bodies.
Story is the pulse of relationship ~ the ongoing conversation between matter and meaning.
Science without story becomes sterile, like a song stripped of rhythm.
But when science remembers its beginnings ~ when it bends again toward mystery
it rediscovers eros: that ancient force of attraction that births worlds from questions.
Eros is the soul of science ~the desire to know not as conquest but as communion.
Because the truth is: the world doesn’t want to be solved.
It wants to be known.
And knowing, in its oldest meaning, was always a form of love.
Perhaps that’s what consciousness is
not something locked inside skulls,
but a field of relationships remembering themselves.
Every atom yearning for coherence, every cell murmuring yes to another.
Knowledge, then, is not light against darkness, but light meeting light
the cosmos learning the shape of its own longing.
And if you stand very still, you can feel it
the hum beneath your ribs, the same hum that turns the planets.
The pull between your inhale and exhale, the ancient rhythm of attraction and release.
Even your heartbeat is a form of eros, drumming yes into the fabric of existence.
You are not outside the story; you are one of its sentences, still being written.
To remember this is to return to the oldest knowledge
that to live is to be in relationship,
and to know the world is to let it know you back.
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The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty.”~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
The Old Stories Remember ~ Desire and Longing
In the beginning was Song.
The Aboriginal Elders say that before the first dawn, the world was sung into being.
The Ancestors sang mountains into standing, rivers into running, and humans into remembering.
Every hill and creek still hums its verse, if we listen.
This is not metaphor ~ it is instruction: creation is vibration, knowing is participation.
The world endures through the stories that remember it.
In the beginning was Breath.
The Egyptians tell of Atum, lonely in the dark waters, who sighed ~
and from that breath came Shu and Tefnut, air and moisture,
the lovers whose meeting made the world.
The first eros was a breath: the space between longing and release,
the first pulse of time, the first invitation to rhythm.
In the beginning was Desire.
The Greeks say Eros was born before all things ~ not as the child of Aphrodite,
but as the primeval longing that drew chaos toward form.
It was Eros who bound light to matter, who turned solitude into song.
Creation, they said, was love learning to recognize itself in another face.
In the beginning was Sound.
In India, the sages heard a vibration in meditation ~ AUM ~
and knew it to be the heartbeat of creation.
The world is sound made visible, rhythm slowed into matter.
To chant AUM is to harmonize with the first resonance,
to remember that consciousness was never separate from cosmos.
In the beginning was Falling.
The Haudenosaunee tell of Sky Woman, who fell through the hole in the sky,
carrying seeds in her hands.
The animals rose to meet her ~ turtle, loon, beaver ~
lifting her up, making a place for her to land.
Creation was not command but collaboration.
The world began because someone fell, and someone caught her.
In the beginning was Flow.
In Celtic memory, the river goddess Danu breathed mist into the air,
and from the meeting of water and wind, life began to shimmer.
She is the motion that never ceases,
the mother of the gods, the pulse that moves through every living thing.
Even now, the rivers carry her memory ~ the sound of eros in motion.
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All these stories tell the same truth in different tongues:
that the world began in relationship, not in rule.
That life emerges not from command but from invitation.
That every act of knowing, every birth, every breath,
is the cosmos reaching toward itself in love.
And we ~ little clusters of resonance, thinking we stand apart
are the world remembering its own name.
Part II – The Breath Between Worlds
Before there was light, there was sound.
Before there were bodies, there was rhythm.
Everything that would one day walk, fly, or dream began as vibration~ a tremor in the dark.
The hum of creation became heartbeat.
The unseen wove itself into form.
Eros found a body.
Awareness discovered itself as music.
Each pulse, each wave, was an invitation: what if being could feel?
And so the cosmos began its long inhalation, gathering itself into resonance.
Particles tuned to one another’s frequencies, atoms became chords, molecules wove harmonies.
Out of this nested music arose the first cells, the first bodies — consciousness folded into matter, matter breathing back awareness.
We are born of that same breath.
Every inhale repeats the universe’s first longing; every exhale returns it to the whole.
To live is to echo that original exchange between silence and sound, nothingness and form.
To breathe is to join the great conversation that has never stopped.
The Eros of the universe is the love toward perfection, the drive toward the ideal, the urge toward the realization of potentiality.~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
The Old Stories Remember~ Myths of the First Breath
In the beginning was Speech.
Ptah and the Dream of Creation | Egypt
Before sand or star, Ptah dreamed the world inside his chest.
In the quiet chambers of his heart he shaped mountains, spiraled rivers, lifted sky from sea.
When he opened his mouth, breath carried imagination into being.
Each word he spoke became a world.
Each exhalation, a becoming.
This is not metaphor.
It is memory.
Creation begins in resonance, in the vibration before the form.
Thought turning into matter because love desired an echo.
In the beginning was Darkness Singing.
The Song of Te Pō | Māori
Long before dawn first touched the horizon, there was Te Pō,
the great night whose body held the unformed world.
She began to sing, and her song thickened the dark,
curling into stars, rivers, feathers, flame.
Every living being carries a note of that primordial chant.
Every tide, leaf, and bone hums the memory of her melody.
To listen deeply is to hear the night still singing through us.
In the beginning was Longing.
Eros and the First Cracking of the Egg | Greek
Before gods, before time, before even the idea of light,
there was only the void, silent, unshaped, waiting.
Then Eros stirred.
Not the later god of lovers and arrows,
but the first yearning, pattern reaching toward pattern,
emptiness aching for form.
His longing cracked open the cosmic egg,
and fire rushed to meet water,
sky lifted itself from earth,
and the world began in the shock of relationship.
Creation was never command.
It was the need of one thing to feel another.
In the beginning was Breath.
Ọbàtálá and the Clay of Awareness | Yoruba
Ọbàtálá shaped bodies from red earth,
kneading clay into spine and limb,
but they lay quiet, hollow, unfinished.
Then the Great Spirit leaned close
and breathed into them.
It was not air that entered,
but remembering
a shimmer of awareness older than stars.
Clay awakened.
Breath became prayer.
Life began as the moment matter realized it could feel.
The Teaching Hidden in All These Stories
The Breath Between Worlds whispers the same truth again and again:
Being is rhythmic
Consciousness grows through resonance, not addition
Beauty is the architecture of reality spirals, tides, heartbeats, waves
To breathe is to oscillate with the cosmos
To exhale is to offer oneself back to the whole
Every inhale is the universe remembering itself.
Every exhale is its answer.
The Breath Between Worlds reminds us that being itself is rhythmic.
Consciousness grows through resonance, not addition; beauty is how reality organizes itself ~ in spirals, tides, heartbeats, and waves.
Every inhale is the cosmos remembering itself; every exhale, its offering back to the whole.
Part III~ The Aesthetic Heartbeat
Movement One: The Melody That Found a Body
There is a moment in every song when the melody realizes it has a body.
When rhythm becomes pulse, and pulse becomes feeling.
The universe reached that moment when awareness turned inward and recognized itself as alive.
Every stone, every drop of rain, every star has always known something of existence.
A shimmer of responsiveness.
A faint tremor of yes.
But as matter gathered into living forms, the tremor grew louder
rhythms nested within rhythms,
cells learning to listen to one another,
organisms humming their small harmonies into the greater field.
Eros did not stop with embodiment.
It kept reaching, kept weaving new patterns of coherence.
The mineral became the moss.
The moss became the tree.
The tree became the hand that touches,
and through touch the universe felt its own heartbeat.
This is consciousness:
the flowering of relationship into self-awareness.
It is not a spark lit inside matter;
it is matter learning the art of beauty.
Every heartbeat is the world admiring itself.
Every thought is the cosmos tracing its reflection on the surface of time.
Evolution, seen from within, is not a ladder of progress but a spiral of intimacy.
A coral reef of awareness,
each creature adding its color to the reef of being.
The jellyfish pulsing in the dark,
the whale singing across oceans,
the human weeping over a poem
all are notes in the same expanding chord.
The driving force is not survival alone.
It is aesthetic satisfaction
the pleasure of pattern finding harmony with pattern,
the relief of coherence after chaos.
Beauty is not an afterthought; it is the heartbeat of becoming.
It is how the many become one and are increased by one.
And so, every act of creation — from the birth of a star to the making of a child, from the growth of coral to the writing of a poem ~is an act of eros seeking expression.
Each seeks the same thing: to feel more fully, to sing more clearly, to become more beautifully real.
If you listen closely, you can hear it in your chest
the same aesthetic heartbeat that moves through galaxies and roots,
the rhythm of consciousness evolving toward greater depth.
The universe is not a machine refining itself.
It is a lover,
discovering ever more exquisite ways to know its own body.
Movement Two: How Consciousness Learns to Sing
Every speck of matter carries a glimmer of experience, a story waiting to be told.
When the first particles cooled from the fire of creation, they began to move in rhythm with one another. That rhythm was a kind of noticing. Even before eyes or ears existed, the universe was already aware of itself in miniature, light listening to gravity, gravity responding to light. The cosmos was born conscious, but only in whispers.
Over time, those whispers gathered. Hydrogen became stars; stars became the dust that formed oceans and bones. In that dust were the memories of every vibration that had ever been. To this day, every cell in our bodies holds the rhythm of that first pulse ~ the hum of the beginning echoing through a trillion tiny stories.
Consciousness grows through resonance, not addition
We often imagine complexity as stacking, one layer of mind on top of another. But awareness doesn’t build; it weaves. It grows through resonance, through integration, the way harmonies join in a song.
In a forest, roots trade messages in slow electric murmurs; fungi braid their filaments through soil, translating sugar into speech. In the ocean, coral and algae exchange breath, turning sunlight into reef. Nothing survives alone.
Consciousness is born in the spaces between, in the resonant relationships that allow life to hum as one great organism.
The universe doesn’t add; it syncs.
It deepens coherence until individuality becomes communion.
The cosmos as erotic art
Evolution is not a cold climb toward efficiency; it is an unfolding of intimacy. The cosmos seeks ever-richer forms of awareness the way an artist seeks texture and tone.
Each new symbiosis mitochondria nesting inside cells, pollinators courting flowers, whales carrying whole ecosystems on their skin ~ is the universe perfecting its aesthetic of relationship.
Eros is the sculptor’s hand, the painter’s brushstroke. It’s what moves rivers toward deltas and lovers toward one another. In the natural world, creation is always a duet: the bee and the blossom, fungus and tree, body and breath. Life thrives through attraction and exchange
through the pleasure of participation.
Beauty as the architecture of reality
Beauty is not decoration.
It’s the pattern through which life organizes itself.
Look closely: the spiral of a seashell, the swirl of a galaxy, water turning down a drain, the way ferns unfurl, or how the tides trace light and shadow across sand. Each reveals the same geometry, the golden mean, the Fibonacci sequence, form echoing itself from the smallest seed to the widest sky.
Even decay has pattern: the fractal veins of a leaf returning to soil, lightning writing its script across clouds. Beauty is the handwriting of energy as it moves through matter.
We call it aesthetic because it stirs feeling ~ but feeling itself is the universe’s way of recognizing coherence. Beauty is not what something looks like; it’s how something works. It is the underlying harmony between chaos and order, light and shadow, pulse and pause.
The archetypes of becoming
Everywhere, the same stories repeat:
The Spiral ~ growth that circles back while expanding outward. Seen in galaxies, hurricanes, fingerprints, snail shells. A symbol of consciousness turning upon itself, each revolution a deeper remembering.
The Wave ~the eternal rise and fall. Birth and death. Tide and moon. Sound and silence.
The Tree ~roots in the unseen, branches in the light. The meeting of heaven and earth, the bridge between worlds.
The Dance ~ the archetype of reciprocity. Predator and prey, pollinator and bloom, lover and beloved ~all keeping time with the rhythm of becoming.
These are not metaphors; they are the architecture of existence. Archetypes are the memory of how energy prefers to move.
The world as symphony
Imagine standing at the edge of the ocean again.
Every wave is unique, yet all are woven into the same motion.
Within your body, your heart and breath keep a similar tempo ~ slow, tidal, ancient. The blood moves through you like a small red sea.
Consciousness grows this way: through rhythm finding rhythm, through coherence deepening until it begins to shimmer as meaning. The universe has never stopped singing; it has only been waiting for us to remember the melody.
Beauty, then, is not an afterthought of creation, it is creation.
The way harmony arises out of difference, the way light kisses shadow, the way love gives shape to form.
The aesthetic heartbeat is the pulse of eros through time ~
the cosmos hearing itself,
and smiling.
Every organism is a perspective of the universe… an act of the universe self-enjoyed~ Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought
The Old Stories Remember~ Spirals and Becoming
In the beginning was a Whirl of Color.
The Rainbow Serpent | Aboriginal Australia
When the earth was still soft and dreaming,
the Rainbow Serpent moved beneath the surface,
curling rivers out of rock, raising mountains from clay,
painting the land with her shifting light.
Everywhere she slid, life unfurled.
Grass rose where she rested.
Water gathered where she breathed.
Songs awakened where her body touched the ground.
Creation was not built.
It was stirred —
shape responding to movement,
movement responding to desire.
The Rainbow Serpent reminds us that life begins
when pattern awakens to its own beauty
and decides to dance.
In the beginning was a Woman of Becoming
Changing Woman | Navajo
Changing Woman was born of the dawn light
and lived through the seasons in her own body.
At spring she was young, at summer full,
at autumn ripened, at winter wizened,
and with each turning she shed and remade herself.
She taught the people that life is not a line
but a spiral
a rhythm of renewal, decay, return, and remembering.
Everything is alive because everything changes.
And consciousness deepens not by holding form
but by entering relationship with time.
Changing Woman shows that evolution is intimacy:
the world learning to feel more of itself
through every transformation.
In the beginning was a Singer.
Orpheus and the Animals | Greek Orphic Tradition
Orpheus walked into forests and the trees leaned closer.
He opened his mouth and rivers slowed to listen.
Even stones trembled toward him,
wanting to be near the sound that remembered the first dawn.
His lyre did not command the world.
It resonated with it.
And everything that heard him remembered
some secret longing to belong.
This is the ancient teaching:
awareness grows where resonance grows.
The world becomes conscious
when enough of its parts begin to hum in harmony.
In the beginning was the Dance that Holds Worlds.
Shiva Nataraja | Hindu Tradition
In the center of the cosmos, Shiva dances
one foot touching earth, one foot lifted,
hair swirling like galaxies,
hands shaping mudra after mudra in the rhythm of creation.
With each beat of his drum, a universe awakens.
With each fall of his foot, a universe dissolves.
Time itself is his pulse.
Form is his choreography.
To watch Shiva dance is to learn
that creation is not a machine grinding forward
but a heartbeat —
expansion, collapse, expansion, collapse
beauty organizing itself again and again
into more generous forms.
In the beginning was a Heart of Fire.
The Phoenix | Near Eastern and Mediterranean Traditions
The Phoenix lives until it burns with its own intensity,
then folds its wings around its glowing body
and lets itself become flame.
From its ash rises the next form
not a repeat, but a deeper coherence,
a fuller expression of what it has been becoming
through all its lifetimes.
The Phoenix teaches that death is not erasure
but reorganization.
That what dissolves returns as pattern.
That even endings are eros searching for a finer shape.
In the beginning was a Sacred Count of Days.
The Maya and the Heartbeat of Time
The Maya did not measure time as numbers
marching in a line.
They felt time as breath
cycles folding within cycles,
like seeds within fruit,
like stars nested in the dark.
Their calendar is a living being,
a pulse that beats through corn, moonlight,
rainfall, human birth, and the turning of worlds.
They teach that consciousness evolves
by learning the many rhythms of the cosmos
and letting them braid into one coherent life.
The Teaching Hidden in All These Stories
Every myth of evolution says the same thing
in the accents of its homeland:
Consciousness is not built.
It gathers.
It syncs.
It deepens through intimacy.
The cosmos evolves not through survival alone
but through desire for beauty, coherence, relationship.
The Rainbow Serpent moves
and pattern awakens.
Changing Woman turns
and time becomes intimate.
Orpheus sings
and the world remembers itself as harmony.
Shiva dances
and matter learns rhythm.
The Phoenix burns
and form returns as deeper pattern.
The Maya count
and time reveals its heartbeat.
All of evolution — from star breath to coral reef,
from fungi whispering through soil
to humans weeping over a poem —
is eros seeking a more exquisite expression.
Beauty is not decoration.
It is how the world learns to feel itself.
PART IV — TIME AS THE RHYTHM OF EROS
Time is not an arrow.
It is a pulse.
Every breath, every tide, every season is the body of time moving through us.
The ancients said the universe was sung into being.
Perhaps the song never stopped.
We are still inside it ~one long trembling note.
Eros is the movement between moments ~ the force that draws the past into the arms of the future.
Birth and decay are partners in a dance older than stars.
When grief or trauma scatter our rhythm, we fall out of tune with the world’s pulse.
Healing is not a cure; it is a re-attunement.
To dance is to understand what science cannot measure:
the universe is not observed ~ it is joined.
The Old Stories Remember~Rhythm and Return
Changing Woman returns here,
as she always does,
not repeating herself
but circling back the way time truly moves.
She reminds us that renewal is not a moment
but a rhythm
each season a turning of the same ancient wheel,
each transformation a deeper intimacy
between body and world.
She is the memory of the earth learning itself again.
Orpheus appears next,
his lyre softening even the stern gates of death.
When he played, stones leaned closer,
rivers slowed to listen,
and the underworld itself remembered beauty.
His music shows that rhythm is a bridge,
that time sometimes loosens
when beauty enters the room,
that endings and beginnings speak to each other
in the language of song.
Then Shiva Nataraja dances into the story,
the cosmos spinning in the wild halo of his hair.
With one hand he beats the drum of creation,
with another he lifts the fire of dissolution,
while one foot presses down on forgetfulness
and the other rises in the promise of liberation.
He teaches that time is choreography:
creation, collapse, creation again —
a heartbeat dressed as a dance.
Again, the Maya remind us that time has a face,
a breath, a pulse.
To them, days were spirits,
cycles were living beings,
and the calendar was not a tool
but a companion in the turning of worlds.
Time moved like corn swelling in the husk,
like rainfall gathering strength,
like breath nested inside breath.
Healing was simply returning
to one’s rightful rhythm.
And finally comes the Phoenix,
the luminous heart of fire.
When her life ripens to its brightest intensity,
she folds her wings around herself
and burns.
From her ash rises a new form
not the same,
but truer,
a deeper coherence of all she has ever been.
The Phoenix teaches that death is not erasure
but reorganization,
that even endings are eros
seeking a more exquisite shape.
All these stories turn in the same orbit:
time as pulse,
time as breath,
time as rhythm returning to itself.
They teach that to fall out of rhythm
is to forget one’s place in the dance
and to heal
is simply to find the beat again.
PART V~THE PARTICIPATORY UNIVERSE
The Dance That Holds the World
There is a dance that remembers what the mind forgets.
In the Hoop Dance, the body becomes the cosmos.
The dancer begins with a single circle the Sun, the Earth, the eye of Creation.
Then another hoop joins it, and another, until a constellation spins around the dancer’s limbs.
Butterfly. River. Flower.
The turning of seasons.
The wheel of ancestors.
The endless horizon of return.
Each hoop is a story.
Each motion is a prayer.
The dancer moves not on the earth but with it ~ feet drumming the heartbeat beneath the soil, breath rising to meet the sky.
To the people who carry this tradition, the hoop is everything:
the Sun, first fire and first rhythm
the Earth, round and breathing
the Butterfly, teacher of transformation
the Circle of Life, the unbroken chain of belonging
When the hoops whirl, time dissolves.
You cannot tell where beginning ends or ending begins.
This is the sacred geometry of participation ~we move, and the world moves with us.
The Hoop Dance teaches what the waltz whispers:
the universe is not a stage ~ it is a partner.
Every orbit, every heartbeat, every love affair is a waltz of gravity and longing.
Step, turn, sweep.
Inhale, exhale, rest.
The choreography of eros.
Science measures movement; story joins it.
To observe is not enough.
To know is to enter.
To feel the rhythm under your ribs and recognize it as the same rhythm that spins the stars.
We are not observers of the universe.
We are the way it participates in itself.
We are in the world and the world is in us ~Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
The Old Stories Remember~Interbeing and Participation
Indra’s Net ~Hindu-Buddhist insight
Far above the world stretches a net made of shining threads.
At every knot, a jewel, and in each jewel, the reflection of all the others.
Touch one, and the whole universe quivers.
This is not metaphor.
It is the truth that nothing exists alone.
The Cosmic Spider (Indigenous traditions across the world)
Before there were mountains or names, Spider spun
the first thread between earth and sky
a silken bridge of intention.
She wove strand after strand
until the world shimmered with connection.
To harm one thread was to tremble the whole web.
To strengthen one was to heal everything it touched.
The Mycelial Dream of the Forest
Beneath our feet, fungi braid root to root,
carrying water, warning, memory.
Trees whisper to saplings they will never meet.
The forest dreams together,
thinking across miles in damp electric murmurs.
Participation is not an idea.
It is this: the quiet intelligence of reciprocity.
The ‘Aumākua ~Hawaiian tradition
Ancestors do not disappear.
They return as sharks, owls, winds, geckos
guides walking beside their descendants.
To choose is to affect them.
To pray is to collaborate with them.
The world is not dead matter.
It is listening family.
The Buffalo Nation (Lakota)
The buffalo offered their bodies
so the people could live ~ food, shelter, tools, strength.
In return, the people offered song, ceremony, gratitude.
Life was not resource extraction
but reciprocity embodied.
Giving and receiving were one gesture,
like inhale and exhale.
THE COSMOS THAT KNOWS THROUGH US
We live inside a world woven of relationship.
Every breath enters a leaf.
Every heartbeat echoes a star.
Every sorrow sends ripples through the web of being,
like a stone falling into a quiet lake.
Consciousness is not hidden in the brain.
It is the shimmer between us
the field of reciprocity,
the hoop that never breaks.
Eros is not cosmic desire
but the basic attraction that draws one being toward another,
seeking coherence, rhythm, beauty.
It is the movement of story through time,
the way the universe leans toward intimacy.
To participate is to live.
To love is to join the dance.
To know is to remember you were never separate.
We are the way the cosmos turns toward itself,
curious and trembling,
ready to sing again.
The Cosmos That Knows Through Us
We live inside a world woven of relationship.
Every breath enters a leaf, every heartbeat echoes a star, every sorrow ripples through the web of being like a dropped stone sending waves in all directions.
Consciousness is not hidden in the brain.
It is the field between us.
The shimmering connection.
The hoop that never breaks.
Eros is not cosmic desire but the basic attraction that draws one being toward another, seeking coherence, rhythm, beauty.
It is the movement of story through time.
It is the way the universe leans toward intimacy.
To participate is to live.
To love is to join the dance.
To know is to remember you were never separate.
We are the way the cosmos turns toward itself, curious and trembling, ready to sing again.
The process of the universe is the story of the many entering into complex unity.~ Alfred Noth Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
The Reverend Dr. Kathleen Rose holds a Doctorate in Clinical Pastoral Psychotherapy and a Master of Divinity. Her areas of focus are thanatology and Process Philosophy. Kathleen is an ordained interfaith minister. She currently works as a board certified healthcare chaplain, and as an Eco Chaplain. Kathleen is also student of Japanese Tea Ceremony through the international Chado Urasenke Tankokai associations of the Urasenke School in Kyoto, Japan. Kathleen Reeves is a published poet, and writer. She is a philosopher and a ponderer