When this virtual world you are honouring with your visit right at this moment, is brimming with life and adventure, the real world it aims to reflect is often times a rather flat affair, with only a sparse number of events that leave any sort of impression on the mind, and with time in the evenings or mornings to make these shine in a shimmering, sparkling blog-reality.
Any event can come alive and begin to sparkle if you spend that kind of quality time with it: you sit at your desk. You have a glass of something cool and refreshing, let it seep upwards into your brain through osmosis as you concentrate. You feel the bluish glow of the screen on your face. You feel the tingle in your fingers as you remember the little hand movements you need to operate the machine that lets you compose and travel. The internet space craft that allows you to look at any detail of the world you choose, anything you need to make that little map come even more alive, that little piece of the world you are trying to draw, according to your own personal measurements. A piece of your world, for your precious map-readers’ orientation, information, investigation, and intoxication. And you hack away at the keys, composing it, drawing the outlines of areas, the course of the rivers, colouring in the different altitudes of mountains and valleys, inventing a key to the different types of produce and the different riches each place has to offer.
Look at my first month in Japan. I needed these journeys. I gave you fourteen little maps in one month. I was only starting out here. I was mapping out my own environment for my own personal use, finding supermarkets, dojos and gyms to ensure my body and mind would continue to function at the necessary level. I had work, and no social life. But I was not suffering. I was travelling, tripping, and sharing it all with you. I had a spacecraft and a map making machine.
Then, things began to settle and take off. A very common oxymoron in the world of travelling, settling, and re-settling. People come in, different planes of exchanging information and energy, of creating sparkling worlds, there is obligation and temptation, incubation and initiation, flagellation and resuscitation, all very energy and time-consuming activities.
And the world I share with you, the things I manage to take out of my busy life and make sparkle for you diminish. If there were 50 hours in a day, I would indulge in making everything sparkle twice, experience its splendour first hand, then revive and re-experience it through my words, opening it up to everybody else who wants to travel with me, every one of you, my precious readers, who give me the opportunity to experience the beauty of this double-grandeur, of sharing my adventures.
But for a while, life has been so full. This world is run by one person, and when reality takes over, you have to be right inside the battlefield. There is no more time to go on reconnaissance missions, map out areas, make things sparkle in dreamy journeys of the mind, develop strategies, and gather information. It is all right here. And you have nothing but your body and soul, and any armour, shield, or weapon you manage to pick up on the way to get through it. It is a miraculous battle. Full of the world, full of reality, full of splendour. Full of writing, too, but writing that would be inappropriately kept in a place like this, in a place anybody could discover on a random space craft journey, anybody could use in their map-making to find me. You have to be careful these days.
But for a while, I have left this world barren, and it was threatening to turn into a forgotten world of the past, along with Atlantis and the record-less world of ancient ninjas, only with less mystery and recognition attached to it, which is a fate I will not allow and can easily avoid, being the creator of this world.
Being a creator, I can tell you that a lot of the time, things do not go according to plan. I had the noble plan to work on the creation of this world conscientiously and regularly, to create along with it a sense of reliability, to create an enjoyable reading and relaxing habit in my readers at the same time as cultivating an enjoyable writing and working habit in myself. But in fact, most of the time, the only plan that works is the plan to create. Because it is more an urge than a plan, and thus much more likely to work. The urge to create. But even urges sometimes have to yield temporarily. I live in a pre-created world, and am constantly trying to create and re-create my life in it, at the same time as creating a new world from the results I achieve: this one.
And in this complicated work of my creation, dear reader, the holy days arrive not according to schedule, or calendar, but unexpectedly. The holy days when the creator rests from creating the world. But it is no simple rest. As stated above, it is holy, in other words, indispensable and undeniable in its rightness. I do not simply rest. No. In fact, I spend my holy days being re-created, and re-creating myself. It is a creator’s job. Without a fully created creator, no world can be created.
So as I succumb to the holy days that have struck me forcefully and unexpectedly, and are likely to hold up the process of creation repeatedly until early September – according to my unreliable plan of creation - I assure every visitor of my world, and every follower of my maps, that I have my space craft and my map making machine securely lodged in cardboard boxes to be moved to a new place from where I will continue following my urge, from where I will fly and explore, and type and draw, and colour in, and create. Hoping that all my readers are successfully re-creating themselves, too, in the holy days that strike the worlds of their creation.
