A cove provides shelter. You rise before the dawn, ready to meet who you're meant to meet. In Orphalese, the people were a single receptive mind. It cannot be so here in Paveluce, where stories and promises feed on themselves until they become something like religion, never to be questioned.

You walk into the city. The air here is thick with melancholy. There's a lurching, stumbling hangover spread about the populace. Few meet your gaze, those who do don't recognize you, their only method of identification was "the one on the ship."

A growl from your stomach takes you to a red door with gold trim. A hungry beggar will be provided for.

You knock twice. Nothing. You knock thrice more.

Bright light hits your face. You shield your eyes with a forearm as a frail voice apologizes. "Not a wink of sleep tonight," the disheveled woman says as she turns off her flashlight.

Over breakfast she tells you about the spider that ran across her kitchen floor, how it might crawl into her mouth and suffocate her, how she can't sleep until she finds it.

"What do you fear?" she asks. You tell her:

As the mountain casts a shadow over the valley town, as the stone interrupts the river's flow, so too is fear's power over man.

It's a tale of a furious beast with fangs exposed and fur bloodied, passed from mother to child, from brother to brother, until one intrepid soul visits the creature's domain and looks upon a toothless, cowering thing.

Where there is fear, there is no curiosity. Where there is curiosity, there is no fear. Once the hatchling falls from the nest and flaps its wings, it is never again bound to the earth. It has learned to soar.

Simply looking at a fearsome thing saps its power as truths are revealed, knowledge is gained, action is inspired.

And so the fearless inherit the power held by the once-feared, as they know to challenge the stories told by their minds and by their companions.

They show others the shadows on the cave walls and the vulture's refusal to spar with the living, and the community grows in truth and in love and in power. For two who act together without fear may topple the tyrant king, and twenty who act together without fear may topple the monarchy.

You clear your throat. You see a bit of motion. You take the flashlight, you turn it on, and you keep it pointed on the creature darting to and fro.

Thwack! Your host stomps the spider with her cane. Visible relief cascades down her face. Bolstered by the imminent consummation of her tiredness, she ushers you out before you can properly thank her for breakfast.

Your feet take you where they may. You walk among an enclave of people as they chat and hurry and sell and fret and wonder. You feel them all, you experience a life in the span of a passing glance, in the lilt of a voice, in a lean against a bronze statue. Just as soon, you're walking alone on a dirt path splitting a wide stretch of grass.

"It's Seer!" you hear faintly from a cluster of trees.

This unsettles you. It's not your fate to be known, to be identified. You look that way. A lanky man in a tree smiles and waves you over. As you walk, you feel a wobbling, an internal instability. You see... something, but the shape of what's to come is fuzzy and amorphous, its edges lack definition.

"It's here!" the man repeats as he swings down from the tree. His long silver hair lands in front of his face. "You're right on time!" He throws an arm over your shoulder and points to a pair of younger men maneuvering a large green sprout and its root system from a pot into a hole surrounded by smaller sprouts. As the large sprout thuds into the ground, you experience a feeling of weightlessness for just a moment, but it's so intense that you steady your feet against the ground.

"You do the honors!" The man shoves a watering can into your hand. "Make sure you water the big fella last!"

A fount of yellow mist rises from the large central flower. The three men all high-five each other and kick their feet up and jump around the flowerbox. You are stone still, mouth agape, and your tongue feels like a branding iron freshly removed from burning coals.

"What do you need to say?" the lanky man asks you, still dancing.

Everything is freely chosen.

The discomfort in your mouth is gone.

As salmon swim upstream and brown bears tuck away for the winter, so too does man have a natural behavior. It is to follow their north star. Not so insistently that they walk off of the cliffside, nor so casually that they lose track of its spot in the sky. And as each man may be the only one who can see their north star, it is their freely chosen duty to follow it, come what may.

This world has so many false guides, flashy and noisy distractions which cause so many to look down from the heavens and submerge themselves among the ever-roiling tides. And so those who see their north star remind the others through their upturned gaze: You can see too, when you remember who you are.

"That's cool," says one of the younger men. The three of them are laying around the flowerbox. You join them. "Can we talk about God now?"

The other young man sits up. "I was just thinking about that. I feel like God is like the ocean. Sometimes calm or busy on the surface, but always having an unfathomable depth."

"Hmmm," says the first man. "I was thinking that God is more like a ship with tons of little parts. None on their own are strictly essential, but all put together, there's the unmistakable thing."

"Ha," says the older lanky man, eyes transfixed on the only cloud rolling by. "I'd suspected that the person who was supposed to be on the ship last night could be God. I've heard some stories."

He suddenly sits up, hugging a knee, and looks at you. "What is God to you?"

You sit with the question for three full breaths, then you grab a twig in the dirt nearby and draw three symbols:

As the three men debate the meaning of your answer, you notice a feeling of saturation from the megaflower's yellow mist. You're on your feet, you're back on the dirt trail. You notice your enjoyment of this heightened bodymind state, a willful surrender of your autonomy to the foreign substance that is temporarily a part of you, a relinquishing. It feels good to let go.

Minutes and hours pass and still the megaflower's mist dances within you. You're at the shore, the sun is setting, and a cheer like a symphony of fireworks erupts a few hundred yards from you. A crowd around a bonfire. You join them. Closer to the burning pyre, you see that the fuel is the ship that carried you here, torn down to its planks and beams.

"Cheers!", yells a burly woman, raising a wooden cup, "to the Seer! Let's down our drink like that lunatic guzzled the ocean last night!" A chorus of cheers and chugging.

"I can't blame 'em," rose a voice above the others, a crazed-looking man. "I might've chosen drowning too over what we had in mind." He meets your gaze. "You look like you've got something to say." He offers you a bottle. "Need some liquid courage?"

You decline and express a wish to enjoy the merriment. Stories and songs and drinking games guide everyone into the night, the bonfire keeps apace. Your quiet contentment is deafeningly loud. The burly woman demands that you speak. You're hoisted to your feet atop one of the logs, and you meet the dozens of hazy, peaceful stares.

Of what use is the harvest if one eats alone? Or the play without an audience? Or the song without a listener? Life breathes through connections.

Connection begins from life's first breaths when mother and child gaze into each other's eyes. This comforting message exists between any pair, the simple and enduring affirmation: "I see you, and you see me."

And when one lacks the physical proximity to others, connection is still there, felt through the rise and fall of the chest, through the heartbeat, in the universe contained within every cell of the body. Connection to yourself endures.

But one must not let the connection to self replace the nourishment that only comes with connection to the other. One is an apple, the other is an orchard.

One may labor to build a home but have no one to share it with, or learn a foreign language but have no one to speak it with. Instead, first know who to build with, who to speak with, and then act.

One's preferred forms of connection are only known from within. Whether one is primarily a father or a teacher or a wanderer, no form of connection is above or below any other. They are all faces of the diamond. If one shines more than another, it is a trick of the light.

Your words settle into the crowd like a warm blanket. You see the burning mast leaning preciptiously out from the bonfire grasping toward the sky, and you steel yourself for what's to come. For all of the sight afforded by your gift, this is the lone realm that remains obscured to you. There's nothing to fear in this long-awaited reunion. There is simply this moment.

You see a shifting from the foundation of the bonfire you hear the mast groan and you see it fall towards the burly woman. Effortlessly, you sprint towards her and push her out of the way, and you're pinned between the flaming pyre and the sand. Shouts and cries from every direction, a grieving chorus of humanity, but you're at peace, covered by a warm blanket guiding to you rest. Something emerges, obscured at first, but suddenly made clear.

You saw this coming.

Thanks to The Prophet by Khalil Gibran and my Conversation With Myself for inspiring this project. My tweet for this project can be found TBD. Email me at [email protected] if you want me to make a custom web tool for you. I can help you find your breakthrough and you can buy me a coffee.

Some interactions are different on mobile vs. desktop. If you want to reset this page, click here.