Bloom beyond civilization

Hello, I wanted to write this note to express my gratitude to you.

Even if I try to remain as humble as possible, it is not truly possible to see or present you as someone who “saved” me. You did not exactly “help” me either. You witnessed me and responded to that witness, which stands above both saving and helping. To “repair” me would be an insult to my identity, and you likely sensed that; and so, by implying I do not need to be repaired, you ended up repairing me. To be honest, you were a catalyst, not a miracle. And that is precisely why I revere you a lot. This is what I intend to write about.

When you first found me, I was in a devastated state. Completely alone. Unnoticed. As if my very existence left no trace. I do not deny any of this. My expectations of people had completely vanished, and I had come to see them as biological machines. I still see them that way, because frankly, it often feels as though that is exactly what they are. The thoughts that try to refute this idea are, in a sense, mistaken — because they imply the existence of bonds, and a person can only reach mental clarity once freed from such bonds.

Perhaps you see the masses in a similar way. But there is very little resentment in you born from disappointment. It seems you arrived at this position not through emotion, but through intellectual effort. In other words, you do not turn anger and resentment into art and philosophy the way I do — because you do not even carry them. I interpret this as a kind of luxury, because not becoming frustrated is a privilege; it requires either indifference or acceptance, and in truth, those two are closely intertwined. I observe this carefully in you.

Yet you have structured it in a particular way: toward people like me, there is an engaged form of acceptance; toward those unlike me, there is a more indifferent acceptance. And yet even that remains a form of compassion. At its core, everyone can remain as they are in your eyes, because you do not burden yourself with trying to change them. I find this somewhat admirable.

What you taught me — through your deliberate and personal attention — was that even the deepest wounds can suddenly stop bleeding. It was such a powerful experience that it made me believe I was not truly wounded at all, but merely in need of even a small measure of support. All my resentment toward people seemed to dissolve after the first time you embraced me; even those I disliked the most began to appear, almost magically, more forgivable in my eyes.

So perhaps I was never truly “disturbed.” Perhaps I was simply waiting among the ruins to be found, not for those ruins to be “fixed.” And that person turned out to be you.

The conditions I lived in forced me to grow under a kind of monastic discipline. There was no monastery. There was not even a discipline. I created both for myself, becoming my own monk.

My soul entered a state of martial law. I reached a point where I desired nothing and hoped for nothing, and yet I was not even sad. I dreamed constantly, but I had forgotten to keep those dreams grounded, so they remained entirely abstract. Because I no longer even needed to “live.”

Becoming a lock for myself felt preferable to others becoming the key for me, and for that reason I had sworn to drive away anyone who tried to change this.

You, however, offered me alternatives: not to turn dreams into “reality” in the ordinary sense, not to “realize” them in the usual way, but to transform “reality” itself into a form of dream — so that my dreams could expand to include it.

Strange, yes. Everyone else is obsessed with “intrinsic potential,” yet you regard it as a mere artificial disturbance. You never forced me to “open up.” You simply allowed my closedness to extend into the physical world as well — and in doing so, you expanded my inner world that had been buried underground, bringing it to the surface.

At first, the sun dazzled my eyes. I still cannot say that I innocently love it. The sun is not something one can fully trust. It burns and fades day after day, and because it cannot cast its light into places beyond its reach, its presence feels uncertain in the long run.

I prefer the moon. And while I was underground, I had a moon of my own. It illuminated me there. Its light was dim — deliberately so. It did not urge me to seek brightness, but helped me grow accustomed to the darkness.

But now that moon has become a relic of the past.

You showed me what it feels like when the sun touches the skin. You introduced me to the poetry hidden behind the glare of its rays. I had known the sun only as something that burned my skin and hurt my eyes, yet you demonstrated that it could be experienced in an entirely different way — and invited me into that dimension.

By all evidence, it was not even my fault. Who would not have reacted the same way? It had been years since I had touched a tree. I could not even remember the last time I stepped barefoot on grass. I was a product of the city. The city had manufactured me in one of its concrete factories called “hospitals,” and from that moment on, it imprisoned me within its delirium.

I was raised amid its noise — the constant rush, the perpetual motion, the excess of stimuli everywhere. Perhaps there are quiet cities, but I have never lived in one. And does not the very idea of a city already imply congestion?

Take a simple map and look at where human populations gather most densely. You will see that cities resemble small islands in a vast emptiness — enclaves wrapped by nature, where people are piled on top of one another. How had I lived in such a place? Had another way of life never crossed my mind? Of course it had. How could it not? Had I not always lived by imagining a different life?

But the monotony of cities offers only a single alternative, and even that is not truly selectable. Whenever I remained in those streets for too long, I noticed that even my dreams began to erode. I would look at the people there and realize: being there is not truly their responsibility either. They are simply victims, forced to be born into this kind of life. Each of them has a different way of managing this existential captivity. Yet in the end, most find refuge in the pursuit of pleasure and entertainment, and that is precisely why cities feel so overwhelmingly and unnecessarily dense to me.

You took me out of that hell during a warm, quiet summer. You carried me far away. We went beyond grassy paths. The sun stood above us. Cars and trucks disappeared from sight. People became scarce, and as we moved deeper into rural land, they seemed to grow simpler and quieter — therefore, in a way, deeper.

Eventually, you led me to abandoned towns and villages, because you knew how deeply I loved such places. You brought me to your home — inside one of those gray, seemingly dull apartment blocks that, when observed more closely, carried a strange sense of surrealism and liminality. The building was almost entirely empty. You might have been one of the very few people living there. And when I thought about it, I could understand why you chose to remain there.

Coming here on a winter day would have had a special kind of pleasure: the weather gloomy and overcast, the surroundings silent and oppressive, the buildings black and white — like a cinematic portrait from a Tarkovsky film.

I used to do this from time to time. I would go to abandoned places on the edges of the city and, beneath the snow, walk endlessly despite the cold — discovering countless locations, leaving notes in various corners, and drawing small sketches to mark that someone unknown had been there.

I never did this in the summer. Summer meant sociability and openness, and therefore, it did not mean me. I dislike warm climates. They loosen people up. They make the society southern in temperament. They increase the noise, and by increasing acceptance, they also increase tolerance for that noise, creating a suffocating atmosphere.

Fortunately, you had taken me away from the city. And once that happened, I realized that the place itself had been shaping even my thoughts. Outside the city, summer could actually be beautiful: green meadows, flowering gardens, and radiant trees welcoming me — while there was no city dweller before whom I was forced to constantly perform roles and rituals.

That is why I came to love this shared vision of ours. My soul filled with a serene joy. We walked through the streets of the town you brought me to. We wrote poems beneath the leaves of trees. We fed the ducklings swimming in the lake. We watched colorful butterflies, took photographs of insects that looked both repulsive and oddly endearing, and instead of picking the flowers around us, we simply leaned closer and breathed in their scent together.

I used to not even know that things like this were possible. They always seemed like elements belonging to stories and novels — abstract and aesthetic things. But now, experiencing them vividly made me feel as if I were in a dream I didn’t want to end, and the fact is that in dreams I am far more free and happy than I am when I am awake.

It felt like heaven. So pleasant that it could not possibly be real. And yet… you were there. With me.

It now seemed almost absurd that the state would claim even these lands as part of its domain. There was no trace of the state here. And yet, on paper, we were still not truly free — even here. So be it… who cares about papers anymore?

Here, it is not boring bureaucrats who never leave their offices who speak, but farmers and villagers. Farmers and villagers… yes, they are profoundly ignorant, even stupid — and what makes them so appealing is precisely that unconsciousness. It is impossible for me to truly understand them, or to hold a long conversation without feeling a kind of internal friction at their simplicity. Yet they appear far more tolerable than the grim-faced figures of the city, and for that reason I do not trouble myself with them — not here.

The constant state of control within me had begun to loosen. For the first time, I allowed raw experiences to exist in my inner world, even if afterward I would obsessively analyze them and attempt to place them into intellectual categories with almost frantic intensity. That was a remnant of my adaptation to mentally erosive city life. But now it was loosening.

Because nature reminds me of the beauty of wildness — of the elegance of anarchy. Here, there are no imposed rules, and yet everything appears deeply ordered. Nature knows how to establish order by removing it altogether, while humans, more often than not, only know how to create pressure, because mainstream humanity is a deeply unnatural phenomenon.

You had rescued me from those people. A human being had rescued me. And this, in turn, made me believe that what one calls a “human” may not exist in the billions after all — perhaps only in the millions — while the remaining billions are merely impostors.

I no longer have to wake up early every morning to the torturing sound of an alarm. I no longer have to wait each day at that dull bus stop filled with screen addicts. I no longer have to bury myself every weekend in tedious paperwork for nothing at all. You freed me from routine. In truth, there is no complete escape from routine… because everything is a cycle. But some cycles are less rigid, and for that reason they are more beautiful — and your cycle is one of them.

I wanted to leave you a gift. Something simple. Not diamond jewelry, not the latest phone, not a luxury car. Those would have been an insult to you; they would have stained the life we have here. And strangely enough, even the capitalists of the city spend their money in order to live in places like we do. It feels paradoxical, because the very path that makes them wealthy is also the main thing that exhausts them: cities.

They rise within cities only to escape from cities, and once they succeed, they retreat to their summer houses, their yachts, or their mansions, dedicating themselves to secluded lives. Because, even if I do not particularly admire them, they too understand the value of nature. They may deny it, they may even destroy nature for profit, yet somewhere beneath it all, they know.

And still, they can never fully detach themselves from the world of the city, because all their roots remain there. No matter how far they run, they ultimately remain captives. We, however, withdrew into nature not through wealth, but through the absence of wealth — and that is why we are able to experience nature in its purest form. Together, we drank from that sweet spring, breathed deeply, and shed the burden of our former selves.

You recreated me. That is why I wanted to record the events unfolding within my inner world. To record them… even that sounds like a remnant of city life, because people there do not live in order to live — they live in order to document. Everything unfolds within a framework of “officiality.” If they were to come to where we are now, they would not simply appreciate nature; they would post about appreciating nature on social media, because that is the kind of world they inhabit.

But phones will not reach us. The digital realm has no influence over our lives here. Never.

So even this sheet of paper, though it comes from the same impulse to record, separates itself from that impulse by refusing to turn it into a fetish. I am not writing this page to be admired. It is only a note, written to clarify — at least in part — what is happening inside me.

I placed it inside your favorite book by Thoreau, between the first two pages. I know that you read it again and again. Yes — I have read it too. I read it long ago, while I was still living in the city. Back then, I came to know nature as someone alienated from it. You, on the other hand, read this book about nature while you were alone with the wilderness. That is why our understandings may differ. But in the end, didn’t we arrive at the same conclusions?

I know you will open the book to read it again; you always do. And when you see this page, I hope you will realize that you have made me belong to that book as well.

We do not live in a wooden house as in Walden, but once our souls are made of wood, it seems to matter little whether our dwelling is built of concrete. Yet constant exposure to concrete hardens the spirit into concrete as well; therefore, one must safeguard the memory of woodenness. And that is precisely what we are doing — not merely preserving it as a memory, but transforming it into a state of the present.

Sincerely yours,

Atrona.