A Meditation in Verse · Poetry & Philosophy
A book-length meditation on awareness, thought, and what it is to be human — cosmic in reach, intimate in voice. Poetry for the mind turned toward its own light.
Before the world, there is the noticing of it. This book begins there.
The Synopsis
What is it to be awake — not merely alive, but aware that you are alive?
CONSCIOUSNESS is Cynthia Ricks Pollard's most introspective work: a sequence of poems and meditations that move from the firing of a single thought to the vastness of a universe somehow able to know itself. It is philosophy written with a poet's ear, and prayer written for the secular and the searching alike.
Spare, luminous, and quietly radical, the book asks the oldest questions — Who is the "I" that thinks? Where does attention go? — and answers them not with certainty, but with wonder. A companion for anyone learning to pay closer attention to the fact of their own mind.
What the Book Holds
The first miracle — the bare fact of noticing, the light that turns on before any thought arrives.
How a single idea ignites, branches, and becomes the private weather of a human interior.
What we owe one another as fellow minds — tenderness as the natural ethics of attention.
The universe pausing, in us, to behold itself — and the brief, holy span we call a life.
Lines from the Book
"Courage is a person, driven to defend the weak! Willing to contend with persecutors, for the liberation of the meek!"
"I do not deserve His forgiveness and grace! Yet He loves me greatly despite sins I partake. In the kingdom of heaven, for me He has a place... My creator, my redeemer, my God!"
Reader Reflections
"I read it slowly, a poem a morning. It rearranged how I sit with my own mind."
"Equal parts physics and prayer. I've never read anything that made awareness feel so vast and so kind."
"Minimal on the page, immense in the chest. I keep returning to the last poem."
Begin Paying Attention
Available now in ebook and paperback. A slow, luminous read for the searching mind.