Who is an individual? A person following their path, not being influenced by others, not following trends unless one wishes to, not conforming to the crowds going into an occupation because that is where one’s talents are, never because that is where the money is. To believe what is essential to one in the life that an individual leads. Finding one’s voice, never imitating other agents, not one’s own. There are many voices on television and other forms of media; being an individual is not having those voices push one into another direction that is not one’s own. To know one’s path is found through times of trial and error, and to stay on that path once it’s located. To know and embrace that every individual has their way.
There are paths; it’s a search to find our way; it’s an experience, a design of life, to play with things that allow us to learn and be open to things around us. Paths are available as the individual; as there are individuals, there are many avenues to finding ourselves. We open the gates to see what is on the other side. At times, it may not be pleasant writing about people who wander many leagues to many lands, but anything is possible in a mythical world. Everyone is finding their path. Not all of them go anywhere; they could end up dead. There was once a trend in building fountains the more elaborate, the better, some used their entire savings, destroying themselves, and others didn’t let this sway them even if they were put under pressure by individuals or the community. Thus they came out ok, but that wasn’t easy. Many communities were trend-following. Eventually, these people left to seek other places where their paths would be more acceptable. That is why so many villagers and townspeople are looking for places to belong.
One life is not considered better than another; they are considered different and individual. There was a legend in the mythical world that people sought a stone that would find their path for them; they searched all their lives, never genuinely finding who they were. People had sought many lives to imitate, often finding nowhere to go. Was the stone natural? Perhaps none found out; a wise man said it was found in every person, within themselves. Because that stone represents us, they say water from the mountains finds the sea; it patiently travels. In the mythical world, it’s known that everyone born is a traveler through life.
There was always this sacredness of being oneself, the preciousness of being human in the mythical world. Still, some never found the sacredness within themselves in searching for that elusive fountain inside of all human beings.
So many people were searching for new information, ideas, inventions, and thoughts that individualism was the most important treasure. People would live deep in an underground mountain, work in a tower that reached the clouds would have a workshop many miles away. They would be considered kind of a hermit, in a way, not considered an individual. In the mythical world, families had tried to get their children into reputable or hereditary positions or occupations that some never took an interest in. Some tried to persist under pressure some of them succumbed. Others were given five years to return; many decided never to return, although the families sent people to search for them. They continued to live in the deserted cities, some of their chosen paths never working out. Many become old wanders. Some became disheveled as if so poor, but they came to become scholars giving up on the world as they age. Some came to our world, becoming legendary wizards, elves, and fairies. Leaders of philosophy had followers like religious founders in our world. There was and is a difference. They became the developers and builders of things that defined common sense and science. They were taught and encouraged to use their imagination to create new things to develop new concepts for society. None were judged as better than the other; they produce their items like tree branches that grow into different components.
Families in many regions design and make their clothes; their family styles are different, and every individual never follows the so-called national or universal norm. There is no such thing as a norm in the fantasy world. People wish to dress differently in every town and city, and within an individual who dresses very differently, there is no norm, no fashion industry. They would never accept Paris or New York; they would consider such a place of dictatorship in ways and clothing. Families try to dress differently and find their own identity in clothing to differentiate themselves from others. They hate universal fashion; they think it’s a way to make money, and that’s it. The poor have no choice but to dress any which way; they take the handed-down clothes from other wealthier people or anything they can get. Combinations of styles come, indeed; they are more innovative than the higher classes. They patch it up innovatively when their clothing wears out and influence others. Among the poor innovative technology, they know how to get resources, whatever they could make into something beautiful.
Each region, city, town, village, and ethnic group has innovative technology that doesn’t exist in other places, bringing pride to those regions’ people. Devices don’t have only one way to go in one technical direction. In our world, we use combustion engines for cars; in the mythical world, they use one form of levitation engine; in another place or village or region, it thought engines utilizing the thought of the controller. Another uses the sun’s energy; others use water cubes, not ice cubes, but cubes composed of water; some vehicles are made of paper that is strengthened by light, there’s use crystal, and a vehicle is made of wood—a car in the shape of a sphere made out of living foliage that uses water to move. Many times the technology of a village is secret and can’t be revealed outside of the town. The water purification systems are different, even in how water is conveyed from one way to another. Cylinder forms of water appear from the sky to fill a reservoir, in one village water branches from one place to another lie underground root system.
In a city, the architecture is individualistic, very different, like a hodge-podge (mixture) of styles, yet there’s harmony. Each house is built very differently from the others; there are town and city styles of architecture. Suppose there are towers with curving S-shaped windows. In that case, the color of glass or other transparent material, S-styles, and even reliefs protruding from them are personal and highly individual to the tower or lower-rise building. There’s a fundamental cultural style that defies the particular and dampens it. But the houses, actual houses residing on the ground, and forest and lake houses are built in a way accommodating to the individual builder. It’s based on some tradition. Lately, however, some towers were built straight with some S-shaped windows but more with face-shaped reliefs. In the town and cities of the south, there’s no building style code; there’s no law, the weirder the style, the better. No matter where or what region, the mythical is a designer playground for experimenting and engineers’ challenges.
Crazy designers create things that seem crazy, have no sense, and structures, that are primarily solid without much living and working space. The exciting thing is that the buildings are alive because they can add rooms, although it already is built; they have items similar to veins that carry what could be a life-giving force. There are designed strange helmets, one style with a high crown that holds a robot spider that comes out of the helmet to explore unknown places, thus keeping the person from danger. This type of helmet has no breathing apparatus, a tiny device in the helmet creates the inner atmosphere for the wearer; it’s an environmental helmet tunnel with a lattice of intertwining leaves that grows into the tunnel keeping it safe from earthquakes and flooding some tubes suck up water from a bio pump. Whatever seems crazy is valid.
On purpose, some people create non-harmony colors on structures, some painted, and others through ceramics or mosaics. Whatever it took to do something personal, it was done at times; people took individualism to great extremes. Nothing is said. No organized media exists, and people are too busy to care about the attitude.
In the arts and sciences, people pursue what they are doing, there is no science or art establishment, and they do things as they believe it to be. A person in science has their mind connected to many people in the field, and thoughts are discussed for other reasons. But individual research is encouraged because it could lead to something. Art is a loner; the artists are more than that, scientists, scholars, engineers, and craftspeople. The eccentric loner works on their projects, creating a whirlwind of creation for the mythical world.
Robert J. Matsunaga
