Dedication to Nichola Taylor
Her Soul Departs to be with God after All Saint's Day, Her Liminal and Creative Legacy Lives On
A dedication to the late Nichola Taylor, without whom I would have been creatively unable to produce my latest work. May her soul rest and live on forever in Heaven in peace with God and Jesus Christ.
There are souls who move through this world not as fixed points, but as quantum possibilities—artists, poets, wanderers in the liminal spaces between meaning and mystery. Nichola was one of these.
She spoke in riddles, not to obscure, but to reveal—to gesture toward truths too layered for plain speech. She cooked with the same intuition she painted with: a kind of somatic wisdom, a fluency in color, flavor, and feeling. She was an amphibian spirit, equally at home in the depths of emotion and the light of creation.
We met through Ben—a bridge between worlds, a quantum wizard who helped measure the unseen. And perhaps it’s no accident that Nichola, in her own way, also moved among particles—the subtle, fleeting traces of beauty and pain that linger long after a life has been observed, or a spirit has passed from view.
Her death, too soon, left a son. A story unfinished, a recipe half-composed, a canvas waiting for the next brushstroke. I couldn’t attend the funeral—not for lack of love, but because some truths are too heavy to hold in daylight. Some questions refuse to be answered, and some visitations come not in person, but in dreams, in memory, in the quiet resonance of a life that touched mine.
On All Saints’ Day—when the veil thins and the harvest of souls is gathered—it feels right to remember her. Not as a saint, but as a luminous, complicated, brilliant being: a woman who danced with chaos and creation, who suffered and loved in equal measure, and whose spirit now visits like a gentle perturbation in the field of my awareness.
In the language of my own work, she exists now in a state of zero free action—no longer bound by time, substance, or sorrow. Perhaps she is a somatic operator in the unseen—a third eye still watching, still painting, still speaking in poetry only the heart can decipher.
Wherever she is, may her memory be a recoherence environment—a protected space where her essence remains vivid, vibrant, and true.
For Nichola—artist, chef, poet, mother, friend.
May her poetry and loving kindness live on in those who loved her.
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
— Ecclesiastes 3:11 (KJV)