How do we get those beautiful gemstones? We risk our lives in deep mines, digging through endless rock and muck, working with gigantic dangerous machines, and still dealing with all the ‘red tape’ back on the surface. It is grueling, demanding, sometimes back-breaking work. Yet we do it because when we find those precious sparkling stones, shaped by untold ages of time and the pressures of a world’s core, somehow all that struggle and uncertainty fades away.
The beauty and triumph makes it all worth while. Their function is their pleasing beauty, and it does work wonders, like the finest, simplest, zero-side-effects medicine. For all the good the exercise of the search and digging, sifting and polishing, cutting and placing does, …beholding their flawless beauty does all the more.
I spent many years joining and exploring just about every in-person and online community I heard about. Just like in any mine, 99% of what I found was ugly, dangerous, worthless; there are monsters out there, many of them, and you can hardly travel anywhere without seeing more of the same. Sometimes I wasn’t able to unearth any beauty at all, and left only with the new knowledge of where not to return. Other times… I found treasures like this world will never believe, and all the hideous views, smells, and words I was exposed to… stopped affecting me as they once had.
One thing I noticed, across all those communities and in-person realms, was that the vast majority of the people there didn’t seem to know their own language, and they didn’t bother to listen, nor to read through messages or posts; they reacted in default negative ways, never logical, and never apologizing for wrongdoing. Their focus was control and abuse, accusing everyone who got near them of all the things only they themselves had done. This was very upsetting and frustrating at first, even baffling, but when it got predictable… I learned to ignore it. Why not? They had demonstrated their inability to read, speak, think, and do the most basic good. All their threats were bluffs, all their lies ineffective. It would have been like trying to have a deep and meaningful conversation with an NPC.
But ignoring the evildoers was never enough; all the other good members of those many communities around the world continued weathering the same senseless treatment I was. Their works were stalled and deleted, along with their other information. Bizarre edits were pressured or forced, warping and tainting them. They were isolated and separated from their friends and loved ones, threatened and then outcast, their sides of the story dismissed, unheard. This was unthinkable… or was it?
It scattered us to the winds every time, and we recovered in the wild, wondering when or if we’d ever meet again. Out there, alone and struggling again, we made do and stabilized ourselves, rebooting our works far from the interference of the mindless swarms. Every so often, a few of us would ‘up periscope’, seeing where the others of our good kind had gone, and if we were close enough to team up in private, sharing resources and ideas the way we always should have.
That whole time, through all those attempts and trials, pushing through nonsense, extracting what little wonders I could find, and doing my best just to survive, I’d always had the instinct to copy down their information, keep in touch with them, and ensure they had the opportunity to carry on their brilliant stories and other works in more appropriate environments that wouldn’t hold them back or down. I acted on that instinct; I did save all their information. It took up a lot of time, and a few peasants here and there mocked this effort, but that didn’t matter. I was saving the good and shedding the bad. The pollution was failing, starting to fade away.
As the years went by, all that saved information; all those extracted gems and crystals, ended up finding their way to Inisfree. There are thousands of them there now, and our great city has only been up and active for the past few years. We project there will be millions over the decades ahead at this rate, possibly a couple billion after several centuries, just as turned out to be the case with Africa, China, and (if you count the undocumented people, such as those of the breakaway civilizations down below the surface) even the Americas. We’ll make sure those numbers only include the perfect this time; no more pollution in every form. My city is.
Incredible and powerful filters have been put in place along our borders, keeping out all the fools and tyrants who once plagued our pure creations, trying their damnedest to twist all into nightmarish abominations; only the good can get anywhere close to us now. And all that time we were forced to spend back out in the wild, at regular intervals between every ‘mining’ and bonding attempt in the cities and other communities? It made us the strongest and most balanced of all; now we can go anywhere beyond our new establishments and survive, the hells and fluctuations having hardened us like the finest metals. We don’t really need the perfect worlds we created anymore; we have them for fun now, not desperation or last resorts. Our forced secessions made us the greatest sovereignties, making compromise or backtracking impossible, even during those times when we thought we had to.
It is the breathing time now; that place ‘in between’… where we relax, recover, recharge, and let all we extracted and amassed… finish crystallizing. We have found what we needed, and have an abundance. Our works are reaching completion, and have a momentum all their own. There is an exponential satisfaction at this point, and only our good things ahead. What troubled us before has since become our laughing stock, easily disregarded, fully forecast and understood.
Sometimes I sneak back into those old places I once dared to explore; I take a look around, and keep finding that the only well-written works and beautiful images there were removed. The bad writing one can barely stumble through is what was allowed to remain. The confused and confusing ‘leaders’ continue their high turnover methods of alienating the finest and most polite. I wonder why, …but I just laugh a bit and shake my head, moving back on. All they ended up doing was not truly thwarting our works, but their own. All they banned, we got to keep and display as signature.
So was it all worth it? Those years of dealing with rude beasts in alien lands where I often starved and many times nearly died, routinely attacked for no reason? Yes. You bet. Because it was a grand adventure of adventures, and what I wanted kept coming back to me no matter what, getting better with every pass, and feeling as pushed away from those ruined realms as I felt. We all gravitated back out and to each other, so the bad actually worked toward the good that whole time, in spite of itself. In a way, …it even helped us extract ourselves, never letting us waste our time and talents anywhere unworthy.
I’m glad we’re not in those gross hells any longer, and grateful for how they ensured we were fully shaped into gemstones all our own. The pressures we faced there made it impossible for anything but our true inner selves to remain. It made it impossible for anything but what we really wanted to continue. If it had been just slightly more tolerable, we wouldn’t have seen and become all we are; we might even still be stuck back in any one of those places, perhaps making excuses for the bad just as the majorities there kept doing.
I no longer waste time trying to wade through the endless mandatory compromises and rewrites of the fallen places. I no longer go out there seeking to communicate, reason, or hopefully extract a handful of whatever is decent. I trust my senses from moment one, extracting myself much sooner when need be. Somehow I just know I’ve already gotten all I was meant to out there, and anything else I am meant to have will come to me, no more mining or copying needed. The basic urge to make backups is still there, and to steer clear of the minds and auras which need more work, but I’ve noticed they are, more and more, starting to right and return themselves. On some level, primitive though they still are, they know that if they carry on as they have, there won’t be any future for them in the grand places.
Everything I envisioned is here, un-watered down; where once there was only, at most, 1% good, there is now 100. Where once battles and escapes took years, they now take seconds. The wise loved ones have rejoined me. We are building up ourselves together, no more delays. It is others who come to me; to us now. That happens when you collect only gems, focusing only on what you love about them, never trying to rebury them in the muck and hells which once finished shaping their sparkling, hardened, mirror-like exteriors.
What will happen to those mines and other pits, now that their gems are all extracted, their ‘veins’ empty and dry? I suspect they will cave in on themselves in time, sealing back up to one day be refilled, worth mining again. I’ve certainly found plenty of ruins, and completely erased sites, during a number of my return reconnaissance patrols. It looks to me like that is what happened there; they were allowed to naturally close and start anew.
I’ve started to feel very happy at such encounters; ruins can just as easily mean that all the good left of its own free will, the forge no longer needed, discarded like the shell of a successfully newborn bird. Sure, study the pieces for a while and make sense of it if you can, but fly on, knowing that the good and worthy have flown on, too. The ruins are a sign of the unnecessary and unstable being returned to the unrecognizable earth, reduced to that which some tried to scare others into being. The ruins are victories of the good, not defeats of accomplished civilizations and societies. The ruins are milestones for very many.
I have extracted so many perfect gems, and seen so many in the making, that I no longer have any desire to search further at all. There is a special gravity to me and Inisfree now; the rest of those who I have been searching for all this time are finding their ways here without needing any messages or assistance. Everything is working out. I know I will be pleased with the results.
