WHY
a question we should never stop asking.
My real education came between the formal blocks of childhood schooling. I would spend summers with grandmother investigating ancient cultures and hearing their stories, poring over their ruins in stone and letter. The narratives of these peoples far away in time captivated me. It was as if they were so close for being so far.
When allowed to choose my own education I studied film and theater first, learning the weft and warp of story craft in various forms. I continued into literature, specifically mythology, fairy tales and creative writing, because those old narratives kept calling me back. I wanted to know more, the truth behind the curtain that I could just barely make out across all these treasures of human expression. I then turned to linguistics and the neurocognitive development of language, as a story is articulated in words, even when its origins lie elsewhere. Each of these paths was the same inquiry moving through whatever discipline would take it. Where does narrative come from, why is it so essential, and what is it pointing to? Neuroscience, in the middle of its own renaissance, is where I explore this now.
Why Art
Everyone works out what the world means to them, and everyone does it a little differently. That working-out never stops, it involves the whole body rather than the brain alone, and most of it happens below the level anyone notices.
The process itself cannot be watched directly. What can be examined is what comes out of it: what a person says, writes, makes or builds. Artists have a word for the individual signature that builds up across someone’s work over years. They call it voice. Everyone has one, whether or not they ever make art.
Voice matters here because it is where an invisible process leaves something visible, and because it develops over time, which means it holds evidence of how it came to be. Fine art is where this becomes most observable, a crossroads where many essential elements converge at maximum integration.
So the art is not an illustration of the research. It is where the research can be seen.
A theory is bound by the language and the moment it is written in. It reduces complexity in order to say something, and what it says is shaped by what its own era is able to hear. Art is bound too, and differently, and it can hold what a theory has to leave out. We see through a glass darkly. Working in both is how I keep the limits of each in view, and the humility that stewardship requires begins there.
Why Divergence
Divergence names three structural forms of human existence: Sex Divergence, Neurodevelopmental Divergence, and Love Divergence. They arise from different substrates of human life, and each shapes how a person develops, relates, and participates in the world. They are fundamental variations in how human existence is organized rather than preferences, surface identities, or deviations from a norm.
Where ordinary conditions do not hold, the workings are harder to overlook. Divergence supplies exactly that. Each divergence functions as an event horizon at which the social construct of “normal” breaks down and real human variation becomes visible. When divergence is integrated rather than masked, the individual, their community, and the larger ecosystem all benefit.
This is why the work is here and not only in a laboratory. My work is itself an event horizon.
Why Itself
Why is inspiration before any action, navigational alignment during, and reflection after. It is the iterative flow of meaning-making in the human being. And when used appropriately it is a tool that reveals our purpose, the value of our contribution.