Epilogue — Movement I: Observation Before Explanation

Before I could explain what I was seeing, I had to trust the pattern. FVTV began not as a theory, but as an observation—one that kept surviving every explanation I built around it.

There is something true about From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV) that matters more than any individual mechanism laid out in that book: I did not reason my way into it. I observed my way into it.

My clinical observations came first, and they never changed. What changed, over and over again, were the explanations I tried to build around them. The initial draft of FVTV, which in retrospect I prematurely published on my Substack and began offering for preorder, was a book on mineral science centered on what I now think of as Theory 1.0: the idea that Shimanishi’s mineral extract replenished major and trace minerals that many people were no longer getting in their diets. But every time I tried to complete a final pass, I found myself pulling on another thread. MB would raise some new question about minerals, water, or mechanism, and my understanding would deepen again.

Then came Theory 2.0, which I called the Mineral Spectrum Collapse Theory. I began to suspect that the as-yet-unstudied ultratrace and rare-earth elements in soils might play critical roles in the large proportion of enzymes that have yet to be identified or studied, and that these rare minerals had suffered a disproportionate decline, leaving modern nutrition even more impoverished than we had understood. Shimanishi’s extract, in that framing, looked like an unusually bioavailable source of the rarest minerals capable of restoring hypofunctioning or dormant enzymes.

Then, as I dug further into agricultural science, I arrived at yet another model: Theory 3.0, the Carbon Collapse Theory, in which mineral-water dynamics in soil altered carbon availability to plants through complex biochemical pathways.

As I tried to finish that, several insights aligned, and MB and I arrived at what became the Geohydrological Shift Theory. Then, during my sustained study of ancient texts, a few previously unconnected observations clicked, and we arrived at the Rock–Water Circuit Theory. The fact that the latter theory had emerged, in part, from insights recorded in texts from antiquity told me that it did not belong inside FVTV and needed to become its own book.

The point of that progression is simple: each time I replaced a theory, it was not because the observation failed. It was because the explanation did. The thing I was seeing—in biology, in plants, in water, and in the lived results of the mineral protocols I was using—never stopped being real. What kept changing was my language for it and the scientific frame I was trying to place around it.