I've been thinking a lot about how to flesh out my now pretty ancient Tree of Life blog collection into a fully-fledged book.

The blogs hold a pretty good scaffolding for the direction and destination, but there's seemingly a thousand pages missing.

I have little interest in simply writing a book about evolution. That was done 163 years ago, and done again almost every day since. No, I want to offer something new, unique. digestible and actually connected to my own identity in some way.

I want it to be mine, and I want it to be a unique journey, a new story unfolding, patching the millions of fragments of knowledge together into a single tapestry of inspiration.

And, the fact is, I'm no scientist. Any attempt at taking an academic approach would be tone deaf at best.

But, since the dawn of my awakening, around September 2009, I've been tirelessly curious about the natural world. It occurred to me tonight that it is because of my passion, education and profession in music that I have had this decades-long love and fascination for all things natural.

The lens with which I use to see the world around me was crafted from the life experiences of someone dedicated to the creative arts. I started off adulthood learning, then performing, composing and educating almost 15 years ago; this has surely had an effect on how I view the rest of the world.

I believe this emphasizes a perspective of beauty, emotion, creativity. This is ironic since I don't really consider evolutionary quirks of nature to be 'creative'; I think that is a product of a conscious mind. But I truly, and constantly, appreciate nature's kind of inevitable creativity born from an infinitely complex series of probabilities.

To the average person, a cockroach or a rat is a disgusting infestation that needs to be eradicated. To me, they are the masters of adaptability, not only succeeding in a human-dominated environment, but thriving greater than they ever had before. Greater, one could argue, than humans themselves.

Hell, even mosquitoes are badass. Some in England have actually evolved into a new species, adapting to life in the London Underground, in which there are only humans to feed from. They are genetically distinct from the other local mosquitoes, and the two types can no longer cross-breed.

These underground mosquitoes no longer require blood to prepare their eggs, nor do they need to hibernate in winter. They prefer to go for humans rather than the usual birds, and their mating behaviour is far more successful in confined spaces.

Isn't that incredible? Don't get me wrong, I still vow death and suffering upon any mosquito buzzing around my ear, but as a group, they have an incredible beauty to them just like everything else the world considers ugly.

And yet, when I look at the 'beautiful skylines' of major cities, you know, those buildings designed by conscious minds of artistic architects, I feel a sense of disgust and disgrace. Oh, the irony once again.

Capturing the essence

It is this essence of wonder I want to capture in this upcoming book I may never end up writing. This David Attenborough-esque, child-like fascination that he inspired within me from an early age as he did for so many others worldwide.

But, I still need to capture evolution in my own unique perspective and style. Looking through my blogs on the subject, they actually spell it out for me;

Follow, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, the tree of life, from the very beginning, following step-by-step all the way to humans.

Along the way, I'd like to explore the elements my blogs address, albeit far more fleshed out, with the goal of answering the kind of questions people with wandering minds tend to ask:

• Why are we symmetrical?
• Why are we so lazy and selfish?
• If we evolved, were we ever bacteria?
• Where did bones come from?
• Why did we start reproducing sexually?
• Why do our skeletons look like re-hashed versions of other animal skeletons?
• How did our fish ancestors learn to breath?

And so on.

I want to be very deliberate in the digestibility of this book, to the extent that a child can understand it, and an adult can appreciate it.

Like I said, I've been thinking about the possibility of doing this for a long, long time. Years. But the truth is, it may never happen. this whole blog I'm writing is literally just me thinking out loud.

I always lacked an artist, but with AI I could do some of the heavy lifting, and my fiancé is literally a professional digital artist so I'm in a pretty good starting position.

But I guess we'll see.

I suppose I'm just too checked-out of my current job, having been there for 6 years and the government cracking down on my very right to exist. I'm very much done with it all.

Might just quit one day and become one of those creepy author stereotypes where I write countless books and sell zero. Could be fun. I guess everybody starts thinking about book-writing when they hit a certain age.