OUR PERSONAL EVOLUTION is often driven by the strength of emotional gusts that blow into our world. These gusts stir up love, fear, joy, sorrow, excitement, stress…pushing our lives around, at times in undesired or unknown directions. As our focus narrows on what is happening to us, perspective can collapse and isolation set in. A key to overcoming this is discovering that emotional gusts have edges—not just ends but sides as well.

Surrounding the edges of whichever gust we are focusing on lies the rest of life, and the path to life’s potential. By looking around the edges, we can see the contradictions of love and heartbreak, beauty and ugliness, blowing through our lives simultaneously.

Once we identify the edges of our emotional gusts, we can begin to get our hands around them, to push them out of and pull them into our lives. In this way we become much greater forces in our own evolution, stronger gusts in our own lives. To paraphrase many poets, philosophers, and spiritual teachers throughout all time—life becomes less what happens to us, and more what we do with it.

The easiest way to find the borders of our own emotions is to take notice of the commonality of emotional experiences of all people. This helps us look past our current emotional turmoil to the wider perspective of our lives. Observing and identifying with the paths of other people gives us tools to map out the direction of our own evolution.

Connectivity, rather than isolation, helps us find our way around the edge of what is happening to us, to where we want to go. This collection of Visual Poems is fundamentally about connecting along that road.