People living in hanging lamps, what does this say? They light the way for travelers on foot and vehicles; they are homes for people; one group of the Senetha people live among giant trees in the mountains, and the homes are shaped like spheres hanging from the trees. The light that emanates (illuminates) from them is very bright, then how do people live within them? There’s an outer skin with its power source within itself; it’s a wall separating the outer surface of the lamp home from the people’s living area. It’s said that these great spheres are probably standard in the Senetha world; these lamp spheres or lamp homes are worlds of their own. Where there’s a sun, lands, mountains, forests, oceans, and the sky, all part of an entire artificial earth within the sphere, named personal world, a galaxy, and a whole universe. This is what some spheres or all could contain. Each home has this imagined thing, unique earth and the universe. The question is, do the families living within them ever venture into their artificial world? Do they ever interact with each other? Because the spheres are so personal that over time they don’t know what the real world looks like, each family member yearns to interact with the real world, and because they are of a community of lamp homes, they wish to know their neighbors. Do the spheres fall apart like other homes? Are they ever destroyed? Once they are constructed or appear, could they be spawned from an unknown nature? Some say that the insides of a sphere are illusions, projections that have energy light barriers that are the walls of the globe. Not every dwelling is suspended from a tree; some seem tethered from the sky. The lamp homes are broken from things not found to be trees; they seem like metal sculptures resembling trees. A whole world is contained in a dwelling shaped like a sphere lamp.
The lamps or homes hang from strong tethered cables that are strong. They are renewed and grow as the branches and trunks of a tree. As the old wires are shed, they fall to the ground below, becoming nutrients for the soil that grows on the ground into new cable structures. The cables vary, going from thick to thin as they grow. The forest floor is filled with dangerous creatures, giant bears; lion prides that hunt wild boar and monkeys; giant spiders and snakes, and rats that eat human and animal flesh. It can be dangerous to fall to the ground below. There are fish-like creatures with wings that eat meat. There are causeways between the sphere lamps, but people work and walk on the ground to farm and hunt, all the creatures mentioned are taken for their meat. Yes, bear and lion heart are what these Senetha eat. They raise wild cattle and boar that roam everywhere. Some lamps are suspended higher than others; is there a reason for this? Probably not; some spheres are more significant than others. Does this have to do with how many people can reside there? No, the amount of room depends on what the families wish for in terms of space. Lamps are a comfortable place to live in.
It could be imagined that the lamps are all one color, probably white, what most people could conceive of, but the hues change over time; from a distance, they are beautiful. A rare type of lamp home is egg-shaped, somewhat like a cube. It has a sphere floating and revolving around it. The luxury lamps had no suspension cables. They just flowed, and they are expensive. Some kinds of rare suspended lights float even closer to the ground.
Children were and are never allowed to walk anywhere on the surface of the forest. There are places where the character is safe, pools that were built for fish. If a child were to fall into the pool, they would be safe.
The pools were considered a safe place to have boats and larger sailing craft to be kept. The fishermen of the forest sail the forest in the reservoirs and canals, with trees on all sides. Some people who live above don’t mind this; in very remote parts of the forest, a hermit isn’t bothered by fishing boats because the fishermen don’t know they are there.
There’s a hermit who lives in a sphere that is half submerged in a pool of water. There is a circular deck around the globe where he sits and does his own thing. He probably doesn’t consider himself part of the community. Some people might consider him part of the scholar class or a shaman. That isn’t true; he’s just a hermit who hunts animals and crafts representations of them, perhaps as objects of respect to the animals they killed. He’s a craftsman of leather things; the skins hang in the tree; he could also be an aqua farmer. Often he cooks on the forest floor. What is inside his home? Those questions had been asked many times for years. Some people had claimed that they saw inside the hermits home there were animal bones, lots of deer antlers, pottery, and a thing that might be a chemistry lab. He’s a strange man few people wish to know because they are frightened of him.
There are other strange hanging dwellings, they are eccentric people, and the dwellers are hidden from one another. They live apart from the community of the hanging lamp dwellings. In a sense, they could be called hermits. When a stranger comes into the forest, they look above and find it as if they are inside a hallway of trees; this might make the forest seem very bright. Some of these dwellers shoot rocks from their dwellings to annoy the people below. And many of them sell things to others that live in the forest.
The inside of those lamps can be anything; there are scholars like individuals who have an entire world as a room, imagine a ceiling as high as the sky or as far as the moon. The pools of water are like oceans in such places; imagine a bedroom as big as a province. Tiny cubical houses, others octagon shaped and many additional exotic shapes that become structures of beauty, inside of them there are many leagues of piled up books and collections of all kinds of things. The sky rains only near the pools; everywhere else could be dry. In a study, there is a desk with a blue sky with clouds above, with its lamps hanging from the sky; the cables are partially obscured by haze and a warming sun, and the lights turn and go on forever. That is one of the many aspects of situations in the lantern homes; anything could be possible. Clutter is all over the place, things collected and existing from many generations, objects so old that dwellers of the present age don’t know what they are. The dwellers use the objects as decorative things for their homes; they weren’t intended to be used that way; if no use is found for them, they sell objects for money. It’s also a place where nothing can be found once lost. There are dogs trained to find lost things. They are very accurate, but there are some things even the dogs cannot locate. Family members generations later find things their great-grandparents lost. Things are kept from generations ago piled high in store rooms, antique and second-hand merchants search around a dweller’s storerooms for old things to sell.
Lantern dwellers have so many secrets; to journey into one is to see things never seen before, a dwelling that could be a dangerous and exciting place. Parts of dolls, limbs, arms, heads, eyes and whole dolls were collected from the most modern to ancient worlds. The dolls are his society, or what should be appropriately called people because he rarely associates with real people. Another person lives in a canopy of leaves and grass; the surrounding natural area is his home. There’s an underground passageway beneath the top, with rounded corners and all-white walls filled with potted plants. It’s a place to take comfort from the rain. These are a few descriptions of what hermits have in their living spaces.
Ruins are where some people live; structures are ready to be occupied, secret passages and places where they raise their food or steal it, and they collect things from the ruins or make them. Parts that once formed other structures are used to build a home; materials are metals, stone, ceramic, glass, and light. Some things are arranged in a pleasing, artistic way; others are disorganized. These dwellings are in buildings so as not to bring attention to where they are. Although many people might live in a ruined city, they don’t wish to know about one another because of the danger to their families. One of the best forms of seclusion is underground, with weeds, fungus, mold, moss, grass, and trees growing. Total natural seclusion is a door into another existence, the entranceway that is a stonewall, a wall of light, a forest, or a hill of grass. In some of these existences, a person can live inside one secluded place. There’s a structure inside another structure and another. This is a way people protect themselves from danger. It’s not that they don’t want people around; they had formed an exclusive community to protect all against scavenger bandits.
The panorama of the oceans was considered an excellent place for people to live for security; ship-like dwellings sailed all around the seas. These water homes can submerge underwater, similar to a submarine. What happens when someone with no family dies? The ship deteriorates, then washes up on an unknown shore, where perhaps another family or fisherman would take it over. People would collect the things that once belonged to them. It seems that possessions don’t belong to anyone. Some people in the world of myth are not too materialistic. It’s natural to think that old things are worn out, fading apart, and shabby; in this world, objects heal themselves, renew themselves, and look as new as anything made. Some individuals who live alone sense death, and they sink their ships. Even possessions are destroyed, so no one gets their hands on them.
Some homes are called chambers of light; structures made of light could take on any form to disguise them from being noticed. The lights don’t always stay on. Eventually, they fade into another world as the people living within create their privacy. In the night, a light might be seen; then it might disappear. Life is very interesting for anyone living within the chambers of light; they’ll do anything, live anywhere, and make it comfortable for themselves, never letting the world tell them what to do. These people like to construct their things because they are craftsmen. A type of dwelling exists woven out of the rock; it can be twined into any shape for individuals and families to live in. There is nothing in the mythical world that can’t be used as a dwelling place for people.
Robert J. Matsunaga
