Pre-Birth of sorts

PreIncarnation once again took a very long time to create. Not merely because it coincided with 2023 when my daughter was born, thus giving me little time to work and focus, but also because it’s big, as big as “The Bear” and with a lot more black ink to fill in.

I still haven’t found a consistent black marker to match my Muji pens in terms of color and attributes, so the original still has some visible differences in the tone of black ink used.

PreIncarnation was inspired by a thought I had late in 2023; it’s the idea of how intense the experience of a soul must be before it gets incarnated into our physical world. The idea of going from a space of infinite knowledge, love and wisdom, to a small creature in a womb, not knowing anything. This soul becomes deprived of all its previous memories and understandings, all in the name of reliving more experiences starting from 0. It’s quite a humbling and scary thought. The illustration captures my now familiar “Sprite” about to go into the funnel that would end up on the other side… a physical body. It’s a difficult journey for all souls I suspect. Seeing my daughter in the moment of her birth, it’s quite shocking to see the exhaustion and pain every soul endures the moment of birth.

How daunting it must be, to be in the ether, knowing you have to jump in again and erase nearly all of the knowledge you experienced in the great beyond, whatever that may be. How reductionist is the human experience to what’s beyond the void, why would any soul choose to jump in again? It’s a question I haven’t been able to answer yet. One thought is that the soup of the universe is made up of these experiences… the physical experience is fundamental to the beauty of the infinite, it builds into it. Still, would any soul actually CHOOSE to make such a leap? Over and over?