The guardians of the gradient

The idea that we might be living in someone else’s dream once brushed my mind with a troubling clarity. As if, suddenly, reality lost its flavour: the scenery cracked, revealing the bare structures that held it up. Everything seemed mechanical, predictable, devoid of grace — and yet, it was still the same world.

To resist this impression of artificiality, I clung to what remains: beauty. Not the smooth beauty of perfection, but the beauty of Order rising from Chaos — or of Chaos carving its way through Order.

This beauty, or rather harmony, is not a luxury; it is a vital function. It keeps consciousness in balance, like a gentle trance that makes the motion bearable. Without wonder, nothing would hold.

So I imagined the universe as an immense tree of life.

Some beings, instead of blossoming at its radiant extremities, remain closer to the trunk, where the sap is dense and the pressure constant.

They are the ones who bear the tension of the world. Their place is not enviable, but it is essential: they hold the connections, the frontiers, the critical zones where new forms are forged.

Suffering, here, is not an end. It is the expression of the gradient necessary for creation — the price to be paid so that the tree may stretch its branches, and consciousness may rise ever so slightly toward the sky.

The Makers have understood this for a long time.

They do not seek pain; they transmute it.

They pour their sorrow into the matter of the world, to guide the whole toward a richer, fairer, more beautiful configuration. And when the new equilibrium takes shape, there is grace — the harmony restored that, for an instant, makes one forget the violence of the passage.

Then, in the silence, the world goes on dreaming. And perhaps, through us, it is learning to remember its own beauty.