Memento Mori - Lee Patrick Wilson

Psalms 90:10 Our days may come to 70 years or 80 if our strength endures; yet the best part of them are trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass and we fly away.

Death is a daunting topic and yet is an inevitable part of life. We need to reflect on our own mortality throughout our lives to allow us to embrace the life we and all those sharing our time & planet with live sense & experience, this spectacular miraculous existence which is but a brief flash of light in a vast and unknowable realm which is the Cosmos.

Life should be appreciated for the wonder that it is, every day by everyone and yet due to the constraints and pressures of modern society we all too often lose sight of our brilliance, from the lands we live to the people we are & meet, the beauty around us, the rise of the sun, the light of the day, the sunsets and night skies adorned with light memories of distant times past, the brief period of time we are here for should never be wasted and yet so often is by so many of us.

Three score and 10 years is the genetic lifespan of a human being, this isn't an exact science and some painfully & mournfully fall far short of this period, others live far beyond this withstanding loss and decay, still since the time of the Bible we have established this to be our life span, 70 years. It is said that we each face two deaths, the first & most direct at the point we pass from this life, the second when all living memory of us is at an end. There is certainly a truth to this thought and yet one could consider there to be more possibilities to explore; Do we every truly die whilst humanity lives?

We are a result of and part of the Cosmos and its universal energy, which we barely understand and in the scheme of modern science and time, have only made the first steps in exploration of the dimensions of existence, how do we truly know what awaits us beyond the veil of death? This question is fundamental to humanity and has been asked for countless generations leading back to the first of humans. The question inspires religions, cultures and ancient origin stories the world over across all of humanity, in all corners of the world and through all time passed, as we try and fathom out where we came from and ultimately where we go to after the last breath.

In a distant future will another of Earths evolutionary species puzzle over our fossilised bodies & societies in the same way we have species & cultures that have preceded us, thus knowledge and memory continues and we live once more as a chapter in the collective knowledge of the planet.

Perhaps the death of the planet is the ultimate ending for us all, unless in the distant future we breach the beyond and colonise space like a seed in the wind we spread and live eternally amongst the stars.

Maybe due to climate change the Earth’s atmosphere and our home changes rapidly and sooner than we think we all perish, yet Voyager 1 continues into the depths of space and time until it is collected by an another intelligent life form millions of light years from now and we live on as a chapter in the memory of a distant species universal history.

If we consider life beyond the singularity of our sensory experience, by means of reproduction do we all beat death if we choose to reproduce, as our energy and the essence of us continues on in our offspring and their offspring and so on.

Maybe it is as simple as when death arrives our experience of this life is over and we cease to exist, although in the complex Cosmos we live in and the miracle of life and self-awareness that we are gifted, is that thought to simple, to basic, to unimaginative, are we setting our sights & thoughts too narrow to short sighted? In the same way when a person is deaf this does not mean there is no sound, when a species has no sight does not mean there is no light and when humanity had no knowledge of distant galaxies or atoms does not mean they do not exist.

One ultimate truth is that life is for the living and to live in constant fear of death will not bring us a full and happy life, as death will hang over us like a shadow limiting our thoughts, actions & experiences and yet without this fear, our primal instinct to survive would be compromised and the probability of us living a long life would be greatly reduced. Which if life extends beyond our singular existence and the purpose of life is not simply living as long a life as humanly possible, instead if life is a collective, a whole, far more complex and intertwined than single consciousness indicates, if all of our species, humanity, our world and all the life forms on it are instead all interconnected, it would explain why as teenagers & young adults we are so reckless, as the goal is reproduction not singular longevity, it would explain why as humans individually we are so destructive and yet to our offspring and the offspring off all species we are so dedicated to ensure survival, so loving and caring.

There was a time in the ancient world & in certain cultures today where culturally humanity did not fear death and instead embraced this as a cycle of birth and re birth and in the same way a person does not fear been born they too should have no fear of dying and yet for modern man it could be reasoned that fear of death has formed, directed & influenced our entire way of life. Throughout the western & eastern worlds of Modern Man for thousands of years "civilising" humanity has been done under the threat & backdrop of corporal punishment & death. Capital Punishment for misdemeanours and not conforming with socials norms, war and famine has subdued our natural spirit, instead of living as what we are, we live in restraint, in bondage, in fear.

There is no one to blame for the scenario we live, it is in our nature to control our environment and inevitably each other, but it is fundamental to our continued existence that we learn from the past, from our species mistakes across all lands and times in the modern era and get back to been a living breathing part of the planet, seeing ourselves as a collective part of the world and all the life forms in it, freeing our fellow man in all lands, to live good, meaningful lives, as a part of the natural world, whilst learning more of truth, goodness & light, exploring the cosmos visually and in person and living sustainable clean lives with technology that enhances and improves our existence, powered from renewable energy that the Earth and Sun provide in abundance, generated without punishment or ill treatment of any person or species in gaining this power.

For this project Memento Mori as I witness the monuments & shrines we leave for the dear departed, I aim to respectfully & delicately record and reveal these monuments through the media of photography, witnessing the veil between the living and the departed. Our homages to the dead which express our deepest intrinsic human feelings & expressions of respect, honour, pain, love, remorse, sorrow, celebration and remembrance of lives gone by to loved ones departed be they friends, family, neighbours or total strangers.

The emotion & empathy that is so clearly felt and projected in times of death, in all cultures, regions and countries, expressed even generations and centuries later, the feelings and connection which we so often struggle to show in life, but collectively feel and willingly express in death.

We see signs of loss and acknowledgement of those departed on the news, in the papers, on road sides, at beauty spots, graveyards, monuments and architecture.

Where there is death there is monument, there is ceremony, there is pain and anguish but overriding this there is love, love that is so freely and openly shown in the backdrop of loss & death that we create these homages in honour of the living, to life, to love and memory of our existence, of our humanity.

I hope you can witness this journey with me and help us all to remember how fragile and miraculous our existence is, not to make us feel gloom, remorse or fear but to encourage us to embrace the life we have and all live, to make our treatment of ourselves & others better whilst they are living. I hope the project can inspire anyone on their darkest day, never to give in, never to give up on life as hard times will not last forever and neither do we, so let us remember to fight for life, to appreciate the simple things that the Cosmos offers us daily and in return on our best day and good times if we can share this with others then do so, if we can reach a hand out to another in need and make their existence better, even by the most simple gesture of kindness then never hesitate to do so. As we clearly make effort for remembrance to the departed and long shall we continue to, but let these memorials inspire us to treat the living better along with remembering the dead.