Today marks the official retirement of the previous giant website which became Inisfree’s vision board; in the morning between snow shoveling, I called in and had the account which included it… shut down, once and for all. It was a bittersweet and stirring moment for me, for I once fought so hard to build, debug, and maintain it. Then, on a call which lasted less than five minutes, it vanished in the blink of an eye, never to return. Years and years of work… voluntarily gone, finally replaced by something even more.
You will not find ruins or evidence of that old site, nor of many of the other previous online places where I built up what you now know of me and my Inisfree. Their legacy will live on, though; it has been metamorphosed, crystallized, and perfected into the current works now available for study here. Everything that started in the place which is now no more… has since been completed, upgraded, and migrated here. There is no more need for that gigantic digital storehouse, so helpful a reference point though it certainly was.
It is good the past has become such a clean slate, too, I feel; imagine how difficult it would be to have to build upon a world and lands still covered in a grid and blanket of Titan-sized structures, vehicles, and discarded scrap. There are megalithic sites out there, but well hidden, overrun by nature, some at the bottom of the seas. Every now and then, you find that a more recent ancient temple was built atop one of their vast foundation stones, but the vast majority are gone, or at least unrecognizable, mistaken for natural landforms in this latest age. Whatever they once did, they no longer do, and the world is a freer, more open, easier to manage place because of it; no towering constructs malfunction in any epic ways, only their products living on.
This current website is much the same; it exists because of the previous great works at those much older sites and services, its foundation being what is left of all of them. The content here became known, amassed, organized, and staged for upload because of how those older constructs grew –and how they were stalled. And now it is the full focus, zero distractions from what came before; what was meant to be has established itself well, and grows with a momentum of its own. If any of those previous endeavors had worked out as intended, the Inisfree, books, site, and expeditions you see today would not have occurred. I am thankful that all their many, many errors, and things needing ironing out, have at last been resolved.
I will remember that last site well, fondly even, and think about all it did for me… and made possible. I let it go, knowing that it is still really here; it evolved into the current one. It was less rebuilt, and more refined. That task that once daunted me… was completed, anyway.
How I tried to fix every little thing there, frustrating and delaying me over so much time… Inisfree grows so much faster and perfectly now, that shell having been shed. It feels like it is skyrocketing now, and, where once there was mostly constructive criticism and negative feedback, there is only the most excited, ever positive.
Farewell, Austin Bunton Design, originally called The New Horizon. Farewell, as well, to its host. Things worked out just as they always should have, and so much better than I had… all that time… assumed.
Hello, new site, host, and Inisfree. Hello, new year. Hello, new me.
As my wise artist friend, Gabriel, likes to say of this wondrous thing: To paradise and beyond.
