I told him “I have lost my work. I have worked so ceaselessly and it all amounted to nothing! In all my efforts for a promotion, in the end, a machine came and replaced all that I do.”

“And what will you do now?” My father replied.

I told him I did not know. “Perhaps it does not matter what I do. If at any given moment, all my efforts could be in vain as these new technologies arrive, why even try at all? Would my efforts not be a fool’s gamble?”

“Every day I water my garden, there is a chance the bugs and pests come crawling onto my plants. The tomatoes of my garden they may eat. So for the potatoes and carrots. Despite this I still water them, every day without fail. If I had not, would we not starve?” My father responded.

“But you would see the bugs coming. You would know your garden is dying before it dies.” I said, “Your garden is not the same as my work! I worked flawlessly and sacrificially, in the end, it still amounted to nothing!”

“And so, will you never pour again?” My father asked, “Will you never lay your heart out into your passions? Will you cease to work for the rest of your life?”

“I do not know.” I responded, “Why shall I work so tirelessly, if it may bear no fruit?”

“Rubbish!” my father said, “If I plant tomatoes in this garden of mine, and the beetles come to chew on the fruit, shall I abandon it all together and say I have no fruit? Does the tomato have no seeds that may bear newer fruit again?”

“I am tired, father! I do not want to plant again!” I told him.

“Then perish! If It were I who had that mentality, what would the dinner you ate last night have been if not nothing? I have grown thousands of fruits and vegetables since you were a child, of these thousands, many of them never reached either your or my plate.”

I remained silent.

“Go rest your eyes. Go weep into your pillow if you must. Grieve the work you have lost, but know it is not in vain. There will be fruit you water that only returns nothing but a seed. There will be fruit you water in which you can enjoy. That is the nature of life! It is not every failure that must haunt you, and not every loss that must restrict you. Rest your mind, when you come to wake, sit with me in the dining room. We shall eat our meal for the day. Soon you will find new work.”

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After the mourning of the Zeresimites had ended, Asa and his newfound followers took up the road once more, and in a handful of days they came at last to the gates of Tronicia -- the city of thrones, risen from the waters of Lake Tronia, where the court of powers sat, and where the leaders of Ga’hala, Carmenedei, Cherubia, Alayad, Gan’ir and Delphisia were bound together by treaty and by war alike.

None of them had seen a city such as this. Its bridges arched white between islands of stone and glass. Its buildings stood far taller than any building or statue in Ga’hala. The city itself rose in rings, each separated by thin canals, each ring climbing higher than the one before it, until at the centre sat a single isle, joined to the rest by four bridges. There stood the Palaces of Authority, the seat of power over all the Occidental nations. Beyond it rang the sound of hammers and foundries, carrying the hum of metal and flame across the city, while the quiet melody of boats along the waters followed behind.

For four days they rested within its walls, gathering bread and cheese for the road ahead. In those four days, they did what good they could for the laypeople of the outermost ring. Word of their kindness spread through the fifth ring, and by the third day, Asa and his men were known throughout it. When people asked Asa his name, he would proclaim, “I am the Voice of Man!”

By the fourth evening, a small crowd had begun to follow them, simply to watch what Asa and his men would do next, what he would preach, and what he would condemn. The crowds of Tronicia were truly fascinated by the teachings of Asa. But it was on the fifth day that the city changed beneath them.

Early on the morning of the fifth day, protestors rushed into the second and third rings of Tronicia, throwing stones and shouting. A councilman named Aurin -- known across Tronicia for demanding openly that the Typhosian schools and teachings be reformed throughout the Occidental nations -- had disappeared two weeks before, and no word of him had been found since. The Palaces of Authority claimed to know nothing of his fate, and claimed no success in their search, but the people did not believe them. Aurin had taught that the Typhosian curriculum was wrong to name some souls lesser in the eyes of Maiara, and in this he had defended the dignity of the laypeople.

Once the authorities and guardsmen had been notified, the rioters fled at sunrise into the fifth ring, hiding themselves among the common people and stripping off any garment that marked them apart. By midday, the Palaces of Authority had sent their elite guard to root out the rioters, but this only stirred greater unrest among the laypeople, until by evening they, too, had risen in riot.

Asa stood at the edge of the crowd when the first stone was thrown. Alongside the three men he had gathered, he watched as the guards and the laypeople broke into a brawl. He watched the armored guards wield their clubs against laypeople who had nothing to throw back but rotten fruit and stones. He watched a club strike a man’s head and throw him into the canal, where he lay without moving. He heard a woman scream his name.

Asa did not push through the crowd. Instead he walked toward a single officer whose armor was painted gold, where all the others wore silver. The officer held a lance taller than Idajo himself, yet Asa was not afraid.

“Is it you? Are you in command of this?” Asa asked boldly.

“I am,” the man answered. “Of all men on this ring, there is none greater than I. I am Kleos, Elite of Tronicia.” The answer struck fear into the faces of Bari, Idajo, and Ignisius, but Asa remained unafraid.

“Then I ask you, Kleos -- what has this crowd done, that blood should be the price? Who made you the judge of their guilt?” Asa questioned.

Kleos looked at him properly for the first time, taking in the plain, travel-worn robes he wore. Something like amusement crossed his face, though his helm revealed nothing but the look in his eyes. “And who are you, that I should answer to your questioning? What are you -- some lowly scholar?”

“He is the Voice of Man!” people in the crowd began to shout, for his boldness before the Elite Guard had quieted the fighting and turned every eye toward him.

“Why do they defend you? You bear no scratch, no wound, no mark upon you. Is this your doing? Are you the one behind it?” Kleos said, gripping his lance and furrowing his brow. Idajo and Bari reached for the swords at their hips, but Asa stopped them.

“I am nothing but a new arrival who carries Maiara’s favor. I have spent five days in the third ring aiding those in need -- those you abandoned! How dare you accuse me! Is this bloodshed not the failure of your own authority?” Asa answered sharply. Kleos shifted his stance as the crowd’s chanting rose with every word Asa spoke. He looked around and saw the laypeople cheering against him, and it drove him to anger.

“Failure?” Kleos repeated. “You call five days of almsgiving in the outermost ring authority? You call the defense of this city’s order a failure? Tell me, Voice of Man, who are you to defy the divine order that man must follow? No one beyond the walls of Tronicia knows the teachings of the Order of Sorrows as we do. Whatever wandering scholar you are, the teaching you carry falls short of what I have known!”

“What nonsense is this! Where did you learn that being Tronician brings you closer to Maiara? Do you believe the Palaces that sent you are anything more than the mortal works of man? Do you not know the fullness of Maiara? Do you not know that her wisdom is greater than any single man, or any single nation?”

“Silence your foolishness!” Kleos argued. “How dare you question Tronicia and its knowledge! If not for us, would this whole nation not fall? When every town and city is breached by the Mughtasib, are we not the ones who come to their defense? Did we not gather the brightest minds of every city and every town, and unite our wisdom in reverence for Maiara and her grace?”

“Is it power that makes a thing righteous--” Asa began, but Kleos cut him off.

“Enough! Take him and his men! Whoever this Voice of Man claims to be, he is nothing but a nuisance among us. Take him from this lake and hold him in the gaols of the southern bay.”

Before the fifth ring had finished its rioting, Asa, Idajo, Bari, and Ignisius were already carried off to the gaols of the southern bay. They remained there three days before Kleos himself came to their cell, still wearing his gold-painted armor, though he had removed his helm, revealing the face of a young man.

“Denounce yourself!” Kleos said. “Proclaim yourself a fraud! Proclaim that you and your followers are nothing but unruly travelers!”

Asa said nothing, and neither did the three behind him.

“Denounce yourself!” Kleos said again. “Or you will learn what it means to be forgotten in a place like this.” He pointed to the corner of the cell, where a skeleton lay still, draped in rotted cloth.

Asa looked at the skeleton plainly, then returned his gaze to Kleos, unmoved, as though Kleos had said nothing at all. A third time Kleos demanded an answer, his fury and impatience growing. Again Asa answered him only with silence, and it was this silence that finally broke something in him.

“Then you will rot here believing yourself righteous! I will sleep soundly while you and your men wither away! What a foolish end for the so-called Voice of Man!”

It was only then that Asa spoke. When his voice came, it was not the voice he had used with Idajo in the gaol, nor the voice he had used with Bari in the den, nor even the voice he had raised against Ignisius beneath the hill of Zeresimus. The moment he began to speak, Idajo, Bari, and Ignisius fell to their knees and reached for their journals, ready to record the next great lesson of Asa -- the parable of the bridge builders.

“There were once two men who each built a bridge across the same river, in the same season, using timber the forest had given them. When the horses and carriages came to cross, both bridges collapsed. The first builder went down to his ruin and sat with it three days and three nights. On the fourth morning, he understood his folly, and he built a new bridge of cobble and limestone.

But the second builder went down to his own ruin and wept only for what he had lost. ‘This forest has failed me!’ he cried, and he sent for costlier timber from a forest farther over the horizon. He built his bridge again, taller this time, adorned with arches and carvings, so that travelers from other towns would come to admire it before they had even crossed it.

When the next great load came -- the same horses, the same carriages -- they crossed the limestone bridge without failing, and the people of the town rejoiced. But when they came to the wooden bridge, it collapsed at once, just as it had before.”

“Leave us three days!” Asa demanded. “Abandon us, leave us to rot! On the fourth day, tell me why this bridge collapsed, and I will call myself the Voice of Man no longer!”

Kleos accepted the terms and departed from the gaols for three days, leaving them without food and only water to share between the four of them. On the fourth morning, Kleos returned, ready to face Asa.

“Your story is plain enough! He was foolish to use wood again. Would you have your three men sit in filth just so I might solve some riddle? Denounce your ways, you Voice of Fools and Paupers!”

“May I ask you one more question?” Asa said, and Kleos nodded, his brow furrowed.

“So you agree his knowledge was flawed?” Asa asked, and Kleos nodded again.

“Then tell me this: was his first attempt wrong? Was he foolish to have once learned that wood could raise a bridge?”

“No,” Kleos said.

“So his wisdom was once true, but not absolute?”

“No.”

“Then now that you agree his first knowledge was true, yet not absolute, as his second attempt revealed to him -- explain to me how your ways are like the stone builder, and not like the other. Do that, and I will call myself the Voice of Fools and Paupers.”

Kleos stood in silence for many minutes. Each time he began to speak, he fell back into the silence of his confusion. As he stood there, Asa continued.

“You cannot, can you? How many wooden bridges have you built between man and Maiara? When they have all fallen, you have whipped and clubbed the paupers of Tronicia for falling into the water and crawling back to the shore they came from. And when I, the Voice of Man, came to tell you of your failure, you threw me into the gaols -- where even now you go on building your bridges of wood.” Asa turned and sat back down where he had been before Kleos arrived.

After this, Kleos left the gaols. Asa and the three men who followed him remained there ten more days. On the afternoon of the tenth day, another guard set them free. When they entered the outermost ring of Tronicia, the poor laypeople cheered and threw a feast for them in their one tavern. They fed Asa and his three with wine, honey, and Tronician fish, celebrating late into the evening. It was that evening that Kleos returned to the tavern, and the room fell silent. He stood before all the laypeople, bare-handed, without his armor.

“Asa!” Kleos called. “I have heard you! I have heard you, Voice of Man! I will build no more bridges of wood! Tell me -- where do I find stone?”

The laypeople sat tense, ready to defend themselves. Many had their hands on their swords; some had their hands on the knives they had used to cut their fish. Asa raised his hand, and his men raised theirs as well, and the hands of the laypeople stilled.

“You will find it by following me,” Asa answered. “Kleos, Elite Guard of Tronicia -- that was never truly your name.”

“Then what is?” Kleos asked.

“Kleos of Sera,” Asa said, and Kleos’s eyes went wide.

“Sera?” he asked.

Asa raised his wine into the air, looking at Kleos slowly, without conviction in his gaze for the first time.

“You are...” Kleos said in awe, “the Son of Thera?”

Asa’s three raised their cups in the air, calling the laypeople of the tavern to join them, and together they all began to chant:

“The Voice of Man!”

From that day, it was known that Kleos had left the elite guard to follow Asa, Bari, Idajo, and Ignisius. And it was then that the Palaces of Authority took great notice of Asa in Tronicia, learning how one of their most faithful guards had left them in submission to him. The Voice of Man, and his few, now called his “passions,” took to the roads once more, to return to the land where his mother was born: Carmenedei.

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Tronicia was the newest of the great cities, raised by the Occidental nations upon the waters of Lake Tronia to house the court of powers, where the leaders and kings of Ga’hala, Carmenedei, Cherubia, Alayad, Gan’ir, and Delphisia were bound by treaty and war alike. It was on the road toward this city, some day short of its gates, that Asa and the twins came upon a smaller town they had not been told to expect.

They smelled it before they saw it. The people of the town were dying. There were sickly elders passing on the road, as there were children crying blood, cradled in their mothers’ arms. It was a sight that truly disturbed Asa and the twins, witnessing such intense struggle among the people. At the crown of this town stood a statue set upon a hill, depicting a four-armed, faceless man with an eye set amid his torso. Zeresimus, the god the people called their own. And beneath this hill, fever moved through the houses like a violent wind, sweeping up the people and leaving them dead in its wake.

A man in clerical robes stood at the edge of town, watching from a cave with a single torch, a length of cloth covering its entrance. His arms were folded as he watched the houses from a distance. As Asa and the twins looked on from afar, they watched a frail mother come to him, her daughter in her arms, no older than a year, begging the man to help them. They watched her beg him, “Please!” They watched her kneel before him, and they watched him send her away. She sat beneath a tree outside the cave, weeping as she held her child. It was from there that Asa approached her.

“What were you told?” Asa asked her, kneeling so that he was level with the child in her arms. He looked down upon the young girl, sleeping peacefully until those moments were plagued with short, fragile coughs — a kind an infant should not know, a kind that brought blood from her lungs, trickling down her cheek.

The woman kept her eyes on her child, not bothering to look at Asa’s face. “He says he will not touch her! He is a cruel man! The people of this town know he is a healer! We have seen sickly travellers and passers-by come to his cave and receive treatment! I have seen with my own eyes him care for a family passing through to Ga’hala! The mother was ill. He carried her into his cave and gathered from the land to heal her! He sent the father and son into the town, and soon they fell ill too, and he healed them as well! But after a few weeks, whatever illness had found its way among his own people spread. Within two weeks, we came to him, and he sent us all away! Six of us have died! Two were babies! My child, my Aemelia — she will surely be next!”

Asa said nothing to her at first, his face painted with fury. He drew a cloth from his bag, kissed it, and wiped first the mother’s cheek, then the daughter’s. Without a word, he rose from the ground and walked toward the cave, the twins following him.

The man in clerical clothing did not move from where he stood, though he watched them come the whole distance.

“You are a physician,” Asa said, his temper plain. It was not a question. The satchel at the man’s hip, marked with herbs and instruments, said as much on its own.

“That I am,” he said.

“On what ground do you permit six people to perish? On what ground do you allow a seventh — a baby no larger than your palm — to perish in your line of sight? What wickedness is this?” Asa snapped.

“Wickedness! Is it not these people who serve false gods? Is it not these people who give Zeresimus the glory, when it should be Maiara’s? What do you know of wickedness, stranger? What do you know of Maiara, that you would think it is not wickedness I allow to perish—”

“Silence!” Asa shouted. “How dare you speak Maiara’s name into this! There is no mandate, no authority, no power by which you could ever determine one’s fate! This is not the work of Maiara! So you have been blessed with the capacity to heal, and you have left it undone? Is that her grace?”

“Watch how you speak to me! You do not know me! I am Ignisius, of Tronicia’s own college of medicine! There is no city as knowledgeable! I know Maiara as greatly as I know medicine!” Ignisius responded.

He pointed toward the town. “I have offered them Maiara’s name! I have called upon her, telling them to renounce the false creator on that hill! When they walk within Maiara’s grace, I will treat every fever in this town before the sun fully sets. If they will not, and they cling to Zeresimus even as he lets them die around them, I will not spend these hands healing those who uphold the dismissal of the truth. The lie of Zeresimus shall die with them!”

“So to prove your god is greater than theirs, you allow them to perish?” Bari asked in disgust.

“I let them choose,” Ignisius said. “I have not withheld mercy. I have told them mercy herself, Maiara, exists. They have refused her on their own terms. I have no duty to these people.”

“Terms?” Asa turned the word over, his anger only growing. In all the time the twins had spent with him, they had never seen Asa so infuriated. “When you were a child in Tronicia, and you were ill, did some physician stand over your fevered bed and demand your confession before he would help you?”

“No. All of Tronicia follows—”

“Did you declare it yourself? Or were you born to a place that had already declared it for you?” Asa said, with no hesitation.

“I... it was declared for me, but—”

“So if it was declared for you, and you received healing regardless, why can it not be declared for them?” Asa questioned.

“Because they would not believe! They would only be healed to follow a false god, and preach his name after! I am preserving Maiara by—”

“Silence! You do not preserve Maiara!” Asa said. “Is she some finite flame, competing for air among others? Is she not eternal? Before we were, she was. After we are, she will be. What nonsensical teaching do you follow, that sees this as just? Come, stand before me. Exit that cave. You will hear the words I have to tell you — if you truly wish to know the fullness of Maiara.”

Ignisius, struggling to defend himself, fell silent for a few moments, then walked forward and sat before Asa. Bari and Idajo sat as well, Asa standing between the three of them.

“Bari! Idajo! Hear these words too!” Asa said, and began his third parable — the parable of the author.

“Ignisius,” Asa said, “if a man sets pen to page and imagines a story, is each character within it, down to the least of them, not truly an expression of the one who dreamed him? Does the character’s knowledge of his author change whether he was written by her hand?”

Ignisius said nothing, as the twins began writing down Asa’s words. As time passed, they found themselves drawn wholly into his teaching.

“Suppose a character in that story never learns his author’s name. He lives his whole imagined life never once looking up from the page to ask who moved the hand that gave him a mouth to speak and a heart to feel. Does his ignorance unmake her authorship? Does it undo the truth that in his very heart burns the same childlike flame that first stirred her imagination — the flame that drove her to create him at all? Does his failure to recognise her make him any less her creation?”

“It is not the same!” Ignisius tried to argue. “A story is not a soul! A character does not choose to worship falsely!”

“Is it not the same?” Asa answered swiftly. “Are you, Ignisius, scholar of medicine, not bound by a story of your own? Is the story of your soul not born of Maiara’s ever-giving grace? So it is you, who already has this truth within you, who fails to recognise it in another? Tell me — what is the difference between you and this woman beneath the tree, if not the story each of you was born into? You did not earn your faith. It was given to you.”

Ignisius opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“Tell me — whose hand do you believe shaped the child dying beneath that tree? Do you believe it was Zeresimus who wrote her into being? Or do you believe, as you claim to, that it was Maiara’s own grief that gave shape to all life, before any hill anywhere ever bore a statue upon it?” Asa did not wait for an answer. “If you believe the second, Ignisius, then you have failed. You have failed to live within Maiara’s grace, and you have failed to give it. What was given to you freely, you have not given to others. You have sat like a sloth in its tree, and neglected her will. Is it for titles that you have neglected to see her flame in every living thing? Is this world not her canvas, on which she paints all life? Can you truly not see that?”

The town beyond had gone quiet. The only sounds left were the trees moving in the wind, and the weeping mother’s cry. Ignisius sat in silence, overwhelmed.

“You and every soul in that town are already bound,” Asa said, calmer now, but no less convicted, “through the very hand that authored you both. You have refused to see her flame living in people who have not yet learned to name her — the same flame that dwells in you. The same flame Maiara set burning in every living soul, in that child as much as in you, deserves to burn. Ignisius, if you cannot see that flame in all life, you do not see what Maiara wills you to see. And if that flame withers while you hold the very hands that could have shielded it from the wind, you have not acted as she has willed you to act.”

When the speech ended, Bari and Idajo began to clap, before Asa raised his hand for them to stop. He turned and pointed at Ignisius, who sat now in absolute silence, looking down in shame. Asa spoke one final sentence to him.

“I have known your story since the moment you spoke your name to me. Ignisius — once of Sera, twice of Tronicia.”

Ignisius looked up suddenly, as did Bari and Idajo.

“This is not the life you were commanded to live. Go into the town, and heal all who are ill. Do not leave this place until every man and every woman, every child and every elder, is well again. When you have done this, you will follow me, and seek repentance for the six flames you allowed to be extinguished.”

Asa and the twins waited a month in the town of the Zeresimites, helping where they could while Ignisius healed the sick. When Ignisius had done all that he could, Asa, he, and the twins took twenty-one days to mourn the six Zeresimites who had died. Only then did they continue on their journey, toward Tronicia.

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When Idajo was released from the gaols, he immediately made his way to the home of Thera and Mishil, as Asa had commanded. It was on that morning that he was reunited with Asa once again, and they shared bread and honey in remembrance of the gaol cells.

After a few hours, before Asa’s parents returned home, they left the compound and began making their way to Bari. Idajo led Asa through the streets of the Lower East until they came upon a patch of thatch laid across the floor in the corner of an alley. Moving the thatch revealed a cellar door, upon which Idajo made a distinct knocking sound, banging in a short and rhythmic burst.

The doors opened, revealing a pair of young men who let Idajo pass without a word. But when Asa tried to step inside, they attempted to push him out. Idajo stopped them and commanded that they let him enter.

The den within was dim, and it was surrounded by many stolen goods: clothes, treasures, tools, even pans and pots. The smoke of a few dimly lit torches filled the room before escaping through a small window, which also cast its light upon the chair before it.

It was the chair upon which Bari sat in the center of the room, the chair that had once belonged to his brother. He did not rise when they entered the den.

“So,” Bari said. “You have come home, with a friend, I see.”

“Bari! I have come—”

“Who is this man? Why is it that you bring such a tan man among us? Have you forgotten whom this gang you assembled serves?” Bari cut in before Idajo could speak. “The gaol cells have not been kind to you, brother. Will you escort this man from here before we speak?”

“He is no stranger, Bari!” Idajo responded. “My brother, listen to me. This is the Son of Thera!”

A brief moment of confusion flashed across Bari’s face. Idajo continued to explain:

“Thera! Do you not remember her songs? When we could not sleep and Mother would lull us to bed? Do you not remember the stories Father would tell us? The old man on the river of Seraph, who said that Sera would be reunited under the Son of Thera? It is him! I met him in the gaol cells by myself. He knew my name, our names, without any notice!”

“Reunite us under what!” Bari erupted. “In all the months you were gone, you descended into fairy tales! What Mother sang to us was hope! What Father told us was hope! Idajo, look outside at these very streets! Half the Lower East seeks our heads. Beyond the borders of the city, the Mughtasib wants to burn us to the ground! You have seen the warfields near Sera, as I have! There is nothing to be restored! Is it this scholar who has made your mind forget?”

“Bari, do you not understand? There is a diff—”

“Understand what?” Bari said, rising from his chair and standing face-to-face with Idajo. “I see it perfectly clear! I remember it all very clearly! I do not need a song to remember our mother, Idajo. I remember her plainly enough. I remember how much love she gave unto you, and how little she spared for me.

“I do not need to remember our father, either. I remember all the lashings he gave to me, from which he spared you. I remember all the Delfinians who would ambush me, but run from you. When this den was established, I remember it was you who led. Did you appoint me, your own twin brother, to any notable position? You did not.

“I remember when you were arrested, and we were falling apart. It was I who kept us together. When we ran out of food to eat and water to drink, it was I who found it. When the officials came searching for us, it was I who hid us.

“Now you arrive. Would you have me throw it all away? To be a lesser man than you again? You no longer have authority, Idajo. If you do not like it, leave.”

“That was never true, Bari—”

“Was it not?” Bari’s voice did not rise. “I do not care whose son this boy is. I do not care what he has come to offer. I refuse to be in your shadow, or his. If you will not heed my command, begone. The two of you.”

It was here in the den that Asa finally spoke up. Gently pushing Idajo back and facing Bari directly, he began to question him.

“Bari, may I ask you something before we are both cast out?”

Bari said nothing, which Asa took to mean that he might.

“Every man is given a tree,” Asa began. “It grows in the soil where it was planted, and bears the fruit that its soil allows. Suppose that your tree bears apples as red as blood. Beside it, your brother’s tree bears apples that gleam like gold.

“Beyond the trees of you and your brother is a forest of trees, each tree belonging to another man. Some of these apples are greater than yours, and many of these apples are a gold richer than that of your brother’s.

“Suppose you look upon his tree every day of your life, and you come to believe that his apples are more valuable than yours. You may believe his fruits feed a man more fully, and that the skin of gold is proof of what your apple lacks.”

“Will you get to the point?” Bari demanded.

Continuing, Asa said, “So you begin to take from his tree. A little at first, then more and more, until taking becomes the only way to eat. When you decide his apples are not enough, as there is a forest beyond, you reach for those apples too.

“You may never learn that the gold upon his apples is only skin—thin and no deeper than the eye can see. The seed inside his apples does not produce trees of gold. When it withers and is no more, all the seeds that may be planted will only raise trees of fragile, brown fruit.

“In your taking, all the trees of golden fruit are no more. You may not realize that you have never tended to your own fruit. You have never tasted the juices your apple produces. You might not know what seed your fruit contains…”

“And what does it contain?” Bari asked, sparingly.

“A golden seed. A tree of red fruit that may produce a thousand golden ones,” Asa finished.

The room sat in silence for a few seconds. After those moments, Bari responded “I do not get it. What is my fruit? What gold do I have beyond the taking of others? Do you not know that I am poor? Do you not know my mother is dead? My father has perished?”

“Have you not seen the men beside you? Do you not know why they follow you? Do you see the men in this den as fools?”

Bari did not answer at once. First, he looked toward Idajo, who stood firmly behind Asa. Next, his eyes moved to the men who stood at the door, the same two who had let Idajo through without a word. Then he looked upon the remaining six who sat upon the spoils of their thievery.

“They follow me because I feed them,” he spoke.

“So, if you were to feed any hungry mouth in Ga’hala, would they follow?”

“No, they would not,” Bari said.

“Why is it that they choose you to feed them?” Asa continued.

“Because I understand them, and they know that. They have faced what I have faced,” Bari said.

“And why then are you their leader? If all of the men inside this den are born of the same woe, why are you the head?”

“Because he is the wisest,” one thief said. “He knows better than all of us.”

“He too is the most willing,” another one spoke.

“Because he knows no fear,” Idajo also replied.

“Do you not see? Is this not the seed of your fruit? How is it that these men can see it, yet you cannot? Can you not see that the seed within you is a substance greater than gold? Bari, within that heart of yours is the seed of unison,” Asa said. “You have united the desperate for a common evil, I tell you! Do you not know that you can unite them for a common good?”

Bari’s demeanour softened into questioning. The fury that had aged his face gave way to the confusion of his youth.

“And… how would I do that?”

“Follow me. I will venture into the darkest of mankind, and you will be the golden seeds I leave behind. Tell your thieves to live meekly and give up their thieving ways. If they cannot remain in Ga’hala, there is a monastery where they can rest. You will return to your men when Sera has given her grace to Maiara. From then on, your men will no longer live in squalor,” Asa foretold.

Asa and Idajo soon afterward turned their backs and left to return to Thera’s home, where they remained for nine days. On the tenth day, Bari arrived at her home. It was there that Idajo embraced his brother tightly before shaking Asa’s hand and accepting him as a leader. That evening, Asa, Idajo, Bari, Thera, and Mishil shared a feast. They had wine, meat, bread, and cheese before Asa and the twins set out in search of the next resurrection.

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People who inherit belonging never have to question it. They slot straight into it and never think beyond the borders of whatever they belong to. You can take people for granted and you might never learn to see people beyond their categories, because you never needed to.

I think when you grow up not automatically fitting in, and you don’t really have anything you feel like you naturally belong to, the feeling of belonging becomes scarce. I think that scarcity is something that makes actually finding belonging feel so valuable. It’s like the difference between being born rich and becoming rich. The becoming itself holds a perspective that the inheritor might never understand.

Going from someone who felt like a black sheep, who didn’t really ever fit into places, to someone who found people and things that accept you without conditions, categories, rules or hierarchy, really does something to your relationship with life. The perspective changes what you think society and other people are for.

A lot of people are unhappy with their lives, so they chase more money, more status, more recognition and think that’s the resolution. To spare you the lecture, sometimes the resolution is already there. Sometimes it’s something you didn’t think to appreciate. Friendship.

It’s corny to say so, I know. You talk about love and kindness on the internet and people think you’re cringe. You hate on people, ragebait for attention and all, it reads as the “natural register” of the internet or human behaviour, apparently. But finding out other hard-to-categorise people exist meant that I already had the resolution everyone is frantically chasing. I don’t need more admiration or status. I just need more time with my friends. There’s this couple of lines from a song by John Well’s — Y’all some whores:

My car broke down, my girl had slid
She low on gas, I bought her more

Hid my mans, they lookin' for 'em
He had no time, I bought him more

The song really captures everything I’m talking about here. Not to go too far on a tangent, but you should give it a listen. Returning to the point, something I realised is having belonging doesn’t automatically make it permanent. You have good friends, close friendships, people you love, but they age. They find careers, aspirations, families. It’s a natural part of growing up. So the real question stops being how do I get more successful and starts being how do I make this continue and how do I find more pockets of people like these.

I think that’s the sum of my ambition now. There’s too many people who had everything life had to offer them but end up dying alone. Material success doesn’t equate to a life well lived, it’s a means to an end but I think people oftentimes mistake it for the end in itself. I think knowing that has changed my relationship to ambition and aspiration, made it more protective than anything else.

It’s like tending to a garden really. You love all the flowers and fruits you’ve grown but perhaps you water it just a little more, throw in some fertilizer, and plant a few extras. Beauty isn’t really missing from your life, it’s there and it’s abundant, but there’s nothing stopping you from making it just a little more abundant.

I think people should really relate to their own lives this way. It’s harder than it seems to learn this kind of perspective. For me it took a lot of solitude and a lot of walks to organise my thoughts, but it was worth it. The way I see it, people feel so confused and alone because they encounter categories instead of encountering human beings.

Something being a black sheep taught me is not to value categories too much. They’re descriptive, not prescriptive. They don’t tell you everything about a person. People are far more complex than they like to admit, and it’s because they want to belong.

So sometimes people who are so used to belonging without considering what they belong to internalise their loneliness or their struggle as just the cost of being someone like them. They create this void inside themselves by reducing themselves from a full human being with an independent will into an example of a category.

Being a black man highlights this for me. From a young age, being smart, articulate and fascinated by information, I was read as whitewashed. Anime became mainstream around 2020, I started watching in 2013, so there was a seven-year gap where I was seen as “one of those anime kids,” which somehow was a failure of black masculinity. Being interested in literature and analysis didn’t help me either. So when it came to the category of blackness and masculinity, I spent a long time as the black sheep.

Growing up as the “gifted child” of my household, the expected saviour of my family, it just worked the same way. There was no room to be as curious or to be playful because caring about anime and video games is a betrayal of the expectations set on you. It creates this gap in intimacy, feeling like the people closest to you haven’t really encountered you. Nevertheless, there is no resentment over it because I’ve already built friendships and communities that resolve that.

It’s why ambition doesn’t feel like hunger to me, it feels like exploration. I don’t have a void I need to fill. Even the “black sheep” is a category in itself I no longer align with.

I often reference Luffy and One Piece, and I think this is an important reason why. The way he’s ambitious, I pretty much feel the same. Luffy’s goal is to become the Pirate King because he thinks it’s a fun goal with a lot of friction and friendship. I understand that, and honestly I want the same for myself. The thing my mind tells me now is “The Mansa Musa of Creativity.” What that means, I can’t say I know just yet.

That’s the unique thing about being once considered a black sheep. You get to see how much belonging matters. So my ambition is mostly about how much of what I’ve found I can sustain. Ten million pounds and being remembered, but dying alone, is not success. I genuinely wouldn’t last longer than three weeks. Sixty thousand and close friendships? A much more meaningful life.

Although, ideally I’d take both the ten million and friendships.

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Everybody wants to be understood. I think it’s some primal urge inside everyone. To have somewhere, something, or someone that understands you. So much of myself is out there online, whether on my Substack or my TikTok, containing enough of me to be understood existentially. I’ve been writing for over a year now. Being personal and intimate with it for at least five months.

Yet there’s always someone misunderstanding me. There’s always something people assume about me. The misunderstandings never seem to go away. I say one thing, people fill in the gap with another. It’s a merry-go-round. Today I feel understood, tomorrow I won’t.

I was never really someone who felt truly understood. I made peace with that and decided to start writing. I thought: if nobody’s going to interpret me the way I’d like to be interpreted, I’d rather just do whatever. I won’t lie and say writing didn’t give me a faint glimpse of hope that I’d feel more understood. I do, but at the very same time, I feel more misunderstood too.

That’s the thing I’d advise to whoever reads this: don’t go looking to be understood. Most people aren’t willing to understand. For every one person who understands you, there’s a handful who won’t. Trying to chase them into getting you is a waste of energy.

I’m not telling you to live your life trying to be opaque and hard to connect with. I’m just telling you it’s probably easier to accept those who feel like they understand you most in the moment. Don’t let the desire for more blind you to what you have, or lead you into some kind of nihilism.

I guess even though I’ve said it God knows how many times, people still have a hard time reading me. The thing I care about isn’t being understood or being desired. It’s what happens to my ideas after I’m gone.

I put my ideas before my identity. When I’m having ideas and thinking through them, it’s not self-referential — it might be shaped by my experiences and tastes, but it’s not about me or how I look to you. I don’t really care what kind of guy I’m seen as. I don’t see being a “high-value” man as particularly fun, and I don’t care for being seen as “smart” or “good” either. None of that contains what I’m searching for. So whatever people want to label me, they can label me.

I just care about what kind of ideas I have. I do whatever produces the highest yield of creative output. My mindset has always been to keep pumping out ideas. I don’t let any one idea sit in my mind too long. The current idea could fail — but the next one, the one that arrives to an empty mind, could be the big ticket.

Look at people like Hideo Kojima. Some of you may read that name and wonder who the hell he is. That’s the point. Maybe if I bring up Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding you’d recognise him better. We care about Kojima because he’s the designer behind Metal Gear Solid — one of the most revolutionary and influential video game series. His influence is huge; cinematics in video games arguably owe a lot to him. We love what he produces, not what he appears as.

It’s the same with Kishimoto and Oda. Nobody thinks of them as “these profound Japanese philosopher-artists.” Oda’s name comes up as a reference to One Piece, Kishimoto’s as a reference to Naruto. They’re never really discussed in isolation.

That’s really all I want for myself: for my name to only be relevant alongside the work I produce. I don’t care to be someone independent of my ideas — I’d rather be the after-image of them, where people engage with the work first, critique it, consider its value, and only then think to consult the creator. I think that’s the role of the worldbuilder: to make worlds people inhabit, worlds that outlast me. Not to build self-portraits.

Take the world I’m currently building, my book, The Sorrow of Creation. It’s built on theology: divine hiddenness, the ground of being, Neoplatonism, and other complicated ideas about God. I don’t want people to sit and think, “Wow, he wrote all of this, he’s a genius.” I want them to think, “Wow, this is an interesting book,” and only later, if ever, wonder about the person behind it.

People read The Prophet and then get curious about Kahlil Gibran and what perspective would create such a book. They don’t read about Gibran first and then pick up the book because of him. The work earns its value because it’s a good idea expressed well. It earns the curiosity about the person, not the other way around. Sometimes the person never becomes focal at all. That’s fine too.

I’m going to die one day. I’m fully aware of that, and I’m making peace with it. The more I write, the less dying feels like dying. It’s more like one form of me ceases while the others remain. I’d like to live eternally through the ideas I express. Seen this way, cementing my identity becomes secondary — I could try, but I’ll only be misperceived, ignored, and forgotten in the end anyway.

My identity is a brief moment in the universe. My ideas could last far longer. I want them to keep moving after I’m dead, when I’m no longer the one carrying them. A man forgotten as a name, still existing as an after-image; a reference point buried inside someone else’s thinking. That’s all I’m really motivated by.

You could spend an entire lifetime chasing being understood, but I don’t think it’s worth it. It’s something deeply meaningful, but there’s meaning beyond it too. Do I feel perfectly understood by anyone in the moment I write this? No, I really don’t. Nor do I know if I ever wil, but I accept that and keep creating.

It’s a bit hypocritical, really — I’ve spent this entire article trying to make you understand that I don’t need to be understood. But hopefully you see: neither do you.

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For the first three days they shared the cell, the two did not speak. Asa had opened his mouth to offer a greeting, but Idajo demanded silence and would not even permit the boy to speak his own name.

When the fourth day arrived, the guards took Idajo from his cell to interrogate him. They sought his unruly brother, who had taken command of Idajo’s gang after his arrest. But Idajo refused to reveal his brother’s whereabouts, so the officials decreed that he would be left without a meal until he broke his silence.

By his third day of fasting, the sixth day of sharing a cell with Asa, Idajo’s strength began to fail. It was then that Asa shared his own portion with him— a single loaf of bread and a single cup of water. And so, for the first time, Idajo and Asa spoke.

“Who are you?” Idajo asked. “How could a blameless boy like you end up in a place like this?”

“I am Asa, the son of Mishil and Thera,” Asa replied.

At the sound of these names, Idajo’s face tightened with sudden scrutiny. “The son of Thera? Sitting here in ragged robes in a gaol cell? Do you take me for a fool?”

“It is true. It is I,” Asa said plainly.

“Do you take me for a fool? Where do you come from? What is your home?” Idajo pressed.

“My home was Sera, burned by the Mughtasib. I come from a monastery just beyond the city borders,” Asa answered.

“It cannot be!” Idajo said, his suspicion giving way to confusion. “I am from Sera too. My mother and father used to tell me stories of our home before Ga’hala. They said we arrived here by the River of Seraph, and that the last prophecy spoken to them was that the son of Thera would one day reunite us all. It cannot be you standing before me!”

“It is true. I was on one of the four boats that sailed from Sera,” Asa said earnestly. “My parents are Thera, the Mother of Music, and Mishil, the Muser of Mankind. They left me in the care of my godfather, Timorimenos, who spoke those very words to your parents.”

Still in disbelief, Idajo challenged him. “If what you say is true, if you are truly Sera’s resurrection, then tell me who I am. You must know me, if it is truly I whom you seek.”

Asa looked at him and asked a single question: “Are you twins? The guard spoke a few days ago of your missing brother.”

“Yes,” Idajo answered.

“Then you are either Idajo or Bari,” Asa said.

“It cannot be! You truly are Sera’s resurrection! I am Idajo, son of Ebu. My brother outside these walls— he is Bari. Have you come for me?”

“That I have,” Asa replied.

In the conversation that followed, Idajo told the story of his life in Ga’hala after the fall of Sera. He had grown up among the lower-east citizens known as the Delfinians, people of fairer skin, and he and his brother had been mocked for years for being among the darkest-skinned in the city. This mockery planted a bitter seed of resentment in the two brothers. When Idajo was fourteen, he gathered all the darker-skinned children of the district and formed a band to protect themselves. But what began as a shield of defense soon hardened into prejudice, and before long, Idajo’s gang had become notorious throughout the lower-east of Ga’hala for targeting the fairer-skinned people and turning to crime against them. Idajo confessed that he was finally arrested after breaking into the home of a Delfinian elder, not knowing that the man lay awake inside.

When his testimony was finished, Asa began to question him.

“Why do you cause such disturbance? Is it in this gaol cell that you wish to die? Are the Delfinians the ones who convinced you the whole world is evil? Is there truly no life beyond the city borders?”

“Of course there is, but it is all evil too! Have you not served in the Occidental military? I spent nights on the warfields near Sera myself! Beyond the borders of Ga’hala there is only war, Asa. This world is a sickness. There is no righteous man who walks this land, let alone a righteous city.”

“Do not be a fool. You say there is no righteous man in this world, but is what you have seen the final word on all of life? My brother, Idajo, have you walked every corner that stretches across the earth? Have you met every man and every woman who lives upon it?”

“Must I?” Idajo answered. “I have seen those who claim to stand beside me show more respect to swine than to me. I have seen those on the other side drink the blood of my people for sport. Asa, I only seek justice. If the Delfinians cannot spare even a single tear for my suffering, cannot find any respect for the darkness of my skin, then I must seek recompense myself. How else could it be fair? I do not rob them because I am evil, I rob them because I am in need.”

“Silence,” Asa said. “Is it every Delfinian who has wronged you? Is it every child who can barely stand without his mother’s hand that deserves your judgment? Idajo, I ask you this: what will your justice bring upon the innocent hearts of the Delfinian children? Is it not this very justice of yours that will lead their hearts astray in turn? Are not the wrongs you commit today the very things that will one day drive them to punish others?”

“Then what would you have me do?” Idajo answered. “Would you have me lie down helpless in the street? Would you have them flog my father, my mother, my brother? Is not the skin of the Ga’halians just as dark as mine?”

“I am not demanding that you lie down helpless. Do you not know the story of how Ga’hala came to be? You speak of the kings of Ga’hala, but do you not know that Ga’hala itself descended from slaves?”

It was then that Asa told him a parable Idajo would carry with him for the rest of his life, the parable of the bird and the seeds.

“If a seed is planted and the birds come and snatch it from the soil, it is a fool’s errand to simply plant another, for the birds will only return and feed again. But if you take up your bow and strike down every bird in the land, who then will eat the caterpillars that consume your crops? How will the seeds of your harvest ever spread to flourish elsewhere? What will feed the hawks of the sky and the beasts of the field, once every bird is gone? Is it justice, then, for the whole land to perish so long as your crop alone remains? What will you do, Idajo?”

After speaking this parable, Asa fell silent and would not speak again for three days, leaving Idajo deep in thought. Whenever Idajo tried to draw him into conversation, Asa gave the same answer: “Until you answer my question, I will remain silent.”

At last, on the third night, now the ninth day of sharing the cell, Idajo gave his answer.

“If I plant a seed and the birds come to feed on it, I will build a scarecrow to guard what I have sown. And if the birds ever learn the scarecrow is harmless, I will bind horsehair to it and shift its place in the field, so its hair whips in the wind and keeps driving the crows away!”

When he heard this answer, Asa rejoiced, and that night he gave Idajo the whole of his bread. For the eight weeks that followed, Asa and Idajo shared the same cell, and Asa faithfully gave him a portion of every meal. When the time of Asa’s imprisonment came to an end, he told Idajo where he could find him — at Thera’s home, and instructed him to go there first, before he went searching for his brother, so that the two of them might face what lay ahead together.

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What I hate more than anything is how shallow common interpretations of The Book of Job are. It’s an issue with believers, namely more evangelical believers, and atheists alike.

Online, the discourse tends to collapse into two options: either you should thank God for your suffering because “remember what happened to Job; he remained faithful despite all he went through,” or God is cruel, making bets on Job’s life for leisure. Both readings are surface-level. Beyond the Gospels, I think Job is one of the most important books in the Bible, and neither interpretation comes close to why.

What Job taught me is one of my first principles: humility. You cannot have exhaustive knowledge of everything. You will not be able to explain life. I think there are many people who think life is a problem of certainty. Job says that’s false. It’s a problem of capacity — capacity to handle uncertainty.

That’s why Job is blessed over his friends. Not because he was more correct than they were, as his own approach was still flawed, but because his flawed approach still held space for uncertainty. His friends turned their theology, an inherently finite and human creation, into absolute certainty about the nature of God. They needed answers while Job didn’t have them, and he fully sat with that.

I understand it to mean God does not offer certainty. If you view God as a transactional being who guarantees some perfect understanding of whatever happens to you, or something that allows you to make the world more predictable, you’ve misunderstood God. I think to understand God is to be able to stand inside of uncertainty.

If you read The Book of Job without the baggage of whatever assumptions you have of God, Job becomes one of the most existential books you’ll ever encounter. The real claim of The Book of Job is that there is no divine definition of human suffering we can comprehend — it is not something we can fully explain nor understand.

With me, I read Job while I was first learning that I was neurodivergent, coming from a background where that was treated as demonic, to be cast out through ritual and prayer. Obviously, that would never work, no matter how hard you’d pray, and the answer would always default to being told your faith wasn’t strong enough.

I was someone suffering in a very specific way, handed an entire explanation built around it. All it led me to feeling was nothing but a profound sense of shame. That explanatory system overrode any real chance of finding out what the suffering actually meant — the exact same issue Job faced due to his friends’ interpretations.

So, reading Job, I realised none of that suffering carried the meaning I’d been handed. The real meaning was far simpler: I was lacking an ADHD diagnosis. However, it left another question: if it doesn’t mean what I thought it did, what does it mean now?

I think that’s a question many people fear. A lot of people end up identifying with their suffering so much that its loss of “meaning” feels like losing themselves. For me, it felt like beginning a second life. I’d say my life and belief in the concept of God only began when I read The Book of Job.

It showed me that none of the answers I’d been handed were inherently true. Because of that, I was free to build my own understandings of my suffering. That’s probably the origin point of whatever creativity I have now.

There’s a line from 070 Shake in “Ghost Town”:

I put my hand on the stove,
to see if I still bleed,
and nothing hurts anymore,
I feel kinda free.

It’s pretty close to the thesis I think Job delivers. You’re not truly free unless you grant yourself permission to bleed. We spend so much time running from our suffering, or consumed by it, that we become trapped by all else. The solution is simple — you are allowed to suffer, and it doesn’t say a single thing about you.

Before reading Job, you might have believed you’re defined by your suffering. If you read it carefully enough, you’ll see what it’s saying is you will never escape suffering. But what it means, or what it leads to, is within your agency. You define what your suffering means.

I’d always listen to Lucki and admire his artistry. In fact, I’m listening to Freewave 3 now as I write this. What I admired is that he’s so unequivocally honest in his music. He doesn’t glorify his suffering nor does he reject it; he documents it. That’s what he chose to do with his struggles: document them, turn them into art, and find success from his honest experience.

Thinking about that, I decided to do the same thing. Turn my woes into something creative. It was reading The Book of Job that made me fully realise that was a possibility.

The Book of Job says you’re free to define the meaning of your suffering. However you must define it well, because that freedom can lead nowhere fruitful. That’s where Ecclesiastes asks you personally the next question:

What do you aim that freedom at? What answer can you create that isn’t fragile and won’t fail you?

For me, that answer was God. Not the evangelical picture of bowing to a man in the sky, but participating in an ultimate reality defined by grace.

It’s important to mention that part. People hear God, whether you’re an atheist, agnostic, or believer, and assume flattering some supernatural man in the cloud. “Serving God” in this way is the same as sucking up to some Boss. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the whirlwind.

In The Book of Job, God appears to him through a whirlwind. I think that is the best image of God in the whole Bible. He’s not a cosmic humanoid, but a relational force you can enter. When you step inside of it, its force is felt and it reorganises you. But it is still a whirlwind of grace. That’s why Job, after his encounter with God as this whirlwind, isn’t left disoriented but reinvented.

He personally sees the totality of Divine grace and is incapable of comprehending it, yet he knows it is there — he is certain of the existence of God’s greatness, but yet he cannot explain it fully. It’s similar to what the Romantics call experiencing the Sublime. He’s met with an experience of both beauty and magnitude. He truly sees the difference between what he knows and what there is. Despite it being far grander than he could ever imagine, he is moved by it, allowing it to make him into a humbler man.

Ultimately, Job gave me exactly what I needed to assess my own life from my own position, rather than from the explanations handed to me. My perspective on my own suffering matters just as much as any explanation offered for it, and so does yours. This is exactly what God clarifies to Job and his friends. His feelings are always valid, but they never are an exhaustive definition of what his suffering means.

I think that’s one of the most empowering realisations you could make. It’s not something you can just know intellectually. It’s a relationship you cultivate with life. The ability to live with uncertainty and the desire to make meaning out of suffering.

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Asa did not push through the crowd. He simply walked to the front and stood there calmly, looking upon the faces of the officers and the thieves. One officer was dressed in fine clothing; the other wore luxurious armour. The boy himself was no older than fourteen, near in age to Asa. It was then that Asa began to speak:

“On what grounds do you punish them?”

The noise of the crowd slowly died away as Asa spoke, one finger held out toward the officer who had declared their crimes. The officer did not look at Asa at first, for all he heard was the voice of a boy. But Asa did not repeat himself. He simply continued to hold his finger out, pointing toward the officer.

“Theft!” the officer replied. “Do you not know? It is a grief against Maiara’s order. To take without ever giving defies the grace of the order in which she has given us!”

Upon hearing Maiara’s name, Asa grew irritated. He answered:

“Answer me! You say that to take without ever giving defies the grace of the order? Is it not you who are dressed in a fine tunic, wearing fine leathers and finer furs? Are not the clothes upon your back expensive enough to feed this entire crowd? Tell me of one man in this crowd to whom you have given! Tell me of a single shilling you have lent, or a shoulder to cry upon that you have spared! If you cannot tell me, explain to me why you do not deserve to be whipped yourself!”

“Who do you think you are?” the officer said. “What is the authority from which you speak?”

Asa said, “I am the Voice of Man, Ancient of Sorrows! You have not answered my questions. Did Maiara not give us wheat to be planted and eaten? Did she not give us cows to raise and milk? Did she not provide the pig whose meat fills your table tonight? Has she ever claimed ownership over the food that fills your stomach? No! The fruit of the ground does not exist for your profit! What good is profit if not for charity? You yourself have neglected the grace of Maiara and whipped these men for your own failings! Of all the people in this crowd, you are the furthest from her!”

The crowd fell into a deep silence for several minutes. Then, all at once, it erupted into cheers and shouts. Some of the children in the crowd picked up stones and hurled them at the Typhosian officers as the people cried out, “Free the thieves! Free the thieves! Free the thieves!”

In the eyes of the officer, this response was enough to accuse Asa of insurrection. Asa did not resist when they took him. He did not run, nor did he fight. He simply went to the gaols of Ga’hala in the same manner in which he had walked into the crowd.

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It was in the second year of this new life that Thera found herself with child. She wrote of it before she spoke of it, filling the pages of her songbook with verses she would later call the first honest suffering she had written since the psalm by the river, and the first honest hope she had known since Carmenedei. When at last she told Mishil, he wept— not from sorrow, but from an overabundance of joy.

And in the weeks that followed, all Sera came to know of Thera’s pregnancy. The townspeople were greatly elated. “Did you know? The Mother of Music is with child!” became a saying woven into every conversation. Soon, rumours began to circulate that the child would be uniquely favoured: “They say Thera, Mother of Music, is with child to Mishil, Muser of Mankind! Truly, there shall be no other child in Sera as gifted, or as knowing!”

Over the following seasons, the town’s disagreements with the Provinces sharpened into open hostility. Councilmen shouted over taxation and grain; tax collectors demanded more with each visit. And the hostility only grew, as the town guard and the soldiers of the Provinces began to take up arms against one another, until great unease settled upon Sera. The Provinces, having taken notice of Sera’s communion through Thera’s song, began to watch her closely, which struck fear into Mishil’s heart. He would send Thera to spend her final thirty-three days with Timorimenos, accompanied by two of his friends from the guard.

In the season when the flowers bloomed, the Provinces abandoned Sera, leaving the town to govern itself. And it came to pass in that same season, one early morning, that Thera at last gave birth to a baby boy. She held him through the first night without sleep, and it was there, in the blue hour of dawn, with the rains already falling, that she spoke a psalm:

“Maiara! Is it not you I worship? I bless this son unto you.
You have bestowed me with life,
when I should have died.
You have bestowed me with mercy,
when I was wrongful.
When I believed I was wise,
it was you who showed me I was a fool.
And when the evils of man blinded my sight,
it was you who gave me new eyes to see—
and it was you who gave me a new song.
So, Maiara, I shall sing! Sing unto the heavens!
For you are the greatest healer of them all.
Let this child be a testament to your power,
as much as a testament to your beauty.”

It was thereafter, upon finishing her psalm, that she chose his name. “Asa,” she said, to no one but Timorimenos and the two guardsmen. “For my son is the light through which Maiara may commune with us. Let us become his greatest guardians, so this lightbearer may become the healing hand of Maiara.” And all three agreed.

In the two years that followed, the Mughtasib joined with the eastern powers and kingdoms to form the Oriental Nations, casting seeds of doubt over the wellbeing of every western civilisation they touched. In response, the Provinces and the western kingdoms set aside their old rivalries and joined together to form the Occidental Nations. Across the first four years of Asa’s life, Sera sat within the Midland Strip— a stretch of contested land fought upon by both Occidental and Oriental forces, claimed by neither, and defended by both. And it was on this day that Sera was finally invaded.

As the sun began to fall, Timorimenos rode in from the eastern fields upon horseback. He did not dismount to speak, but rode through the streets crying, “Mughtasib! Mughtasib!”, and did not cease until every household in the town had heard his voice. And he was not wrong to hasten. Before the sun had fully set, dozens of horsemen came riding into Sera from the east, and behind them came a storm of flaming arrows, setting the town ablaze.

Mishil, Thera, and young Asa, who was not yet four, though his birthday was in the days approaching, stood with Timorimenos at the edge of the town square and watched as the eastern half of the town descended into destruction and despair within minutes. Men who had sold Mishil his paints only weeks before were struck down, if not by arrow, then by blade. Women and children were dragged toward the horses by wrist and by hair. And before the very eyes of young Asa, a boy no older than ten ran past them with an arrow lodged in his chest, until at last he fell before them.

After witnessing these things, they fled westward toward the river, as more soldiers and archers poured into Sera behind them. By the time Timorimenos reached the western edge of the town, seven other families had gathered behind him, drawn either by his shouting or by the sight of others moving in the same direction. In the company he had gathered were the households of seven children, each known in some fashion to Mishil or Thera, through her teaching or his painting.

The eldest was Khayra, nine years of age, the daughter of the town elder. Beside her ran the family of Kleos, eight, who was known as the finest of Thera’s pupils. He was a boy who could play the flute in a way nobody else his age could manage. The twins Idajo and Bari, five years old, ran hand in hand as they always did. Then came Harmonia, whom Mishil had cared for in her infancy while tutoring her elder brother, as Peter Prilut had once tutored him. Ignisius, the chief guard’s nephew, and Karim, the miller’s son, followed behind.

Eight households, bound by nothing but the destruction of their home, reached the River of Seraph as the lands behind them were scorched to cinder. The fishermen’s boats sat moored along the bank, and Timorimenos did not waste words in getting them into the water. With only four boats, he set two families in each boat, released each rope with his own hands, and gave an order as they began to row:

“Save yourselves! Do not come to aid another boat if arrows come to rain on us! Will Maiara be pleased if we all perish? She shall prevail! Until then, live meekly. The Son of Thera shall gather all the remaining children of Sera! He will restore the heart of Sera and may your children find communion with him! Sera shall be restored!”

And they rowed with the current, away from the war that had come upon Sera. The river illuminated its destruction, reflecting the orange hues of the flames that consumed their homeland. When the Mughtasib soldiers reached the river, they fired arrows at all four boats. Though they were not enough to pierce a single boat, they divided the boats into three separate streams. Yet all eight households had successfully escaped.

It was there upon that boat that Mishil and Timorimenos spoke of where the families might go once the current released them. After a few hours, they decided that Ga’hala would be their refuge. Timorimenos knew of a small, secluded village upon its outskirts, home to an obscure monastery which he had helped establish during his time as a missionary. And it was agreed that Asa would be raised there, in Timorimenos’ keeping, while Mishil and Thera settled within Ga’hala itself— close enough to visit, yet far enough to keep him from the corruption of the Typhosian councils and the Occidental Powers, which demanded that all boys submit to the army and train against the Mughtasib.

When they came ashore some few days later, worn thin by the river and by grief, Mishil and Thera settled within Ga’hala itself. Mishil continued his work as a painter, while Thera became a choir instructor. They found residence in a modest quarter near the outer markets, cheap enough that they could send ample food and drink southward to the monastery where Asa and Timorimenos resided. Every few days, they would make the journey to visit him.

The monastery itself was a quiet place. Its walls bore no crest, no title, nor anything to mark it as other than what it was: a sanctuary for monks of the Order of Sorrows, established before the influence of the Typhosian councils had reached so far. It was there, hidden within the monastery, that Asa would spend the whole of his boyhood, learning from several wandering monks. He would grow neither in Sera nor fully in Ga’hala, though his parents would come often, bringing with them great tales of the world beyond.

Within that monastery, Asa would learn to read and write, exposed to the knowledge of the world, yet sheltered from the politics of its divided kingdoms. He would learn of suffering and mercy, of man and his many failings, while the wars of nations raged beyond its walls.

It was here that the covenant of the Ancient of Sorrows truly began.

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“It cannot be true,

That they say there is a God.

Where would they be?

It is sure they are not beside me.

Maybe it is I, whose eyes fell blind --

Now tell me, am I at fault?

Is it not the ashes of war that blind me?

As so it may for the rest of mankind?

Does my woe not have her ear to fall upon?

Did she not hear my praises?

Was it not I, who stood on the plazas?

Was it not I, who sung sweet little melodies?

Did I not learn the harp?

To please the ear of lifegiving herself?

I have blessed you!

I have given you my joy!

For all the chords in my throat,

And the fingers on my hands,

I blessed you!

I surrendered my gifts.

Do you not hear me, you?

Why is it I speak and you remain still?

You are nothing but a thief, you!

As my throat has run dry as this soil,

My fingers have become thin as bone

What have you given me?

And how does it match what I’ve given you?

After all I have given,

after all I have wept,

How can I?

How can I say, there is a God?”

When the afternoon came, heavy rains descended upon them, so that Mishil and Thera could journey no further that day. Seeking shelter, they chanced upon the dwelling of a hermit, who received them beneath his roof without guile or suspicion. When he had set before them a pot of broth and shared his wine, he lifted his veil and made himself known unto the two travelers.

He was Timorimenos, a man who had lifted his hand in rebellion with the Ìjì against the Mughtasib, but had laid down his arms seven years ago to walk in the devotions of a monk within the Order of Sorrows. Yet when he realised the Typhosian Council working corruption within that holy order, he turned his back to civilisation and fled into the wide fields, so that he might dwell in quiet communion with the earth. There he had abode for eleven years in fierce devotion to his solitary rule.

When Thera and Mishil declared unto him the ruin of Carmenedei and the tale of their pilgrimage, righteous fury arose in the hermit. And when, after the turning of many hours, Thera confessed the utter fading of her faith, how the desire to touch the harp had utterly forsaken her, and how she might never more lift her voice in song — the hermit arose from the floor, and in the shadow of his dwelling he began to speak:

“How pitiful!

Was it a single arrow

that could pierce your belief?

Who are you to say she does not give life?

From which authority has your word descended?

Flee from this arrogance! Adjust your vision!

When the crowds cheered your name,

surely, you thought, there was a God.

When no harp played as beautifully as yours,

surely, you thought, there was a God.

When your mouth was full of fruit,

and the children across the land starved,

did you question her grace?

When they threw silver at your feet,

and the poor were thrown onto the roads,

did you question her grace?

For I have witnessed war upon war.

I have felt the shackles of slavery myself.

I have seen the treacherous conquer.

I have wept for the innocents who have died.

Thera! Young woman,

you have never felt Maiara’s grace.

You have only felt for your own!

If you had truly encountered her,

you would know, she is unmoving.

Young woman, collect your tears,

and address your woes.

You have now felt a world without Maiara,

as you have felt a world within Maiara.

Your eyes have been made clear.”

The following morning, the hermit bound up a bundle of bread and honey for Mishil and Thera, and sent them forth upon their way. In peace did they journey for the space of a day, until at last they came unto Sera. There Mishil found labor as a painter and a tiller of the earth, while Thera took up the work of a teacher.

In her days of teaching, she looked upon many of the children of Sera, and not a few of them stirred her soul. As the hermit Timorimenos had foretold, she witnessed children endowed with great gifts alongside those who struggled heavily; she saw the gentle and the stubborn, the zealous and the cold. Truly, it was in the house of learning that she came to see the fullness of humankind.

Now, on a certain afternoon, the heavy-laden children and the gifted ones fell to strife. The gifted mocked the slow, crying out names such as “fools” and “donkeys,” while the slow burned with bitterness against the proud, until the schoolyard was filled with wrath and division. Yet Thera chid them not. She called them to sit together in the very dust where they had fought, and she lifted her voice and sang unto them.

She sang of sorrow. Without adornment, she melodised in song of her father and the town of Carmenedei. She sang of its fairness, of the tenderness of her father’s love, and of the harmony her home had known, until by slow degrees her tune waxed cold. From the wondrous music about her home, the song passed to the final hour thereof, where she sang of the shaft that narrowly missed her crown, and of the iron that pierced her father. That which began in praise ended in lamentation, yet the song remained wondrous and fair even unto its close.

When the song had ended, no child remembered who had kindled the quarrel. The children were so stricken by her voice that they began to whisper among themselves, saying she was surely a goddess who was hidden among men. And when they asked her how she had fashioned such an elegant song, she answered:

Neither you, who have played the flute,

nor you who have mastered the harp,

will ever tell a story as great!

Neither you, who have seen poverty,

Nor you who have felt oppression

Will ever sing a song as great!

Am I not human, as you children are?

Am I nothing but a woman?

I am no Goddess, please cast me no name.

Listen to those who sit next to you!

The ones who have less,

I tell you, in story they may have more!

Listen to those who sit next to you!

The ones with gifts

Is it not them who may share your tale?

Children, are we not one body,

When connected in song?

Take up your voices, as I have with mine.

I will sing for as long as I will teach,

But only if you lend out an ear,

Hear the life of the one beside you,

And you will all be blessed with a greater gift.

Word of Thera’s wisdom spread throughout the town of Sera: how a young teacher had turned a schoolyard brawl into a holy hymn. Soon the whole town had learned by heart not that song alone, but many others from her lips. And before long, men ceased to call her simply a teacher. They named her Thera, Mother of Music — she who taught mankind to bind their hearts together through song.

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Recently, I recorded a video stating that CeeChyna is a good example of never allowing yourself to become something greater in people’s minds, because people forget to view you as human. You get flattened into whatever symbol you represent, so whenever you contradict that thing, people can’t accept it.

You’ve seen that with her. She’s a female rapper who people saw as a symbol of anti-patriarchy and radical feminism. Personally, I hold no opinion on the matter—I’ve heard some of her music and I see the appeal of the approach, so I can understand why people supported it.

However, she had some sort of life crisis and apparently turned to religion to find support. This is where that symbolic representation issue came into play, and it’s where she lost a lot of fans. These people weren’t seeing her; they were seeing whatever she represented. When she stopped representing those specific things, they were quick to discard her.

It’s not something that only happens to celebrities. It happens to absolutely everyone. Take a look at me: I’m a black man, and just the sight of me alone causes people to categorize me and expect me to behave in a certain manner. I’d even argue that romance is heavily symbolic for a lot of people—something pretty difficult to escape from.

That begs the question: how do you minimize it from happening?

Kanye is the clearest example. I mean, look at him. He’s this deeply spiritual guy and a representative of black culture, but he’s also a complete gooner. He talks about it way too openly and has done and said way too many gooned-out things. It’s something Nicki Minaj and Amber Rose have both spoken of, and there are probably more who’d say the same. Kanye has a very weird fetish for women who either look like or are porn stars.

Is he doing this to be controversial? Definitely, but I don’t think it really stops there. I think he’s presenting the fullness of himself, including his contradictions. We know his greatest values, but we also know his worst traits. It ruins any chance of us forming a flawless, pristine narrative about him; the only narratives we can really imagine are either his or the media’s. It’s a very controversial method, but it means the people who support Kanye do so expecting him to have edges.

By owning his contradictions, he doesn’t allow himself to get flattened so easily, giving him more agency.

If you’ve followed my thoughts for long enough, you’d know agency is very important to me personally—one of my highest values. I guess reflecting on Kanye and CeeChyna made me willing to publicly confront some of my own contradictions.

I’m someone who’s genuinely good at articulating what healthy intimacy looks like, how capitalism ruins romance, and the difference between love and lust. I probably sound like some massive hopeless romantic when I talk about these things, but honestly, it’s the exact opposite. I’m a complete case of Solomon’s Paradox when it comes to romance.

That’s why I quote Lucki so much: when it comes to romance, I have historically chased heartbreak to fuel my ambition. I would somehow keep ending up in a doomed or flawed romantic situation because it gave me enough emotional charge to create something. It’s been like that for a few years, but now the spell is starting to wear off.

Whenever I like a girl, I think that’s one of the most motivated states I get into. The chase makes me more creative because, I guess, there’s something tangible to be driven by. The thing is, I would never really want the chase to end. Back then, I’d prefer to chase and then get discarded.

This probably sounds insanely stupid, but I guess it was my ethical backdoor to dodging commitment. If I’m chasing you, you get to feel important and special without me actually having real obligations toward you, while I still get that creative inspiration. A win-win.

I used to feel problematic about this—it definitely is, just in a quieter way. Now I’m just open with it. It’s not really something I do or aim for anymore, but it’s what I’ve done for a large portion of my life. Could it continue? Yes, I’ll be honest. In my mind, romance is either about having a rival or having a muse.

I might come across as intelligent and emotionally aware, but I think that always creates an impression of me that I really don’t care to have. I’m back home post-grad and getting more irritated by the day. In university, I was barely motivated by some happily-ever-after romance knowing I’d eventually return to this. Now that I’m actually here? It doesn’t motivate me at all. I very much struggle to imagine the idea of being in love.

Being someone who’s constantly providing emotional relief is completely off the table. I have very little room to absorb any kind of emotional responsibility, despite how aware I may seem. My primary goal is just building a life that’s mine. Perhaps I’ve been given that task at one of the trickiest times in recent history.

That’s my biggest contradiction: I am well aware of what real love actually looks like, but the connections I’ve chased are reckless gambles. I wouldn’t quite say I end up actually heartbroken, but it’s just enough of a feeling to shock me out of a flat state of mind. I am far more reckless than you’d assume. It just so happens that my reckless choices yield the most fruit.

Naruto and Sasuke.

I know, I know, “What the hell, saintkupid?” But hear me out. The idea of having your partner be your greatest rival might be the most erotic idea I can hold in my head.

Friction is deeply meaningful to me. A relationship built on friction, on generative movement and direction, is one of the most meaningful things I can conceptualize. The highest kind of relationship I can imagine is with someone who never lets you become complacent.

We already believe this implicitly — especially as men. We say things like “she’s so bad, I need to get my shit together,” or the classic “I need to get rich.” The only difference for me is that once I get her, I don’t want her to stop making me feel that way. That has to be a core element: every time I see you, I feel the need to be better, to try harder. The feeling of being challenged, perhaps, is my most romantic experience.

Do you think Naruto would have ever become Hokage without Sasuke’s friction? No. Do you think Sasuke would have ever become anything more than the Avenger of the Uchiha? No. They both became great because the other one constantly reminded them they couldn’t afford complacency. How could Naruto reach his goals if he couldn’t beat Sasuke? How could Sasuke enact his vision if Naruto kept standing in his way?

That’s why I say Naruto and Sasuke are such an intimate duo. It’s funny, but I mean it seriously. I care a lot about agency. I’ve already unlearned the belief that you can outsource your agency and good things will happen to you. If you want good things, you go get them. If you want that dream life — you go build it. I don’t believe you can have a genuinely good life without a sense of agency. And if I love someone, I obviously want them to have a good life, the best one possible. By that logic, I need them to have agency, for themselves, more than for me.

The way I grew up, I watched religion and culture tell all the mothers around me, and my friends, that abandoning their agency was virtuous, that if they gave up their sense of self for “God” or for their husbands, they’d be blessed, or considered “the right kind of woman.” All it did was traumatize them, traumatize me, my sister, and all our friends. All because somewhere along the way, self-abandonment got mistaken for virtue.

I have absolutely zero interest in repeating that cycle. None.

I guess that’s one of the more complicated things about me. I don’t believe in outsourcing agency — I believe in owning it. I’m radical with mine, so I’d expect you to be radical with yours.

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One of the biggest realisations I made in my life, a common one really, is that there is no such thing as absolute certainty. Obviously, growing up in a strictly religious household, you kind of assume there is — your whole upbringing is about this one objective and absolute truth, that this specific concept of God is true and everyone and everything else is false. By reading the Book of Job, I figured out the point was never about full certainty but movement.

Learning that, humility became one of the highest virtues to me, it’s sort of my first principle. You will never know for certain every detail, the right course of action, or every move to make. That’s just human existence. Reflecting on it until I truly understood it, I ended up at this conclusion:

The smartest human philosophy isn’t complicated at all. It’s pragmatism.

You don’t have to be perfect to start. You don’t need to have it all figured out, you don’t need to know the perfect move. You just have to begin and stay humble enough to learn as you go. Honestly? I’d consider myself radically pragmatic. If I could be the champion of any modern-day philosophy, it’d be radical pragmatism.

I don’t need the perfect answer. I don’t need the perfect metaphysics or total awareness of every angle to an equation before I start solving it. I just need to start solving it. If I can identify a problem, I can identify a solution. If someone gives me a better read on the issue, I build or update the one I have.

This isn’t even cognitively challenging, it’s just courage. If you recognise you value something, the most pragmatic thing you can do is act on it now, and update your relationship with that value as reality responds to it. I can say it in fancy words, articulate it into neat sentences that make it sound profound, but really, people do this all the time.

It’s a scientific principle; I see it constantly. Someone uploads a video of themselves being themselves because they value their own personality, they think it’s useful or fruitful. A word I’ve grown to love is the word telos. It’s an ancient Greek word meaning an end or a purpose. Someone with telos is someone using their agency, in transit towards something. That is what I define as smart: agency and movement.

Someone who has a lengthy metaphysical argument around objective or subjective morality but no practical fruit outside of the abstract isn’t as impressive to me. Someone who wants to do something, and is compelled to do it without needing instruction or motivation from outside themselves, is. Being polished or optimised isn’t what’s valuable to me, it’s the willingness to try despite the absence of it.

When I say the things I say, I do not care about being the most correct, the best take, or being the smartest or wisest person in the room. I do not care about any of it, really. I just care about doing something. I consume a lot of information, so my pragmatism tells me to synthesise it into something useful. I just want a fun society to exist in.

I want a playful mode of being, without constant comparison, survival pressure, or pointless status competition. I just want us to be as we are, and enjoy life without needing to live up to arbitrary ideals and standards restricting how playful life could be. Everything I say is just pointing in that direction, not to uplift myself, not to convince anyone I’m special, and definitely not to sound smart.

So honestly, I take offense to it sometimes. I don’t like it when my thoughts and writing get filed away as just “thoughtful.” If I say something smart, your responsibility now is to use it. You have a new piece of wisdom, be pragmatic with it. Don’t sit there clapping for me like I’m some oracle on a stage. If you really want to compliment me, tell me that because of something I said, you decided to do something and you’ll keep doing it. That means more to me than a simple “you’re intelligent.”

Someone who inspires me is Kanye. My Plato, seriously. Every time I look at Kanye, he makes me want to push higher and reach a more dramatic, mythologised creative life. It reminds me to try, to stop worrying and push harder. His whole career was defined by his pragmatism; he wanted to rap, and so without a clear path, he decided he’d figure it out sooner or later. If I were to have an influence on people, it’d be like that.

I might talk about the things that make up identity, religion, politics, those sorts, but I’m not condemning anyone’s identity or humanity; I’m condemning the lack of pragmatism. We keep saying we want these things, or we say we value these ideals. We seem to rarely ever move towards them, just argue.

I spend every moment of my life thinking about how I can try. What more can I do, what more can I attempt. I don’t want to be the only one trying, the only one doing something novel. I want society to be novel. I want existence itself to be novel. I don’t want to be the centre of it, I want to exist inside it. That’s not an isolated effort.

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What I mean, more precisely, is that a meaningfully free society requires neither the absence of structure, which liberalism mistakes for freedom, nor a forced structure, which conservatism mistakes for order and belonging. Instead, I propose that a self-actualised and reflective society is what is most meaningful: one equipped for its own dignity.

This is a political reflection on the alienation of contemporary life, on the potential infrastructure for something better, and on the utility of an orthopraxic, pluralistic life built around art and aesthetic awareness rather than dogma.

Liberalism, Negative Freedom and Alienation

Liberal life is built around the preservation of individual liberty. It maintains the belief that society should protect the rights, freedom and equality of the individual first. People should be free to live, speak and worship as they choose. Governments are constituted via democracy rather than from a central authority figure. Much of liberal thought and action is centred on the premise of freedom from structures that may infringe on an individual’s personal liberties.

The failure of contemporary liberalism is that while it has freed individuals from certain oppressive structures and regimes, it fails to produce reflective, self-directing citizens for its own stability. People become free, but they do not necessarily have the tools to know what they are free towards. Isaiah Berlin coined a term for this: negative freedom.

This is the absence of external obstacles, barriers or interference. Freedom is defined entirely by what is absent, such as authority figures or institutions that may control your agency. Negative freedom is effective at teaching individuals that their freedom should not be infringed upon, but not necessarily what they should do with that freedom, thus creating a vacuum. We have more agency, but without inherent direction.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim described this condition as anomie: a state of normlessness in which the old structures of society no longer exist, but no new stable structures have emerged to give individuals a coherent social identity. This creates feelings of hopelessness, isolation and a lack of purpose. What tends to fill this gap is consumerist and capitalist incentive and culture, meaning liberalism successfully frees us of structure, then replaces its functions with fragile alternatives.

This is clear in how romance and dating are currently carried out among Gen Z. As we have become more liberal, traditional views on romance, love and relationships have been moved away from. This was a necessary effort in respecting the individual autonomy of women, who lacked agency within relationships in previous generations, while men largely retained theirs. However, the concept of devotion and commitment over time became increasingly disinherited.

What filled the gap left by liberalism in romance was consumerism’s dating app culture: there is always another match, another potential connection, another option waiting on an app such as Hinge, Tinder or Instagram. In preserving individual freedom, we have entered a dating culture that preserves optionality over meaningful experience, leading to a paradox: individuals experience more freedom and more choices, yet less meaningful relationships, ending up with things such as “situationships” and failed “talking stages,” as named by the current cultural zeitgeist. This is beneficial not to the common person, but to the entrepreneur, who can manipulate algorithms and build subscriptions, turning romance, relationships and dating into a commodity driven by alienation and isolation, rather than a genuine experience that might cure it.

This is a localised example of a broader failure. Ultimately, liberalism does not inherently provide positive infrastructure for individuals. By focusing solely on negative freedom, it leaves individuals vulnerable to a cycle of consumption that offers the illusion of choice while sustaining the very conditions that lead one back to consumption in the first place. To move beyond this, society requires a more substantive definition of freedom, one earned through communal practice rather than the absence of interference alone.

Right-Wing Traditionalism and Over-Specification

While contemporary liberalism creates a societal vacuum by under-specifying social traditions, beliefs and practices, the right successfully diagnoses the loss of structure, obligation and communal orientation as the cause of societal anomie. Traditionalist arguments recognise that human beings require a transcendental force and a sense of belonging to a coherent community in order to flourish. The issue with these movements is their lack of pragmatic capacity, leading to the mirror opposite of liberalism. Where liberalism offers no infrastructure for the self, traditionalism insists on a single, historically inherited infrastructure as the only possible source of meaning, usually a singular national, religious or ethnocentric identity.

The most prominent example of this failure is found in movements like Christian nationalism, which posits that a functional society can only exist if all citizens are united under, and compliant with, a singular religious ideal, being Christianity. This approach is rooted in what Isaiah Berlin termed monism: the dogmatic certainty that there is a single universal truth for how every individual should live their life.

The issue this raises is that it makes individuals subservient to the tradition, rather than making the tradition serve the needs of the human person. The lack of pragmatism is most visible here, as it often flattens real human complexity in service of tradition, leading individuals to either shrink or deny their own lived experience. This produces internal conflict and cognitive dissonance, threatening the mental wellbeing of society’s members in the name of tradition.

Because the content of these traditionalist structures is typically fixed and inherited rather than agentically chosen, the only tools available for maintaining them are often compliance, compulsion and exclusion. Wherever there is exclusion, however, there is the potential for animosity and social discohesion, and for individuals to form what Erik Erikson called a “negative identity”: an identity built on opposition, one that cannot experience harmony because part of the self requires an enemy or antagonist to sustain its own narrative. For instance, a religious individual who needs non-believers to be present in society in order to understand themselves as virtuous or meaningful.

The inherent weakness of dogmatic tradition is best illustrated by Alasdair MacIntyre’s example of the Polynesian people and their taboos. For centuries, these taboos provided meaningful spiritual purpose. Over time, however, they became a set of arbitrary limitations. This became apparent when King Kamehameha II broke the taboo system by sitting to eat with women, an act met with only scattered resistance, because the tradition had already become incoherent to most people who were still nominally bound by it.

This illustrates that even when enforced through political power, a tradition that has lost its transcendent value cannot sustain a society. Therefore, when the right attempts to return a modern, diverse population to these old structures, such as a nation governed through religion, it is often trying to revive a tradition that no longer resonates with the general public. Tradition is ineffective when enforced: religion and its ideals do not appear virtuous to those who do not affirm its metaphysics.

Liberalism and traditionalism both fail to solve the problem of anomie. Liberalism is correct that we need to preserve individual autonomy and agency, but it fails to provide the structure, tradition or incentive that makes autonomy meaningful. Traditionalists on the right correctly affirm that human beings need to submit to something higher than themselves in order to find some sense of telos, but they insist on a rigid, exclusionary infrastructure that diminishes human autonomy in the process.

Religion as Social Technology: Japan’s Model of Orthopraxy

The synthesis required to bridge the gap between liberalism’s vacuum and traditionalism’s dogmatism, in my opinion, lies in reframing religion not as a set of supernatural or metaphysical propositions requiring belief, but as functional social technology. Western society’s longstanding zeitgeist is orthodoxy, meaning correct belief. This is exemplified by the commonality of debates and conversations surrounding the existence or non-existence of God, which God is true, and, within religious traditions themselves, which institution is most faithful or accurate. The shift required is a movement towards orthopraxy: correct practice over correct belief, using ritual, symbol and community as infrastructure to produce identity, purpose and continuity.

By treating religion as “technology,” society can adopt and adapt its most beneficial elements, such as moral guidance and communal experience, without the need for dogmatic submission.

The most effective empirical example of this practice-based approach is found in the coexistence of Shinto and Buddhism in Japan. This demonstrates how a culture can maintain a collective identity and shared symbolic language without forced compliance with mythology. Shinto functions as an indigenous faith to Japan, cultivating aesthetic awareness and providing the framework for communal events, harvest prayers and festivals such as matsuri. It lacks a founder, sacred scripture or fixed dogma, while still allowing people to root their identities heavily within it.

While Shinto governs the celebration of life and community, character formation and death are traditionally handled through Buddhist ritual. A popular phrase in Japan is “born Shinto, die Buddhist,” reflecting a system where these two religious traditions complement each other rather than compete for exclusive truth. Ritual acts as a shared symbolic language that strengthens collective identity. Most people who participate in these rituals do so for their cultural and communal value rather than as an expression of sincere belief or metaphysical claim; Shinto gods function more as mythology, and Buddhism itself is non-theistic.

This suggests the solution to the problem of “freedom from” without a “freedom to,” the very condition that produces anomie, is an infrastructure of orthopraxy: the right communal rituals and events that foster a shared sense of identity. A concerning trait of Western society may be its abandonment of the communal and ritualistic tools that religion once provided.

Religion-inspired technologies are capable of giving us a sense of telos, direction and purpose, and continuity that can be passed down through generations, offering resilient, transcendent meaning as a response to the fragile, dissolving meanings that foster anomie and fuel consumer culture. Collective ritual also produces a kind of emotional synchronisation, where individuals bond and integrate as a collective, decreasing alienation and isolation.

Therefore, the proposal is to construct a civil secular religion. This is not a cult, but a positive infrastructure inspired by the social and cognitive infrastructures of religion. The goal is to create a society where tradition serves the human person rather than the human serving tradition. Looking at religion, and especially at Japan, can teach us how to build new structures that provide the transcendent meaning necessary for a functional society.

Neohumanism, The New Religion

If religion’s function, once separated from its metaphysical claims, is to provide identity, ritual, purpose and continuity, the question becomes what actually plays that role in a society that is plural, where no single tradition can be assumed shared. I claim the answer to be art and literature: a proposal I call Neohumanism, in deliberate echo of the humanism that once did this work before.

Art succeeds where enforced tradition fails because it has no central authority capable of declaring it heretical. There is no council that can excommunicate you for misinterpreting a painting. Its transcendence is structurally decentralised and personal, which is what prevents it from calcifying into compulsion and exclusion. This is what separates it from a cult or a mere hobby. A cult requires submission to a fixed authority; a hobby requires no shared ritual at all. What is being proposed sits between the two: communal without being doctrinal, something fundamentally participatory.

This idea is not entirely new. The Renaissance already demonstrated its plausibility. What defined the period was not simply an artistic explosion but a sustained cultural project asking a single transcendent question: what does it mean to be human? The question was asked and answered from every conceivable angle, expressed initially through Christian and Catholic material, yet later found in secular movements such as Romanticism. The object of inquiry, the telos of the Renaissance, was the human condition, and it remained constant even as the metaphysical framing around it dissolved. This question is what generated shared meaning. Art does not require consensus on belief to function as communal infrastructure; it only requires a shared willingness to keep asking the same question from multiple perspectives.

To be effective, this cannot remain a private or passive good. Reading a novel alone, or visiting a gallery occasionally, is personally fulfilling, but it is not infrastructure. What would be required is the deliberate construction and prioritisation of communal creative practice: public poetry spaces, literature workshops, creative writing classes, art studios, community galleries and book clubs, woven into everyday life as ritual. This matters because infrastructure implies recurrence and shared participation.

This kind of infrastructure trains two capacities simultaneously: expression and interpretation. People learn to articulate their own account of what it means to be human, but also learn to read and understand someone else’s account, including one built from a radically different worldview. A Christian’s account of suffering, a Muslim’s account of devotion and an atheist’s account of morality can all sit within the same communal practice without conflict over supernatural claims, because the shared object is the human condition itself, not agreement on its ultimate cause.

This is precisely the pluralism that traditionalism could not sustain, achieved without the vacuum that liberalism left behind.

Informed Freedom

What this produces, if genuinely pursued, is not merely a “more artistic society” but a more reflective one. A society trained in expression and interpretation becomes a society more capable of understanding itself and other people. Negative liberty tells you that you are free to be anything, without any infrastructure for how or what to choose. What is being proposed here is closer to Berlin’s account of positive liberty, self-mastery and self-authorship, but earned through chosen communal practice rather than imposed through ideology or dogma. Real freedom is not merely the absence of interference, but the presence of an informed capability to reason, choose and live a meaningful life. Informed freedom is negative freedom given the material to think with.

This is where the argument closes the loop from the earlier account of modern dating. The point is not that situationships and talking stages are morally inferior or inherently problematic, but that they often exist arbitrarily, in the absence of any real answer to “what is intimacy?”, a question liberalism has never answered in the wake of deconstructing older, more dogmatic forms of relationship. Through writing, art, or any other communal creative practice, the need for the endless optionality of app-driven romance has, to me personally, become irrelevant to obtaining a sense of identity or coherence, because a focus on art, writing and interpretation has given me a stronger, less fragile answer to what intimacy means. This is not a call to the old, compulsory model of devotion, nor a call to the same conclusion I have reached. It is the recognition that through media literacy and self-expression, society can cultivate individuals with greater self-knowledge, able to consciously choose the options that provide meaningful experience for themselves.

A meaningfully free society, then, requires neither the absence of structure that liberalism mistakes for freedom, nor the forced structure that traditionalism mistakes for belonging, but a society equipped, through shared ritual and an increased value placed on art and reflection, to determine its own direction.

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Mishil was born in the south, in the town of Alayad, to two parents of little means and lesser mercy. He was the fifth of seven children, and was sent out to work by the age of four. In his seventh year, his father died of illness, and with no means of provision left, three of his siblings were given away to slavers and traffickers for the sake of coin. His mother continued to struggle to feed the four who remained, and as they grew more and more malnourished, she turned, at last, to thievery.

Mishil began his own adolescence the same way. First bread, then coin, then whatever a blade could win him. By his sixteenth year, he was a feared thief and a gang member. By his eighteenth, he had killed a man, not in defense, but in pursuit of coin. The man he killed was revealed to be a noted member of the Typhosian councils, and Mishil was forced to flee his home for the towns beyond it.

Bondage

By his twenty-first year, he was caught by the Provinces and given over to the authority of the Typhosian Councils, who sold him into bondage in the south-west. Mishil remained there for years, carrying stone, soil, brick, and mortar across the southwestern lands. It was in his sixth year of enslavement that he met two other former thieves, slaves like himself, named Luis and Franciscus.

On the night of Franciscus’s thirty-eighth birthday, when Mishil was twenty-nine, a great storm plagued the lands they worked. Strong winds tore down the shacks they slept in, and heavy rain drowned the soil of the fields they tended. The slavers shackled all twelve slaves. Franciscus, Mishil, and Luis among them, were dragged to a cave, leaving them under the watch of a few guardsmen to see that none escaped during the storm.

The slavers never returned to the cave. When the guardsmen went to search for them, one by one, none of the guardsmen returned either. At last, the single guardsman left behind set the slaves free, fearing the winds might take him too.

Carmenedei

Mishil found himself travelling north, to where the Typhosian Councils held no jurisdiction. After three weeks of pilgrimage, he arrived in Carmenedei, a town revered for its music, art, and literature. There he laid down his blade and his thievery, taking up odd work instead — washing feet, clearing manure, and carrying the dead to their burials.

Eight months into his new life, everything changed while he was cleaning feet. It was there he met Peter Prilut, a renowned and retired painter, who took notice of Mishil’s quiet, dutiful nature and offered to teach him to paint, in exchange for nothing more than a roof and a meal. Mishil accepted.

For the next year, Mishil painted every day, and quickly learned to capture form, emotion, and meaning. He painted beggars on the street, prostitutes in the alley, and children thieving coin. It was this work that brought him a small notoriety, enough, in time, to earn him an invitation to the Festival of Arts, an annual congregation of art and literature.

The First Festival

The Festival of Arts was held each year at the turning from winter to spring. Carmenedei opened its gates to painters, poets, and musicians from every province willing to travel. Mishil arrived with three canvases under his arm and little else, his only patron Peter Prilut — a forgotten relic of the art world, though once famous in his day. For two days he stood beside his own work, saying little, watching the wealthy pass him by. Few stopped to look at his paintings of prostitutes and thieves, and those who did often gasped in shock.

On the third evening, the square filled for the closing performances, and a young musician took the stage as the penultimate act. Mishil found himself at the front of the crowd, watching her.

The singer was named Thera Citharistriae. She stood at the centre of the square in robes too fine for the company she kept, playing a grand oak harp, her whole body given over to the sound she made. Mishil knew little of music. He had never been taught, nor could his upbringing have afforded it. But listening to Thera play and sing so angelically, he understood she was something no other musician in that square was. For the length of the song, he did not move. When it ended and the square erupted into applause, he found he had not clapped at all. He had forgotten how.

When she left the stage, Mishil still stood exactly where he had from the start of her performance. As she passed him, she greeted him — only to be met with a slight grunt in return. He had been struck with awe and fear at once: a man like him had no business standing near a woman like her. Her gown was foreign silk. His cloth was tattered and paint-stained.

As she walked on and the sublime feeling began to leave him, he packed his belongings and returned to Peter’s house that night. He painted from evening until morning. Not her, and not anyone else, but himself. For the first time, he painted his own face, and found upon it nothing but fear.

The House of Citharistriae

For two and a half years, Mishil continued to paint daily, growing better with each passing month. His notoriety grew alongside his skill, until he began to attract patrons of his own. Eventually, this brought him to the House of Citharistriae, and once again, to Thera. It was here, at last, that Mishil found the nerve to speak to her, and to introduce himself fully.

“You’re the painter my father hired,” she said, without question.

“I am.”

“I think I remember you...” she said, narrowing her eyes. “You were at the Festival two winters ago. Everyone clapped for my performance. Everyone except you. You weren’t impressed.”

Mishil felt the old fear rise in him again, and answered before he could stop himself: “I did not know how.”

“You didn’t know how to clap?” Thera replied, confused. “Are you certain you’re a capable painter?”

“No, no. I do know how. I only meant... I had never heard such a melody, not in my life. Truthfully, I had never heard anything like it.”

“Are you trying to woo your patron’s daughter?” she said. “Many men say the very things you are telling me now. I can tolerate it from beyond the walls of my home. I will not tolerate it from within.”

“I am not lying to you, I assure you,” Mishil said. “I am not from here, and I am not used to festivals such as these. Where I grew up, in the south, such music was never a priority. Only the Order’s hymns and laments taught us anything close to passionate song. It was new to me. Please, forgive my lack of manners.”

She stood in a moment of silence while observing Mishil and his mannerisms before turning her back. A house like hers did not permit its daughters idle conversation with hired painters. Before she left, she turned her head half-around to remind him:

“Paint my father well, I ask of you,” she said. “My house is in no mood for his temper.”

Mishil did not see Thera again after that conversation. He spent the next thirty-three days painting the largest portrait he had ever attempted, of Thera’s father. The man was so pleased with the result that he paid Mishil an extra five gold coins, beyond the twenty silver he was already owed. The portrait drew such admiration that houses neighbouring the House of Citharistriae came to see it for themselves, and in time, they too became his patrons, inviting him back to the Festival of Arts once more.

The Second Festival

Peter Prilut found Mishil before the performances began — older now, and smaller than Mishil remembered, though his eyes were exactly the same, still full of that same passion and flare for life. He embraced Mishil the way a father embraces a son, with great triumph. They spoke only briefly, of paint, of light, and of the year that had passed between them. Prilut spoke with great joy and pride of Mishil’s skill, urging him never to stop creating, no matter what might happen or wherever he might go. Mishil agreed, promising he would never let Prilut down. Soon after, the crowd began to gather, and Peter was pulled away by admirers who still remembered his name.

Later that afternoon, Mishil finished with his own crowd of admirers before moving toward the stage, in time for the performances. It was there that Thera found him last, before she took to the stage.

“Don’t forget to clap this time,” she said, with no testing in her words now — only a slight tease, and the familiarity that had begun to settle between them.

“I will try,” he said. “Don’t do too well, or I might fail you again.”

The Invasion

She had played her harp for perhaps four bars when the first arrow struck the boards beside her feet, stopping her song at once.

For a moment, no one understood what they were seeing. The second arrow found her father, striking him in the shoulder as he sat among the honoured guests near the stage. It was his cry that broke the crowd’s silence. More arrows followed, raining down, and more of the crowd were struck. The square erupted into screaming as the Mughtasib emerged from among the trees on the city’s eastern edge.

Mishil did not remember moving. Before he could blink, he was already on the stage, pulling Thera down from the platform as a flurry of arrows split the wood where they had been standing. He dragged her low and fast toward the forest behind the platform, hoping to evade capture. Smoke and flame had already consumed Carmenedei, where only moments before there had been song.

For five nights they walked toward the Midlands, sleeping in whatever cover the road offered. A hollow beneath a fallen tree, the ruin of an old grain store, the open sky over a grassy field, and anything else that presented itself. Mishil did not struggle, having spent years already hardened by slavery, but Thera, undoubtedly, did. Neither spoke of her father . Mishil did not ask, and Thera did not offer. In that silence, they grew, slowly, into each other’s company.

By the second night, she had stopped flinching at his nearness. By the third, she had begun to walk closer to him with each mile. By the fourth, they spoke of small things such as his years in Carmenedei, her years at the harp, his fondness for Peter Prilut, and the town they were travelling toward: Sera.

On the fifth day, Mishil opened himself fully to her at last, revealing his origins; his missing siblings, his years of thievery, the man he had killed, his enslavement, and his redemption in Carmenedei. Thera was astonished to find out the truth of Mishil, yet trusted him still, for he had already saved her life days earlier.

That same night, they made camp in a shallow gully off the road. Thera, who had not wept once since the arrow found her father, sat beside the fire and, without warning, began to cry. When Mishil moved to console her, she swatted his hand away and turned from him, wanting only to be left to her sorrow. She cried quietly, as though embarrassed to disturb the silence between them, but she did not ask him to look away. Nor did she ask him to console her.

Uncertain what else to do, Mishil reached instead for a piece of paper, laid it flat among the rest of his things, and took the charcoal from his bag.

He did not ask her permission, and so he worked quickly, and in near silence. Mishil glanced up only enough to catch the shape of her. The firelight’s detail on her cheek, the way her wavy hair had fallen to obscure her face. He did not try to make her beautiful. He only tried to make her true. Mishil had learned to render every beggar and every thief with their honest expression, the one exception being Thera’s father, the reason he had come to be with her at all.

When he was finished, he did not show her. He set the paper face-down beside him and said nothing. After a long while, Mishil fell asleep, and Thera’s crying slowed, and at last stopped. When she looked over at him, he was already unconscious, the paper resting beside him, untouched. She, too, fell asleep soon after.

Sera

It was only much later, once they had arrived safely in Sera and taken the first small room they could afford, that he finally showed it to her. Thera by the fire, mid-grief, in her most shrunken state. Despite how dark the emotion was, Mishil had rendered it so beautifully that the darkness scarcely seemed to matter. He had made her pain look transcendent.

“You made me beautiful,” she said. “I was beyond monstrous that night.”

“You were not monstrous,” Mishil said. “You were being human. Have you never cried before?”

“Not to that extent. Not since I was a child, maybe.” She paused, then asked, “Mishil, have you cried? Recently, I mean. In the last few years. You have been through so much more than I can imagine. How do you bear it?”

“Perhaps I don’t know how. I used to cry when I was small. Every day, every night. My mother beat me into silence, and still I would snivel and whimper. As I grew older, it grew harder. If I could still cry, I would. I have survived too much to be moved by much anymore. The heart grows colder.” He paused. “It doesn’t, at least, when I paint.”

For a single season they lived simply in Sera. Carmenedei had devolved into violence as the Mughtasib and Provinces clashed against each other. Mishil took whatever commission he could find, and Thera slowly returned to her harp, though she now only played for herself in the late of evening, when she believed him to be asleep. Mishil never was, and refused to let her realise it.

It was one ordinary morning, while Thera slept, that a newsboy came running through the streets, telling news of how Carmenedei was soon to be liberated from the Mughtasib, as the winds had assisted the Provinces in pushing them back. Victory was seemingly only months away.

Mishil looked at Thera, asleep in the single narrow bed they shared, and heard a voice speak to him:

She is the daughter of a wealthy house. You are a thief who killed for a mere twelve bronze coin, and was sold like cattle for it. Remember the luxury of her estate in the House of Citharistriae. Remember her father’s face in the portrait you painted, the fine clothes they wore, the customs he had never heard of, and the excess of silver they paid you.

Mishil was overcome with a strong force of shame, feeling as though the life he had been living with Thera was an act of theft as any other. He had stolen her chance for a meaningful life, purely by his talents. The only honest thing left to do, with this knowledge, was to return what he had taken, and go.

He left all his coin by her side, and departed before she woke.

The Old Man

He had no knowledge of where he would walk. He felt, in the moment, that this was the most honourable thing he had left inside of him. It was on the road east of Sera, past the old mill where the forest thinned to farmland full of cattle, that he found an old man. He was seated against a fence post, too still, breath thin and uneven. His chest rose slowly and fell slower, his mouth left agape. Beside him, it seemed, a pouch had slipped from his failing grip, revealing twenty-five silver coins scattered upon the ground.

Mishil’s oldest instincts rose in him before the newer ones could stop them. He knew how easy it would be to rob the poor old man of all his coin. Instead, he picked up, one by one, all twenty-five coins, and placed them back in the pouch, before placing the pouch into the old man’s palm, closing his frail fingers around it.

The old man, in a sudden moment, opened his eyes and took a deep breath, startling Mishil. He looked at him for a long moment with a weathered and sun-worn face, and grabbed him with his empty hand.

“Keep it!” he said, with a frail urgency. “I will not need it when the sun rises again!”

“You are not well, sir. Let me help you to town,” Mishil attempted to say.

“What would a town do for me? I am one hundred and seven years old! What good is another year to me? I have no need for this life of mine, boy. Take the coin! Live! Don’t waste your life,” he scoffed.

“Are you not afraid of dying?” Mishil questioned.

“I am one hundred and seven, and I have not lived my life at all. I spent every year running from anything. From all my wives, from all my children, I ran! I was stubborn, and I was weak. Now look at me! I am dying, and my body is failing me. I have no roof to shelter myself under, and no inheritors of my fortune! I have spent the last of my coin on prostitutes and booze! You want me to keep my coin? So that I kill myself with harlots and drink?” The old man laughed.

“What? No. No, don’t do that. There must be better ways to spend the last of your earnings,” Mishil said.

“What would you do? Spend it on harlots? Maybe if you’re noble, you’d buy a ranch, farm some cattle. Maybe if you have a heart, you’d spend it on a woman. Say, young man, do you have one?” The old man continued to prod.

Mishil said nothing. The old man’s dying grin grew larger, exposing his absent teeth and rotting breath. “You’re a heartbreaker, like me, huh? Better you take this coin and fix it. What’s her name, son?”

“Thera,” Mishil said.

“Thera,” the old man repeated, pushing the pouch into Mishil’s chest with the last of his strength. When Mishil finally grabbed the pouch, the old man said a few more words.

“You can run to the other end of the Earth, and you still won’t be safe. Young man, you cannot run from yourself forever. Better you settle. Take care of this Thera of yours.”

By the time Mishil returned with help from Sera, the old man was already gone. Not fled, but passed. His hands lay still, loosely open, a faint grin fixed upon his sullied face. Mishil buried him there alone, beside the fence post, with no name to mark the grave.

Then he turned, and walked back to Sera, and did not leave again.

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For twenty years they watched Milad’s leadership. He was faithful to every teaching left him by Oruloa, and the Order remained in communion with Maiara — yet still they watched the world grow into disarray around it. The Oburonites continued their crusades in the west. The Mughtasib continued their invasions in the east. The teachings of the Order, however faithfully kept, were drowned beneath the world’s own woes.

After fifty-nine years, Milad died, and the Order split into a council overseen by a scholar named Typhos. He sheltered unrepentant thieves, murderers, and pillagers for a fee, behind the Order’s back, betraying the wisdoms of Maiara. By the Order’s two-hundred-and-thirty-first year, it had fallen entirely to corruption.

And so, at last, Asa came to Maiara in question.

“My Mother, my Mother! Have you seen what peril they have made of your grace?
My Mother, my Mother, is it not woe that you feel?
Is mankind not the child reared from your daughter’s tears,
as I am the child reared from yours?

Do you not lament the tears of the child of war,
knowing he will grow only to monger fear in another?
My Mother, my Mother, is it not you his war seeks?
Is it not his blindness for which we weep?”

When Maiara spoke back unto him, her words returned:

“My son, my treasure, my Ancient of Sorrows,
I have felt every hurt.
Yet did I not appoint Seth to lead?
Did I not give mankind hope?

Did he not mourn his father’s absence?
Did he not share our sorrows?
Did I not provide them order?
Did they not reject my hope?

My son, my treasure, my Ancient of Sorrows,
I have never rejected them.
They rejected me.”

With her response, Asa sat in contemplation for four days. On the fifth he returned with his argument to share:

“My Mother, my Mother! I have sat and thought.
Why is it that they must grieve to know your worth?
Why is it sorrow that shall lead them back?

Was it fair that Seth had to grieve Ish,
in order to find your grace?
Was it fair that Milad had to grieve from birth,
in order to find your grace?
Was it fair that Eshuai had to grieve his father,
in order to find your grace?

My Mother, my Mother! I do not believe you are cruel —
but why must the world bleed its sorrows
in order to find your grace?”

Maiara heard Asa’s cries and answered:

“My son, my treasure, my Ancient of Sorrows,
Do you not remember where I came from?
Was it not my father who created me in perfect love?
Was it not Eve, whom I created in the same?

My son, my treasure, my Ancient of Sorrows,
could I have loved them, and forced my grace upon them?
Would my love even be a gift?
I could not make them see me — I could only wait for them to see.

I do not wish for a world of sorrow,
yet sorrow is what reminds them to see me.”

Asa spoke then with a confidence he had not shown before. It was this argument, that would break his mother into weeping.

“My Mother, my Mother! It is I who shall go!
I will venture into all the sorrows of creation.
I will restore all communion with your grace.

Have I not felt your sorrows?
Have I not seen the same child walk toward war?
Have I not felt Eve’s sorrows?
Have I not felt the wages of war upon the innocent?

My Mother, my Mother! So it is sorrow that binds?
Was it not the sorrow of Seth that created the Order?
Was it not the grief of Eshuai that upheld his kingdom?

My Mother, my Mother! Allow this venture of mine!
I shall descend from this perfect creation,
and take the same imperfect walk that Ish once had.
My Mother, my Mother! Allow me this rite!
I will become the sorrow of all creation,
from the lands of the west to the lands of the east.
I shall bear all their sorrows,
so that when I return, they may follow.”

It was from there that Asa turned his back on perfect creation, and with Eve and Maiara’s final blessing and final tears, he departed from perfection unto the world.

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Your experience of life is heavily dictated by how you use your attention and awareness. You can choose to experience the world in one big rush of dopamine and stimulation, but you’ll miss out on a lot of the beauty the world has to offer. Making life a constant rush keeps you on a treadmill that never ends and never truly satisfies. Every time you stop, that strange void comes back — until you learn to slow down.

You can’t experience “peace” fast. Which phrase sounds more intuitively correct — slow peace or fast peace? Why do I assume you said slow?

Learning to have a relationship with slow moments is something I’ve gradually come to understand the impact of. It changes your awareness of not only yourself but your environment too. Suddenly smaller details become more obvious and desires become simpler.

For instance, I went to listen to an audiobook by a river a few months ago. An older gentleman came and sat by me and gave me bread to help him feed the ducks. It was a quiet, somewhat serene activity — there was peace in it. There was melancholy too. I realized he probably doesn’t get many opportunities to do something as simple as sit with someone.

That’s the thing about peace and melancholy, they’re not opposites at all. They can exist in a moment together, or independently; you can feel melancholy and peace, or peace alone, or melancholy alone. They have a symbiotic relationship, more often than not arriving as a pair.

I think the real value of melancholy is the awareness it creates. You see the beauty in things, but you also see their fragility, their impermanence. It’s a form of mourning that deepens your relationship with whatever experience you’re having. An experience becomes most meaningful when you hold all of it — the beauty and the sadness both. A simple example comes from Neil deGrasse Tyson, who’s pointed out that the very fact flowers die is part of what gives them meaning. That’s a subtle melancholic experience. We’re conscious a flower is ephemeral, yet that makes us appreciate its presence far more.

You don’t avoid buying flowers just because they’ll die. The inescapable fact that it will die is part of why there’s value in its presence. I think that’s why melancholy has become so sacred to me. The deepest form of appreciating life is melancholy. It’s almost like emotional weightlifting. The more you sit with the heartache of an experience, the more meaningful it becomes.

Besides, the idea of being “weightless” is a child’s privilege; it’s not possible to be weightless as an adult without becoming irresponsible. I don’t even believe someone who’s had everything handed to them, who’s never “objectively” suffered, could be truly weightless. That’s because suffering is a phenomenon, not an event. What counts as suffering is shaped subjectively inside the person experiencing it, so even someone who hasn’t suffered as much as you or me has still suffered relative to their own condition. Which means melancholy will still have some place in their life, attached to whatever they consider weight.

The mastery of melancholy is by far the greatest spiritual accomplishment possible. To integrate melancholy without being ruled by it is to truly see things clearly. To actually be self-sovereign, you have to be willing to be at least a little melancholic. If every time the tiniest bit of weight touches you, you squirm and run from it, all you have is that endless treadmill — running from your own experience.

I think I’m overdoing it a little sometimes, but if you actually know me, you know I exaggerate everything. When I say I act like Marlon Wayans, I’m genuinely not joking. I exaggerate EVERYTHING, including my melancholic states. That’s not to say I get depressed, though that’s sometimes what people assume. It’s better described through actual experience.

One massive discovery I made in life is the extent to which Pentecostal theology and the frameworks common in West African communities were largely shaped by survival under colonialism then preserved as tradition, with survival rhetoric and logic passed down culturally in disguise. That’s obviously a melancholic realization, one that holds a lot of weight. It’s unfortunate to look at your mother soil and see this continuing with no clear sign of a paradigm shift on the horizon.

Does that mean I’m fundamentally “depressed” because of that awareness? No. I just understand this weight extensively, and I can sit with it. On the other side of that knowledge is more knowledge. I’m not within those conditions anymore, and I can be thankful for that, though I once was. Thinking about all of it is a melancholic experience but on the other side of that melancholy, is freedom and hope. I can allow myself to imagine a better future only because I sat with it all in the first place.

I think of melancholy as a corridor. Everyone says there’s light at the end of the tunnel, so I can’t be that far off. If you never walk through that corridor, you’ll never see peace or freedom. The melancholic walk is perhaps one of the most sacred passages there is.

The point stands: self-sovereignty fundamentally includes melancholy. You are not free if you cannot hold weight, that’s just avoidance dressed up as peace. The more weight you’re capable of bearing without buckling, the more free you are.

The more melancholic, too.

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Divine Desire.

There’s a couple of intellectual traditions and concepts that I borrow from in my attempt to answer this question. Here is the Overview of all relevant concepts:

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Overview

Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism is one of the most influential spiritual and philosophical systems, influencing all of the Abrahamic Religions. What it argues is that the root of existence stems from “The One.” This is an ultimate perfect source of all things, that is beyond thought or human description. The One divides itself through a process of emanation; where all of reality flows downward becoming more limited and more imperfect.

Kenosis

Kenosis is a term in Christianity to describe Christ’s nature — meaning “Self-emptying”. What is important to understand here is that Christ is understood as the revelation of “God’s nature.” It describes how Jesus gave up his divine nature to become human during the incarnation. This ties into Neoplatonism’s idea of emanation; Christ becomes the Human representation of emanation itself.

Apophatic Theology

Aphophaticism or Apophatic Theology is the understanding that an Infinite God, is ultimately unknowable ( A mystery) as we are finite human beings. Therefore, the approach that must be used to understand God is through negation, stating what God is not rather than what he is. All human concepts of God are too small to capture the ultimate mystery of the divine. A mystery cannot be fully defined because it would cease to be a mystery. This relates to Neoplatonism’s “The One” as it expands on the idea that God (The One) is ultimately unknowable and how we should relate to that.

Ground Of Being

Paul Tillich argues God is not a “Man in the Sky” like commonly believed. God, instead is the Ground Of Being. This describes ultimate reality as the foundation all things that can emerge from. God ceases to be a cosmic judge and is the existential power that keeps everything to falling into nothing; the deepest, most unknowable part of all that exists, whether that is man, woman, rock, fish or tiger. All of them at their deepest level, are dependent on God. This concept here suggests how we all relate to God or The One — we are all at are deepest level a product of The God as the Ground Of Being / The One.

Theosis / Deification

Theosis is a theological concept that suggests the goal of human life is to participate in the divine life and grace of God. It is Eastern Orthodoxy’s definition of humanity’s ultimate goal. Theosis becomes possible to humanity via the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

Divine Desire

Divine Desire

Having established God as the Ground of Being, we can now ask the next question: why does anything exist at all?

The answer proposed in this framework is Divine Desire.

To understand this, it is helpful to speak of God through analogy. Throughout this work, God will be described as Infinite Imagination. As argued by Apophatic Theology this means that this is not as a literal psychological mind, but as an analogy for the inexhaustible possibility contained within the Ground of Being. This language builds upon the concepts of the Ground of Being, The One, and Divine Mystery we established earlier.

Just as the human imagination can conceive countless possibilities such as people, places, objects, emotions, stories and relationships, the Infinite Imagination contains the possibility of all things without being limited by any one of them. It is source from which every possibility derives.

If the Ground of Being is the shared substrate of all existence, then everything that truly exists ultimately participates in it. This includes not only matter, but consciousness, beauty, meaning and emotion. Joy, grief, anger, hope, wonder and love are not independent realities floating outside the Ground of Being; within this framework they ultimately derive their possibility from it. This is the first metaphysical assumption we are to make.

The second assumption follows naturally. If Infinite Imagination contains every possibility, then it necessarily contains the possibility of perfect love. Yet because this Ground of Being is also understood as the ultimate source of feeling too, perfect love is not merely an abstract concept to be comprehended. It is something that can be perfectly known. This creates the concept of Divine Desire.

However, desire here must be understood carefully. As human beings, we usually desire because we lack. We experience hunger because we are empty. We seek affection because we fear loneliness. We pursue success because we fear insufficiency. Finite desire is often shaped by scarcity.

Divine Desire is necessarily different.

God does not desire because something is missing. Infinite Being cannot be completed by anything outside itself. Rather, Divine Desire arises from absolute abundance. It is the movement of fullness toward expression, not deficiency toward fulfilment.

The difference is analogous to two people choosing food. One reaches desperately for a stale loaf of bread because starvation leaves no alternatives. The other stands before a banquet with every conceivable dish already available and freely chooses the meal that offers the richest experience. Both desire, yet one desires from lack while the other desires from abundance.

Perfect love also has certain intrinsic qualities. Genuine love cannot be coerced, manipulated or forced into existence. It requires genuine otherness and it requires freedom of choice.

If I only love another person because they depend upon me, or because I can control their choices, then the love I have is self-referential and what exists is not love but possession. Genuine love preserves the freedom of the beloved. It allows the possibility of rejection while continuing to will the good of the other participant.

If this is true even of finite human love, then the perfect love understood by an Infinite Imagination must likewise include genuine freedom. Divine Desire is therefore not the desire to possess another, but the desire to make genuine communion possible. Such communion requires beings who possess their own subjectivity and whose love can be freely given rather than mechanically determined.

Here the concepts of kenosis and emanation become illuminating. Because Infinite Being loses nothing by giving, creation is not an act of necessity but of grace. God does not create in order to become complete. God creates because infinite fullness can endlessly pour itself out without exhaustion. Creation is therefore the continual self-emptying of Divine Love.

Every created being is a unique expression of Infinite Imagination, revealing something of its source without exhausting it. An Artist can create a painting that contains a snapshot of their psyche. A gallery can provide a story about the artist too, however no single painting nor gallery will ever make the Artist’s psyche full comprehensible.

Existence itself is therefore the result of Divine Desire: God freely desires perfect communion and therefore brings into being a genuinely agentic creation capable of participating in that love.

Implications

If this framework is true, then God is ultimately an infinite mystery who cannot be exhausted by human concepts & knowledge but a reality that can be genuinely participated in. The purpose of religion is therefore not merely to define God correctly, but to cultivate a mode of being that increasingly participates in God’s own life.

Salvation is consequently not understood primarily as intellectual affirmation, but as participation. To become like God is not to acquire God’s essence, but to participate by grace in God’s way of being. Grace is therefore not merely something God gives; it is the manner in which God exists. As finite beings to become increasingly characterised by grace, we become by participation what God is by nature.

Salvation therefore becomes the transformation of desire. Human desire is not to be abolished but healed. Rather than desiring from scarcity, fear and incompleteness, the spiritual life gradually reorients desire toward abundance, generosity and self-emptying love. Theosis is the process by which finite desire comes to participate in Divine Desire.

Among Christian traditions, Eastern Orthodoxy preserves this vision most explicitly through the doctrine of Theosis, summarised by St. Athanasius:

“God became man so that man might become god.”

This statement does not imply that we finite humans can become God but that we can participate in the divine life by grace.

Within this framework, Jesus Christ is the perfect revelation of Divine Desire in human form. His life reveals what desire looks like when it is no longer governed by lack, fear or possession, but by perfect love. Christ therefore reveals not merely what God is like, but what God desires humanity to become and commune with. He is the pattern of fully integrated human existence: finite, yet perfectly oriented toward infinite grace.

To follow Christ, then, is not merely to imitate moral behaviour or affirm theological propositions. It is to cultivate the same relationship to desire that Christ embodies. This is one that gives rather than takes, communes rather than possesses, and empties itself without ceasing to be full.

This also transforms the way Scripture is understood. The primary purpose of the Bible is not simply to function as a historical record or a catalogue of doctrines to affirm or a rulebook but as a sacred text that progressively reshapes human consciousness. Its narratives, poetry, law, prophecy and wisdom reveal recurring patterns of desire, alienation, repentance, communion and transformation.

Whether every passage is literal, symbolic or some combination of both is therefore secondary to its ultimate purpose. Scripture is a means by which finite minds are gradually conformed to the mind of Christ. Faith is not certainty about every interpretation; it is trust that, when encountered with humility, Scripture participates in the healing of desire and the restoration of humanity into communion with God.

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I’ve been sitting with this quote for weeks. I’ve been trying to build a system around why it’s such a good one, so I suppose this piece is really an introduction to that idea. I’m still deciding on a name, but I’m leaning toward Imaginative Realism.

Everything we have starts in the imagination. Our phones began as a hypothesis: could a computer be made handheld and portable? Cars started the same way: could there be transport more efficient than the horse, something mechanical, like the train? The chairs we sit on had to exist in a designer’s mind before they became objects we could touch, feel, and sit on. Reality is defined by what imaginations we allow to actualise.

Take a concept like masculinity. You can’t find “raw” masculinity anywhere in the real world. There’s no object of masculinity that exists. What exists is a collective imagination of it, one that goes on to shape people’s entire inner worlds and external realities. When people don’t understand that a label or construct is a product of collective imagination rather than an observation of reality, they end up alienated, trying to live up to what’s imagined instead of what’s actually there.

I’ve been talking a lot about romance online lately, and a big part of why is that romance is where a lot of people personally cap their imagination. Many people limit the idea of a meaningful life to being loved, or being chosen. That idea is powerful, but it’s still just an idea. Romance isn’t inherently that meaningful or that powerful. It’s imagination handing power to the idea by refusing to imagine an alternative.

Because of that, people spend their lives chasing partnership, convinced that every sacrifice along the way is necessary to get there. A lot of dating culture is about letting go of, denying, or hiding certain parts of yourself to become more desirable, because that’s what’s supposed to make life meaningful under this collective imagination.

I’m not trying to moralise here. My point is that if you let yourself imagine a life with meaning beyond romance, and let yourself hold ideas beyond it, you open up a lot more room to move. You can express yourself fully without worrying how it affects your desirability, because you know your life is more meaningful than that alone.

I like making big claims about myself and my potential, and people often react like I’m being delusional. I don’t see the problem. We’re all delusional about something. Instead of submitting to delusions about another person and their role in your life, you can submit to delusions about yourself. We all have our fantasies. Mine are just about me and my future, not someone else.

My point is that the reality you can inhabit is limited by the one you can imagine. You can’t be successful if you can’t imagine success. How would you motivate yourself? You can’t write a poem if you can’t imagine a scene or a feeling. What would you even write about?

Carl Jung was right: all the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. Most of what we are, and what we do, is the product of what we let ourselves imagine. A limited imagination is a limited life. The key to better mental health, more success, more connection, more abundance isn’t more strategising alone. It’s a stronger imagination. The key to a better society, too, is a better imagination. You are limited by what you can imagine, and we are limited by what we can imagine together.

So what right do we have to depreciate imagination?

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