The quince bloomed, finally. I was vaguely aware of the extended floweringof the quince in normal years. The memory, like the buds hidden in the rinds of the branch, hovered on the verge of distinction. That is, I seemed to remember that the flowering persisted beyond the opening of the visible buds, but I never quite isolated the tangible memory as a formal thought – the sense that something less than obvious, something embryonic, continued to emerge after the tiny clumps of buds that visibly wintered over had broken into flower.
            The continued flowering is a diminished version of the usual bare-branched display, of course, as the flowers hover near the larger stems, for the most part, and the leaves have emerged, so that the pink seems to line the redundant convolutions of a green cloud. But now the display is all of a piece, a proper presentation for late spring.

           What is consciousness?
            The diminished academic and intellectual response continues to try and equate consciousness with mind. But consciousness witnesses mind. Consciousness cannot be a thought. Consciousness witnesses thought. Consciousness cannot be a perception. Consciousness witnesses perceptions. And finally, consciousness witnesses consciousness. This is not simply a matter of assertion. If it were not true, we could not isolate the experience of thought or the experience of perception.
            All the neurological science in the world will never make a necessary connection between mind and consciousness.We locate this or that kind of thought in this or that part of the brain. And then we theorize about it and call it ‘consciousnesss tudies’. As such, we have yet to begin to study consciousness.
            The fact of self-awareness tells us how it is with evolution. Matter is conscious. Not in the sense that matter will rise up as dolomite or gneiss and begin to speak to us. But consciousness is coeval with material creation. As the classical Greeks perceived, the first essential or primary evolutionary distinction in terms of consciousness is the difference between the immovable organism and the motile. Movement implies choice.
            But, obviously, choice is prior to self-awareness. The biochemist and the microbiologist continue to insist that movement is reactive, a function of chemistry. But if neurological science has yet to begin to link mind to consciousness, nothing in science as it now stands can explain self-awareness. And self-awareness is the apparent ultimate of evolution, in terms of consciousness. Therefore motility is also a prior expression of a final cause – namely, true spontaneity – something that inherently escapes science.
             Chemistry bespeaks the chain of prior causes. But causality itself arises from the analytical and inferential structures of consciousness, the nature of the moment of self-awareness. Nothing else ‘in nature’ is causality itself, all naked. And, in the moment of self-awareness, prior and final cause are simultaneous. When the scientist tries to impute science to the whole of experience, he or she lies.

            So, what is consciousness? The squirrel makes choices. It picks up the acorn, but not the stone that looks like the acorn. But apart from the basic self-assertion of animal vitality, it does not stand up on itshind feet and insist ‘I am’.
            Consciousness does not evolve. Matter evolves toward consciousness.
            Why do scientists go through these contortive maneuvers, rejecting the concept of complexity in order to obviate any progressive necessity in evolution? Could it be denial, and not science?
            And therefore, presumably, the progression of evolution targets self-awareness. The moon is silent. Basalt has very few words for most of us. But when we get to the center of physics, the science of matter, light behaves as if it knows us. And light, as the old mystics suggested, is the touchstone of matter – for the physicist as well. The speed of light, paradoxically, is the absolute of relativity.

            Evolution, then, brings us back to the world. If consciousness is the key, at the beginning and the ending, then the evolutionary cycle itself is the expression of consciousness. The dinosaurs are grand and wonderful errors. But these are a secret mystery written in stone. A billion worlds imply a billion possibilities. But consciousness begins and ends today. This morning, the sun rose. This evening, it sets. The whole world is contained in an instant of self-awareness. Kshana, they said in Sanskrit – a lightning flash.
            In the time of the dinosaurs, perhaps the whole world was a seasonless tropics. But even then, one would presume relative rainy seasons and dry seasons. And sun and moon rose and set; the moon waxed and waned; the stars came out at night.
            Consciousness is the world as the seasons. The year is the grand metaphor for that lightning flash. If we wish to understand the reflective construct, the powers and mysteries of consciousness, few better places to begin than with the annual cycle of nature. This is our evolutionary cohort.
            The practice is older than the druids. The christians adopted it as the liturgical year. The romantics revived it, because the door began to open toward the conscious recognition of the reflective construct – the empirical, the ‘scientific’ recognition of the peculiar substance and dimension of the act of self-awareness, the self-creative moment of our being. And at the center of this self-creation a mysterious and impenetrable ‘otherness’.

            Quince and daffodil – not just flowers in the garden. Because I experience them. And because I cannot separate that experience from any other moment.
            The year turns.

            A child walked hand in hand with his mother. The golden pinfeathers of the leaves overpowered him. He was filled with an indescribable fear. Who can qualify what it was that he was afraid of?