Editorial - Time

Hello, Dear Reader, and welcome to Issue 15 of Consilience.

This issue is devoted to exploring the theme of Time.

Time humbles us. It leaves us twisted in the dancing leaves of fall, pondering the illuminated days of long-ago spring. Time there as we spend time with family. Or when we see our grandparents’ wrinkles, beautiful and whole, silver hair wisping, their eyes and face, and the laugh that once boisterously echoed through a room. When the divorce papers are signed, and the clocks strike the coming hour, that seems more like an eternity than a moment. When we sit in hospice and feel the divide between death and life. As a poet crawls between the idea and the creation. Or as a scientist measures the changing ice of solidified time. A moment giving another chance to be loved and loved again.   

Time is a long-lost friend that has finally returned home. We laugh. We tell stories. We act as if all those decades were nothing but a dream. It is time that separates want and need, hope and longing. It is time that breaks us. It turns the cradle into the casket and the flower to the mycelium fingers, reaching outwards. Time echoes mercilessly through the verses of our minds and the equations of our tired hands as we try to crack the great riddle of its formless forms. 

We sing to it. We dance and pray and cry to it. We fall in love and die to the ebbing flow of change and entropy—doing everything we can to create a smidgen of order amongst its chaos. To write endless pieces about it. We study mathematics, art, and melting clocks; it is the scientist and poet’s greatest obsession. 

Time. Oh, Time. 

In this issue, you will get glimpses of artistic and poetic interpretations of that ever-fleeting, ever-beguiling, ever-flowing thing called time. We hope you take the time to explore the diamonds hidden among the pages.

As ever, we offer heartfelt gratitude for the mindful work of our poets, artists, reviewers, and editors. We of the Consilience Team endeavor in the spirit of creative and intellectual mutualism with our contributors, gaining much through our collaborative engagement. As we continue to nurture a platform that celebrates the liminal spaces between the humanities and the sciences, we invite you to join us as we grow in understanding between disciplines and between people.

The Consilience Team