Some recent thoughts

I have been spending a lot more time in the cavern recently. This has been the first opportunity I have had to sit down and reflect a little bit on what has been going on. So many thoughts. It has been difficult finding the time. I hope too much time has not passed between the origin of the thoughts and my writing writing them down.

The removal of the fungus stalks or whatever these things are has taken a lot of time. I knew eventually all this rain was going to be an issue.

I am starting to wonder if the situation here in the cavern has changed.

It is a little different to think about what is going on in the cavern. There is this feeling that there are large swatches of time where nothing is occurring, punctuated by days of intense and, at times, confusing activity.

So many questions left unanswered. So many questions with no apparent way to find an answer.

By now, others have surely written about much that occurred over the last couple of weeks. Changes in the DRC. The task given to Douglas Sharper, and his interpretation of it. The Watcher's Sanctuary and Er'cana. I will leave it to others to discuss the events and their details.

It does feel that something has changed here in the cavern. More than just recent events and their outcome. I feel that maybe something has changed within the community.

Where once Explorers would push the boundaries of barriers in the cavern, we seem to have become content to huddle together in the city, the neighborhood, the pubs while the events unfolding around occur.

“But, Butch, what else is there for us to do?”

When does the Journey end? We started the Journey not knowing where it was going.

I remember the initial panic at realizing that I had linked to an age and I didn't know how I was going to be back to the surface. On the basis of what? The word of a stranger who couldn't even look me in the eye and spoke in riddles and a who knows how old message from someone who could have easily been dead.

Over the course of that Journey I filled that small age (just how big is Relto, really?) with items that have marked my path along the way. I have marveled how Relto reflects what I am thinking, or even what I am feeling (what is suggested by the frigid air and near constant rain?).

I remember the awe (and fright) of what had been come to be called the great linking—Explorers being linked to their Reltos, not only from the cavern, but from the surface. The lattice overloading and finding the KI useless. And Relto appearing to be a much different place.

Of course, the feeling has changed. It feels like a lot of Explorers want to move down the road together, all as one unit, marching in formation. But what is going to happen the first time we come to a fork in the road? I yearn to make my way off the road and into the unknown. Am I alone in this feeling?

I sometimes feel that the Explorers are a turbulent body of water between tides, feeling the pull of everything equally, and only moving on the larger scale, and getting lost in the eddies within the community, groups that at buoyed by and yet feel closed to the currents around them. And others groups that seem to feed without regard to their ability to manage their size, or sustain their growth, lost in the strength of their own current, wiping away the smaller eddies and currents as they mark their own blind progress.

I still do not know.