Chapter 8 One sunny November morning, when the strain had reached a pitch that made repression almost unmanageable, she came to an impulsive decision and obeyed it. Her husband had again gone out with luncheon for the day. She took adventure in her hands and followed him. The power of the seeing clear was strong upon her, forcing her up to some unnatural level of understanding. To stay indoors and wait inactive for his return seemed suddenly impossible. She meant to know what he knew, feel what he felt, put herself in his place. She would dare the fascination of the forest, share it with him. It was greatly daring, but it would give her greater understanding how to help and save him, and therefore greater power. She went upstairs a moment first to pray. In a thick, warm skirt and wearing heavy boots, those walking boots she used with him upon the mountains about silence, she left the cottage by the back way and turned towards the forest. She could not actually follow him, for he had started off an hour before and she knew not exactly his direction. What was so urgent in her was the wish to be with him in the woods, to walk beneath leafless branches just as he did, to be there when he was there, even though not together, for it had come to her that she might thus share with him for once this horrible, mighty life and breathing of the trees he loved. In winter he had said they needed him particularly, and winter now was coming, her love must bring her something of what he felt himself, the huge attraction, the suction and the pull of all the trees. Thus in some vicarious fashion she might share, though unknown to himself, this very thing that was taking him away from her. She might thus even lessen its attack upon himself. The impulse came to her clairvoyantly, and she obeyed without a sign of hesitation. Deeper comprehension would come to her of the whole awful puzzle, and come it did, yet not in the way she imagined and expected. The air was very still, the sky a cold pale blue but cloudless. The entire forest stood silent at attention. It knew perfectly well that she had come. It knew the moment when she entered, watched and followed her, and behind her something dropped without a sound and shut her in. Her feet upon the glades of mossy grass fell silently as the oaks and beaches shifted past and rose and took up their positions at her back. It was not pleasant. This way they grew so dense behind her the instant she had passed. She realized that they gathered in an ever-growing army, massed, herded, trooped, between her and the cottage, shutting off escape. They let her pass so easily, but to get out again she would know them differently. Thick, crowded, branches all drawn in hostile. Already their increasing numbers bewildered her. In front they looked so sparse and scattered, with open spaces where the sunshine fell. But when she turned it seemed they stood so close together, a sered army.  They swallowed down into themselves the very glade by which she came. For when she glanced behind her, rarely, the way she had come was shadowy and lost. Yet the morning spockled overhead, and a glance of excitement ran quivering through the entire day. It was what she always knew as children's weather, so clear and harmless, without a sign of danger. Everything ominous to threaten Oralaam.  And then abruptly in an open space where the sunshine fell unhindered, she stopped. It was one of the breathing places of the forest. Dead, withered bracken, laying patches of unsightly gray. There were bits of heather, too. All round the trees stood looking on. Oak, beech, holly, ash, pine, larch, was here and there small groups of juniper. On the lips of this breathing space of the woods she stopped to rest, disobeying her instinct for the first time. For the other instinct in her was to go on. She did not really want to rest. This was the little act that brought it to her, the wireless message from a vast emitter. I've been stopped, she thought to herself, with a horrid quam. She looked about her in this quiet, ancient place. Nothing stirred. There was no life nor sign of life. No birds sang, no rabbits scuttled off at her approach. The stillness was bewildering, and gravity hung down upon it like a heavy curtain. It hushed the hot in her. Could this be part of what her husband felt? This sense of thick entanglement, with stems, boughs, roots, and foliage. This has always been as it is now, she thought, yet not knowing why she thought it. Ever since the forest grew it has been still and secret here, it has never changed. The curtain of silence drew closer while she said it, thickening round her. For a thousand years I'm here with a thousand years, and behind this place stand all the forests of the world. So foreign to her temperament was such thoughts, and so alien to all she had been taught to look for in nature, that she strove against them. She made an effort to oppose, but they clung and haunted just the same. They refused to be dispersed. The curtain hung dense and heavy as though its texture thickened. The air with difficulty came through. And then she thought that curtain stirred. There was movement somewhere. That obscure, dim thing which ever broods behind the visible appearances of trees came nearer to her. She caught her breath and stayed about her, listening intently. The trees, perhaps because she saw them more in detail now, it seemed to her had changed. A vague, faint alteration spread over them. At first so slight she scarcely would admit it. Then growing steadily, though still obscurely outwards. They tremble and are changed. Flashed through her mind the horrid line that Sanderson had quoted. Yet the change was graceful for all the uncouthness attendant upon the size of so vast a movement. They had turned in her direction. That was it. They saw her. In this way the change expressed itself in her groping terrified thought. Till now it had been otherwise. She had looked at them from her own point of view. Now they looked at her from theirs. They stared at her in the face and eyes. They stared at her all over. In some unkind, resentful, hostile way they watched her. Here the two in life she had watched them, variously, in superficial ways, reading into them what her own mind suggested. Now they read into her the things they actually were and not merely another's interpretations of them. They seemed in their motionless silence, their instinct with life, a life moreover that breathed about her, a species of terrible soft enchantment that bewitched. It branched all through her, climbing to the brain. The forest held her with its huge and giant fascination. In this secluded breathing spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of them. They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their myriad vast sight upon the intruder. They shouted at her in the silence, for she wanted to look back at them. But it was like staring at a crowd, and her glance merely shifted from one tree to another, hurriedly, finding a none the one she saw. They saw her so easily, each and all. The rose that stood behind her also stared, but she could not return the gaze. Her husband she realized could, and their steady stare shocked her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked. They saw so much of her. She saw of them so little. Her efforts to return their gaze were pitiful. The constant shifting increased her bewilderment. Conscious of this awful and enormous sight all over her, she let her eyes first rest upon the ground. And then she closed them all together. She kept the lids as tight together as ever they would go. But the sight of the trees came even into that inner darkness behind the fasten lids, for there was no escaping it. Outside in the light she still knew that the leaves of the hollies glittered smoothly, that the dead foliage of the oaks hung crisp in the air about her, that the needles of the little junipers were pointing all one way. The spread perception of the forest was focused on herself, and no mere shutting of the eyes could hide its scattered yet concentrated stare, the all-inclusive vision of great woods. There was no wind, yet here and there a single leaf hanging by its dried-up stalk shook all alone with great rapidity, rattling. It was the sentry drawing attention to her presence. And then again, as once, long weeks before, she felt their being as a tide about her. The tide had turned. That memory of her childhood sands came back. When the nurse said, The tide has turned now we must go in. And she saw the mass of piled-up waters green and heaped to the horizon and realized that it was slowly coming in. The gigantic mass of it, too vast for Hari, loaded with massive purpose, she used to feel, was moving towards herself. The fluid body of the sea was creeping along beneath the sky to the very spot upon the yellow sands where she stood and played. The sight and thought of it had always overwhelmed her with a sense of awe. As though her puny self were the object of the whole seas advance, the tide has turned. We had better now go in. This was happening now about her. The same thing was happening in the woods. Slow, sure, and steady, in its motion as little discernible as the seas, the tide had turned. The small human presence that had ventured among its green and mountainous depths, moreover, was its objective. That all was clear within her while she sat and waited with tight-shot lids. But the next moment she opened her eyes with a sudden realization of something more. The presence that it saw was after all not hers. It was the presence of someone other than herself. And then she understood. Her eyes had opened with a click, it seemed, but the sound in reality was outside herself. Across the clearing where the sunshine lay so calm and still, she saw the figure of her husband moving among the trees, a man like a tree walking. His hands behind his back and head uplifted. He moved quite slowly, as though absorbed in his own thoughts. Hardly fifty paces separated them. But he had no inkling of her presence there so near. With mind intent and senses all turned inwards. He marched past her like a figure in a dream. And like a figure in a dream she saw him go. Love, yearning, pity, rose in a storm within her. But as a nightmare she found no words or movement possible. She sat and watched him go. Go from her. Go into the deeper reaches of the green, developing woods. Desire to save, to bid him stop and turn, ran in a passion through her being. But there was nothing she could do. She saw him go away from her, go of his own accord and willingly beyond her. She saw the branches drop but his steps and hit him. His figure faded out among the speckled shade and sunlight. The trees covered him. The tide just took him. People unresisting and content to go. Upon the bosom of the green, soft sea he floated away beyond her reach of vision. Her eyes could follow him no longer. He was gone. And then for the first time she realized, even at that distance, that the look upon his face was one of peace and happiness, wrapped in cotaway and joy, a look of youth. That expression now he never showed to her. But she had known it. Years ago in the early days of their married life she had seen it on his face. Now it no longer obeyed the summons of her presence and her love. The woods alone could call it forth. It answered to the trees. The forest had taken every part of him from her. He was very hot and soul. Her sight, that had plunged inwards to the fields of faded memory, now came back to the outer things again. She looked about her and her love, returning empty-handed and unsatisfied, left her open to the invading of the bleakest terror she had ever known. That such things could be real and happen found her helpless utterly. Terror invaded the quietest corners of her heart that had never yet known quailing. She could not, for moments at any rate, reach either her Bible or her God. Desolate in an empty world of fear, she sat with eyes too dry and hot for tears, yet with a coldness as of ice upon her very flesh. She stared, unseeing about her. That horror which stalks in the stillness of the noon day, when the glare of an artificial sunshine lights up the motionless trees, moved all about her. In front and behind she was aware of it, beyond the stealthy silence, just within the edge of it, the things of another world were passing. But she could not know them. Her husband knew them, knew their beauty and their awe. Yes, but for her they were out of reach. She might not share with him the very least of them. It seems that behind and through the glare of this wintery noon day, in the hot of the woods, there brooded another universe of life and passion, for her all unexpressed. The silence veiled it, the stillness hit it, but he moved with it all and understood. His love interpreted it. She rose to her feet, tottered feebly, and collapsed again upon the moss. Yet for herself she felt no terror. No little personal fear could touch her whose anguish and deep longing streamed all out to him whom she so bravely loved. In this time of utter self-forgetfulness, when she realized that the battle was hopeless, thinking she had lost even her God, she found him again quite close beside her, like a little presence in this terrible hot of the hostile forest. But at first she did not recognize that he was there. She did not know him and that strangely unacceptable guys. For he stood so very close, so very intimate, so very sweet and comforting, and yet so hard to understand, as resignation. Once more she struggled to her feet, and this time turned successfully and slowly, made her way along the mossy glade by which she came. And at first she marveled, though only for a moment, at the ease with which she found the path. For a moment only, because almost at once she saw the truth. The trees were glad that she should go. They helped her on her way. The forest did not want her. The tide was coming in indeed, yet not for her. And so, in another of those flashes of clear vision, that of late had lifted life above the normal level, she saw and understood the whole terrible thing complete. Till now, though unexpressed in thought or language, her fear had been that the woods her husband loved would somehow take him from her, to merge his life in theirs, even to kill him in some mysterious way. This time she saw her deep mistake, and so seeing, let in upon herself the fuller agony of horror. For their jealousy was not the petty jealousy of animals or human. They wanted him because they loved him. But they did not want him dead. Full charge with his splendid life and enthusiasm they wanted him. They wanted him alive. It was she who stood in their way, and it was she whom they intended to remove. This was what brought the sense of abject helplessness. She stood upon the sands against an entire ocean slowly rolling in against her. For as all the forces of a human being combine unconsciously to eject a grain of sand that has crept beneath the skin to cause discomfort, so the entire mass of what Sandra sent had called the collective consciousness of the forest, strove to eject this human atom that stood across the path of its desire. Loving her husband, she had crept beneath its skin. It was her they would eject and take away. It was her they would destroy, not him. Them whom they loved needed they would keep alive. They meant to take him living. She reached the house in safety, though she never remembered how she found her way. It was made all simple for her. The branches almost urged her out. But behind her, as she left the shadowed precincts, she felt as though some towering angel of the woods that fall across the threshold the flaming sword of a countless multitude of leaves that form behind her a barrier, green shimmering and impassable. Into the forest she never walked again, and she went about her daily duties with a calm and quietness that was a perpetual astonishment even to herself, for it hardly seemed of this world at all. She talked to her husband when he came in for tea, after dark. Resignation brings a curious large courage. When there is nothing more to lose, the soul takes risks and dares. Is it a curious shortcut sometimes to the heights? David, I went into the forest, too, this morning. Soon after you I went. I saw you there. Wasn't it wonderful? He answered simply, inclining his head a little. There was no surprise or annoyance in his look. A mild and gentle ennui, rather. He asked no real questions. She thought of some garden tree the wind attacks too suddenly, bending it over when it does not want to bend. The mild unwillingness, with which it yields, she often saw him this way now, in terms of the trees. It was very wonderful indeed, dear yes. She replied low, her voice not faltering, though indistinct. But for me it was too, too strange and big. The passion of tears lay just below the quiet voice, all unbetrayed. Somehow she kept them back. There was a pause, and then he added, I find it more and more so every day. His voice passed through the lamplit room like a murmur of the wind and branches. The look of youth and happiness she had caught upon his face out there had wholly gone, and an expression of weariness was in its place, as of a man distressed vaguely at finding himself in uncongenial surroundings, where he is slightly ill at ease. It was the house he aided. Coming back to rooms and walls and furniture, the ceilings enclosed windows confined him. Yet in it no suggestion that he found her, irksome. Her presence seemed to no account at all. Indeed he hardly noticed her. For whole long periods he lost her. Did not know that she was there. He had no need of her. He lived alone. Each lived alone. The outward signs by which she recognized that the awful battle was against her, and the terms of surrender, accepted, were pathetic. She put the medicine just away upon the shelf. She gave the orders for his pocket luncheon before he asked. She went to bed alone and early. From the front door unlocked was milk and bread and butter in the hall beside the lamp, all concessions that she felt impelled to make. For more and more, unless the weather was too violent, he went out after dinner even, staying for hours in the woods. But she never slept until she heard the front door close below, and knew soon afterwards his careful step come creeping up the stairs and into the room so softly. Until she heard his regular deep breathing close beside her, she lay awake. All strength or desire to resist had gone for good. The thing against her was too huge and powerful. Capitulation was complete, a fact accomplished. She dated it from the day she followed him to the forest. Moreover, the time for evacuation, her own evacuation, seemed approaching. It came stealthily ever nearer, surely and slowly as the rising tide she used to dread. At the high water mark she stood waiting, calmly, waiting to be swept away. Across the lawn, all those terrible days of early winter, the encircling forest watched it come. Guiding at silent swell and currents towards her feet, only she never once gave up her Bible or her praying, this complete resignation, moreover, had somehow brought to her a strange great understanding. And if she could not share her husband's horrible abandonment to powers outside himself, she could, and did, in some half grouping way, grasp at shadowy meanings that might make such abandonment possible. Yes, but more than merely possible, in some extraordinary sense, not evil. Here the two she had divided the beyond world into two shop halves, spirits good or spirits evil. But thoughts came to her now, on soft and very tentative feet, like the footsteps of the gods which are on wool. That besides these definite classes there might be other powers as well, belonging definitely to neither one nor the other. Her thought stopped dead at that, but the big idea of found lodgement in her little mind, and owing to the lodginess of her heart, remained there unejected. It even brought a certain solace with it. The failure or unwillingness, as she preferred to state it, of her god to interfere in help, that also she came in a measure to understand. For here she found it more and more possible to imagine, perhaps no positive evil at work, but only something that usually stands away from humankind, something alien and not commonly recognized. There was a gulf fixed between the two, and Mr. Sanderson had bridged it, by his talk, his explanations, his attitude of mind. Through these her husband had found the way into it. His temperament and natural passion for the woods had prepared the soul in him, and the moment he saw the way to go he took it. The line of least resistance. Life was, of course, open to all, and her husband had the right to choose it where he would. He had chosen it away from her, away from other men, but not necessarily away from God. This was an enormous concession that she skirted. Never really faced. It was too revolutionary to face. But its possibility peeped into her bewildered mind. It might delay his progress, or it might advance it. Who could know? And why should God, who ordered all things with such magnificent detail, from the pathway of a sun to the falling of a sparrow, object to his free choice, or interfere to hinder him and stop? She came to realize resignation, that is, in another aspect. It gave her comfort, if not peace. She fought against all the belittling of her God. It was perhaps enough that he knew. You were not alone, dear, in the trees out there? She ventured one night, as he crept on tiptoe into the room, not far from midnight. God is with you? Magnificently was the immediate answer, given with enthusiasm, for he is everywhere, and I only wish that you. But she stuffed the clothes against her ears. That imitation on his lips was more than she could bear to hear. It seemed like asking her to hurry to her own execution.  END OF CHAPTER VIII. And so the thought that she was the one to go, remained and grew. It was perhaps first sign of that weakening of the mind which indicated the singular manner of her going. For it was her mental opposition, the trees felt, that stood in their way. Once that was overcome, obliterated, her physical presence did not matter. She would be harmless. Having accepted defeat, because she had come to feel that his obsession was not actually evil, she accepted at the same time the conditions of an atrocious loneliness. She stood now from her husband farther than from the moon. They had no visitors. Others were few and far between, and less encouraged than before. The empty deck of winter was before them. Among the neighbors was none in home, without disloyalty to her husband, she could confide. Mr. Mortimer, had he been single, might have helped her in this desert of solitude that preyed upon her mind. But his wife was there the obstacle. For Mrs. Mortimer wore sandals, believed at knots with a complete food of man, and indulged in other idiosyncrasies that classed her inevitably among the latter signs, which Mrs. Biddesey had seen taught to dread as dangerous. She stood most desolately alone. Solitude therefore, in which the mind unhindered feeds upon its own delusions, was the assignable cause of her gradual mental disruption and collapse. With the definite arrival of the colder weather, her husband gave up his rambles after dark. Evenings were spent together over the fire. He read the times. They even talked about their postponed visit abroad in the coming spring. No restlessness was on him at the change. He seemed content and easy in his mind, spoke little of the trees and woods, enjoyed far better health than if there had been change of scene, and to herself was tender, kind, solicitous over trifles as in the distant days of their first honeymoon. But this steep calm could not deceive her. It meant, she fully understood, that he felt sure of himself, sure of her, and sure of the trees as well. It all lay buried in the depths of him, too secure and deep, too intimately established in his central being to prevent of those surface fluctuations which betrayed disharmony within. His life was hid with trees. Even the fever, so dreaded in the damp of winter, left him free. She now knew why. The fever was due to their efforts to obtain him. His efforts to respond and go, physical results of a fierce unrest he had never understood till Sanderson came with his wicked explanations. Now it was otherwise the bridge was made, and he had gone. And she, brave, loyal, and consistent soul, found herself utterly alone, even trying to make his passage easy. It seemed that she stood at the bottom of some huge ravine that opened her mind. The walls were of, instead of rock, were trees that reached enormous to the sky, engulfing her. God alone knew that she was there. He watched, permitted, even perhaps approved. At any rate, he knew. During those quiet evenings in the house, moreover, while they sat over the fire listening to the roaming winds about the house, her husband knew continual access to the world, his alien love had furnished for him. Never for a single instance was he cut off from it.  And listened to the paragraphs he read aloud as of old. But this was all a veil he spread about himself of purpose. Behind it he escaped. It was the Contra's trick to divert the sight to unimportant details while the essential thing went forward unobserved. He managed wonderfully. She loved him for the pains he took to spare her distress, but all the while she knew that the body, lolling in that unarmed chair before her eyes, contained the nearest fragment of his actual self.  It was an empty shell. The essential soul of him was out yonder with the forest, farther out near that ever-roaring heart of it. And with the dark, the forest came up boldly and pressed against the very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the slates and chimneys, the winds were always walking on the lawn, and gravel paths. Forests came and went and came again. Someone seemed always talking in the woods. Someone was in the building, too. She passed them on the stairs, or running soft and muffled, very large and gentle, down the passages and landings after dusk. As the loose fragments of the day had broken off and stayed there caught among the shadows, trying to get out. They blundered silently all about the house. They waited till she passed, then made a run for it. And her husband always knew. She saw him more than once deliberately avoid them. Because she was there. More than once, too. She saw him stand and listen when he thought she was not near. Then heard herself the long, bounding stride of their approach across the silent garden. Already he had heard them in the windy distance of the night, far, far away. They sped she well knew, along that glade of mossy turf by which she last came out. It cushioned their tread exactly as it had cushioned her own. It seemed to her the trees were always in the house with them, and in their very bedroom. He welcomed them, unaware that she also knew and trembled. One night in their bedroom it caught her unawares. She woke out of deep sleep, and it came upon her before she could gather her forces for control. The day had been wildly boisterous. But now the wind had dropped. Only its rags went fluttering through the night. The rays of the full moon fell in a shadow between the branches. Overhead still raced the scud and rack. Deep like hurrying monsters. But below the earth was quiet, still, and dripping, stood the host of trees. Their trunks gleamed wet and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a strong smell of mold and fallen leaves, the air was sharp, heavy with odor. And she knew all this the instant that she woke, for it seemed to her that she had been elsewhere, following her husband, as though she had been out. There was no dream at all. Merely the definite haunting certainty. It dived away, lost, buried in the night. She sat upright in the bed, and she had come back. The room, shown pale in the moonlight, reflected through the windows, where the blinds were up, and she saw her husband's form beside her, motionless and deep sleep. But what caught her unawares was the horrid thing, that by this fact of sudden, unexpected waking, she had surprised these other things in the room. Beside the very bed, gathered close about him while he slept, it was their dreadful boldness. The relief of no account as it were that terrified her into screaming, before she could collect her powers to prevent. She screamed before she realized what she did, a long, high shriek of terror that filled the room, yet made so little actual sound. For wet and shimmering presences stood grouped all around that bed. She saw their outline underneath the ceiling, the green, spread bulk of them, their vague extension of walls and furniture. They shifted to and fro, massed yet translucent, held yet thick, moving and turning within themselves to a hushed noise of multitudinous soft rustling. In their sound was something very sweet and sinning that fell into her with a spell of horrible enchantment. They were so mild, each one alone, yet so terrific in their combination. Cold seized her. The sheets against her body had turned to ice. She screamed a second time, though the sound hardly issued from her throat. The spell sank deeper, reaching to the heart, but softened all the currents of her blood and took life from her in a stream towards themselves. Resistance in that moment seemed impossible. Her husband then stirred and asleep and woke. And instantly the forms drew up, erect and gathered themselves in some amazing way together. They lessened an extent, then scattered through the air like an effect of light when shadows seek to smother it. It was tremendous, yet most exquisite. A sheet of pale green shadow, the yet had form and substance filled the room. There was a rush of silent movement as the presences drew past her through the air and they were gone. But clearest of all, she saw the manner of their going, for she recognized in their tumult of escape by the window open at the top, the same wide, lubing circles, spirals as it seemed, that she had seen upon the lawn those weeks ago when Sanderson had talked. The room once more was empty. In the collapse that followed, she heard her husband's voice, as though coming from some great distance, her own reply she heard as well. Both were so strange and unlike their normal speech, the very words unnatural. What is it, dear? Why do you wake me now? And his voice whispered it with a sighing sound like wind and pine boughs. A moment sent something what passed me through the air of the room. Back to the night outside it went. Her voice, too, held the same note as of wind entangled among too many leaves. My dear, it was the wind. But it called, David. It was calling you by name. The air of the branches, dear, was what you heard. Now sleep again. I beg you, sleep. It had a crowd of eyes all through and over it, before and behind. Her voice grew louder, but his own and reply sank lower, far away and oddly hushed. The moonlight, dear, upon the sea of twigs and boughs in the rain, was what you saw. But it frightened me. I've lost my God and you. I'm cold as death. My dear, it is the cold of the early morning hours. The whole world sleeps. Now sleep again yourself. He whispered close to her ear. She felt his hand stroking her. His voice was soft and very soothing, but only a pot of him was there. Only a pot of him was speaking. It was a half-empty body that laid beside her and uttered these strange sentences, even forcing her own singular choice of words. The horrible dim enchantment of the trees was close about them in the room. Gnarled, ancient, lonely trees of winter, whispering round the human life they loved. And let me sleep again. She heard a murmur as he settled down among the clothes. Sleep back into that deep, delicious peace from what you called me. His dreamy, happy tone and that look of youth and joy she discerned upon his features, even in the filtered moonlight, touched her again as with the spell of those shining, mild, green presences. It sank down into her. She felt sleep groped for her. On the threshold of slumber, one of those strange, vagrant voices that lost consciousness, let's loose, cried faintly in her heart. There is joy in the forest over one center that, then sleep took her before she had time to realize even that she was vile parodying one of her most precious texts and that the irreverence was ghastly. And though she quickly slept again, her sleep was not as usual, dreamless. It was not woods and trees she dreamed of, but a small and curious dream that kept again and again upon her that she stood upon a wee bear rock in the sea and that the tide was rising. The water first came to her feet, then to her knees, then to her waist. Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams. A period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But finally, the water rose above her eyes and face, completely covering her head. And then came explanation. The sword of explanation dreams bring. She understood, for beneath the water she had seen the world of seaweed rising from the bottom of the sea like a forest of dense green, long, sinuous stems, immense thick branches, millions of feelers spreading through the darkened watery depths, the power of their ocean foliage. The vegetable kingdom was even in the sea. It was everywhere. Earth, air, and water helped it. Way of escape, there was none. And even underneath the sea she heard that terrible sound of roaring. Was it surf or wind or voices? Further out, yet coming steadily towards her. And so, in the loneliness of that drab English winter, the mind of Mrs. Bitticey, preying upon itself and fed by constant dread, went lost in disproportion. Greeriness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies and a clean moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts. Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her god was drawn into distance. She counted the days to spring. She groped her way, stumbling down the long, dark tunnel. Through the arch at the far end lay a brilliant picture of the violet sea sparkling on the coast of France. There lay safety and escape for both of them. Could she but hold on. Behind her the trees blocked up the other entrance. She never once looked back. She drooped, vitality passed from her, drawn out in a way as by some steady suction. Immense and incessant was this sensation of her powers draining off. The taps were all turned on, her personality as it were, dreamed steadily away, coaxed outwards by this power that never wearied and seemed inexhaustible. It won her as the full moon wins the tide. She waned, she faded, she obeyed. At first she watched the process and recognized exactly what was going on. Her physical life and that balance of mind which depends on physical well-being were being slowly undermined. She saw that clearly. Only the soul, dwelling like a star apart from these and independent of them, lay safe somewhere with her distant god. That she knew, tranquilly. The spiritual love that linked her to her husband was safe from all attack. Later, in his good time, they would merge together again because of it. But meanwhile, all of her that had kinship with the earth was slowly going. The separation was being remorselessly accomplished. Every part of her the trees could touch was being steadily drained from her. She was being removed. After a time, however, even this power of realization went so that she no longer watched the process or knew exactly what was going on. The only satisfaction she had known, the feeling that it was sweet to suffer for her sake, went with it. She stood utterly alone with this terror of the trees amid the ruins of her broken and disordered mind. She slept badly. Woke in the morning with hot and tired eyes. Her head ached dully. She grew confused and thought and lost the clues of daily life in the most feeble fashion. At the same time she lost sight too of that brilliant picture at the exit of the tunnel. It faded away into a tiny semi-circle of pale light. The violet sea and the sunshine, the mirror's point of white, remote as a star and equally inaccessible. She knew now that she could never reach it. And through the darkness that stretched behind her, the power of the trees came close and caught her twining about her feet and arms, climbing to her very lips. She woke at night finding it difficult to breathe. This seemed wet leaves pressing against her mouth and soft green tendrils clinging to her neck. Her feet were heavy, half-rooted as it were, in deep, thick earth. Huge creepers stretched along the hole of that black tunnel, feeling about a person for points where they might fasten well, as Ivy or the giant parasites of the vegetable kingdom settled down on the trees themselves to sap their life and kill them. Slowly and surely the morbid growth possessed her life and held her. She feared those very winds that ran about the wintry forest. They were in league with it. They helped it everywhere. Why don't you sleep, dear? It was her husband now who played the role of nurse, tending her little wands with an honest care that at least ate to the services of love. He was so utterly unconscious of the raging battle he had caused. What is it keeps you so wide awake and restless? The winds, she whispered in the dock. For hours she had been watching, the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows.  In his strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment, until the meaning of it faded and left her in a dark confusion of the mind that was now becoming almost permanent. The trees excite them in the night. The winds of the great swift carriers. Go with them, dear, and not against. You'll find sleep that way if you do. The storm is rising. She began hardly knowing what she said. All the more then, go with them. Don't resist, they'll take you to the trees, that's all. Resist, the word touched on the button of some text that once had helped her. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. She heard her whispered answer, and the same second had buried her face beneath the clothes in a flood of hysterical weeping. But her husband did not seem disturbed. Perhaps he did not hear it. So the wind ran just then against the windows with a booming shout, and the roaring of the forest farther out came behind the blow, surging into the room. Perhaps, too, he was already asleep again.  Her face emerged from the tangle of sheets and blankets. With a growing terror over her, she listened. The storm was rising. It came on the sudden and impetuous rush that made all further sleep for her impossible. Alone in a shaking world, it seemed, she lay and listened. That storm interpreted for her mind the climax. The forest barreled out its victory to the winds. The winds in turn proclaimed it to the night.  This was the roar and shout of victory that she listened to. For unmistakably, the trees were shouting in the dark. These were sounds, too, like the flapping of great sails a thousand at a time, and sometimes reports that resembled more than anything else, the distant booming of enormous drums. The trees stood up. The whole beleaguering host of them stood up, and with the uproar of their million branches drummed the thundering message out across the night. It seemed as if they had all broken loose. Their roots swept trailing over the field and hedge and roof. They tossed their bushy heads beneath the clouds with a wild, delighted shuffling of great boughs. With trunks upright, they raced, leaping through the sky. It was upheaval and adventure in the awful sound they made, and their cry was like the cry of a sea that has broken through its gates and poured loose upon the world. Through it, all her husbands slept peacefully as though he heard it not. It was, as she well knew, the sleep of the semi-dead, for he was out with all that clamoring turmoil. The part of him that she had lost was there. The form that slept so calmly at her side was but the shell, half emptied. And when the winter's morning stole upon the scene at length, with a pale, washed sunshine that followed the departing tempest, the first thing she saw, as she crept to the window and looked out, was the ruined cedar lying on the lawn. Only the gaunt and crippled trunk of it remained. The single great vial that had been left to it lay dock upon the grass, sucked, end ways towards the forest by a great wind eddy. It lay there like a mass of driftwood from a wreck, left by the ebbing of a high spring tide upon the sands, remnant of some friendly splendid vessel that once sheltered men. And in the distance she heard the roaring of the forest further out. Her husband's voice was in it. End of chapter nine, and end of The Man Whom the Trees Loved by Elgin on Blackwood.


Add a poll here with Stevenson head coach Tracy Johnson and coach Johnson You know, NASA was a very tough opponent and you guys got off to a tough start After was a 1-1 game. You had that stretch late first period early second where this game kind of got away from you guys Yeah, it kind of felt like a roller coaster of emotions for sure So, you know, we battled hard and we never gave up so proud of them for that We just really have to have take take some time to look Every single one of us take take some looks in the mirror here and figure out how to get us get ourselves back on track Are you happy though with what you were able to do in the second half of the game because the game settled down You were able to get on the power play you got two goals in that second period including your first short-handed goal of the year Yeah, again, like I said, you know, they never gave up and we we can see that potential and we can see that It's right there. So we just got to put together 60 minutes and none of this 10 minutes here five minutes here two minutes here stuff So we'll get to work on our consistency Kendrick had a few goals But Annie Smith Hammond was also really big for you coming off. She was your third gold tender off the bench And she played very well today. Yeah, I think she was solid going back there You know never really as a coach anticipate or ever want to have to go through all three-year gold gold tenders But she did a good job going in cold and and putting together the best half of the game as she could for us Lastly, you're still very early on in this season and it's really a big trip up coming I know you got a few weeks to prepare but you're at Kings College and that's gonna be a big one So good luck going forward in that one. Thank you so much


Hello, everybody. Thanks for being here. Today, we're going to talk about your product if you want to make it open source, or if, or how you want to build a community around it. I'm Adrin. I work at HugginFace. I'm also one of the maintainers of Cycadland. I'm going to talk about a few things that I have learned along the way, and the community has learned. Before we start, let's talk about a few different terms. Open source is one thing, but free and open source software is another thing. Free there as freedom, not as free beer. What freedom is, is different to different people, and that's why you have different organizations like Open Source Initiative or Free Software Foundation that they don't necessarily agree with one another that, if a license gives you enough freedom or not. And then you have different distributions that take a bunch of software, and they ship that, and redistribute that to people. And they have their own definition of what's accepted and what not. And the implication of that for you is that if you want to make a software, then you might want to have something that is accepted for the communities and for the distributions that you want to be included in them. But the licensed world is kind of crazy. If you look at the Wikipedia page, there's a ton of them, and each column here is a different feature, think of it. They're quite different. They allow different things. They ban different things, which kind of makes sense. But how do you decide? Maybe you should decide some of the licenses that everybody agrees they are good licenses. Well, here, each column is an organization, and they don't necessarily agree with one another. But at least there are a few that people kind of agree they are good licenses. Which one should you choose? Depends on how much you want to allow your users or your community members to be allowed to do, or things that you want them not to do. If you want another company, go use your software, make money without unchanging it, without releasing the changes. You can be on the permissive side. If not, you're more on the protective side. So easy, right? Not really. At some point, the community and all these companies who were doing open source, they kind of got to the point that a lot of people caught it that the open source is midlife crisis. Think of it as a company works on a product. They open source that. And they release it on an open source license for people who want to try, or companies who are small and they want to use it. But if you want to use it heavily commercially, or you want to use extra features, then you have to go back and pay company X. And then you end up some large cloud companies who end up using your product without paying you, and they take a big chunk of the cake and they basically grab your users. Company X goes back and changes the license, trying to prevent that cloud company to do that. That's how service site public license came out. When you look at it, it says SSPL requires that everyone who offers the functionality of SSPL license software to third parties as a service must release the entirety of their source code, including all software, APIs, and other software that would be required for a user to run an instance of the service themselves. That basically meant if you are AWS and you offer elastic sets, you can't, or you have to make AWS open source. This license is also not compatible with a lot of other licenses, including the Linux kernel, so it's really not clear how you would use it if you were to offer that as a service. And it's not OSI approved. It's not, it doesn't give you enough freedom. Whether or not that's a good thing is a different story.  Why does that matter? Because it changes the kind of community that you build around it. But the boring license stuff aside, let's talk about community. Now I have decided, I know what I'm doing on the license side, I want to build a community. How do I do that? Or rather, let's talk about the things that you shouldn't be doing. The first one is lack of onboarding. If somebody comes to your project, you create a new one, and it's very clear to you what it does. But from an outsider's perspective, it's not clear what it does, who the user is, how the users are supposed to use it, and how to get it. Then they can't enter your community. What you end up doing is having people who think and code exactly like you do, it's not many of them, we are all very different. And it also hurts the diversity of the contributors you're gonna have on your project. And I hope at this point, we agree that diversity is a good thing for a project. So we're not gonna talk about that. Things you could do, you could have it like a much better read me than you have. You can have a contributing guideline. A lot of people are now used to having a contributing guideline. And that's the first thing, when I go to a new project, that's the first thing I look for. I'm like, okay, like how do I install it? How do I compile you? If I have to compile you, how do I start contributing? Try to reduce the friction for new contributors. Instead of arguing about what format you like, what kind of, what's your line length and all of those, automate as much as you can. And if you can, have them in pre-commit hooks. They work and have CI and tests that run. And they also run for people who come from outside. If you are in a team that if somebody from outside submits a pull request from their fork and half of your CI doesn't run, then you're basically not inviting people who are not in your organization to be active in your community. The next one is nothing in writing, documentation. We all love documentation. We all hate writing documentation. That's why I'm a strong advocate of what I call documentation-driven API design. When I start a new project or when I start working on a new feature, the first thing I do is I write a Python script or think of it as a Python notebook. I explain what the problem is. I explain what this is trying to solve, how the user would interact with my software, what they would get, and at the end what the output is. If this is the first thing you do, it means that you can communicate that to your stakeholders instead of your implementation and having your stakeholders having to read your implementation and kind of guess what the API is and how the users are interacting with you. The better thing is that you start with documentation. It doesn't become an afterthought. It doesn't become a documentation that you have to pay later. But that's not the only kind of documentation you write. You have your usage docs, you have your API docs, but you also need to version your docs. If you don't, then you're gonna have users who come and they're confused because they copy some code from your documentation page, they go run, it doesn't work because they have an old division of your software installed locally. And code documentation is as important as the other public documentation that you render. Code documentation is important because if you have a new person, either an outsider or a new hire who wants to work on your code base, they look at your code and they have no clue what it does, they can't enter that community. And you can, even if you're just doing closed source, you're just inside the company, each project is its own community and you want to have people who can enter that community as easy as possible. And be comfortable with your documentation toolbox, whatever you want to use. A good part of the PyData ecosystem uses Sphinx, it nicely renders your docs. We use also Sphinx Gallery, we take the Python file and generates an IPython notebook and an HTML file. And if you don't want to deal with the infrastructure, you can read the docs that does all of that compilation for you, it renders it and it also versions your documentation. The next one is leadership is a mystery. A new person comes to your project and they don't know who makes decisions. They don't know if they have questions, if there is a person that they should ask. They wouldn't know if somebody's review matters more than others. Or is there anybody they could just like send an email to and talk? Is there anybody who could mentor them? And this brings us to the governance. Deciding how your leadership works is deciding how you're governing your project. And there are many different models. You go through a few of them and then you need to decide what flavor works best for you. The first one is duocracy. You might have a team, they're all internals, they all have access to the repository, they all work on different parts of the project. And practically the one who works more on a module becomes the owner of that module and they make the most important decisions of that module. It works, it has no overhead, but when newcomers come, they have no idea which module is owned by which person. It's very implicit and it's really not clear to the outsiders. So it works at the beginning, but you can't really continue doing that for long. The next one is founder leader or BDFL and the Python community is very familiar with this. Hilo used to be the BDFL of Python. It's a very easy system to start with. You start your project, you are the one who makes all the decisions about that project. It's good for a while. It doesn't have any overhead, but at some point your project becomes hopefully bigger than you. Your preferences become your personal preferences that might not agree with the direction that the project is going. If you have an active community, if you have a large user base, they might want something that you don't. And if you're the only person making those decisions, then there's a clash. And it's usually to the detriment of the project. To solve that, a lot of projects have a self-appointing council or board. So you're like, okay, I want to have a single point of failure.  They all work together. It's good, but if you are self-appointing, then you're not necessarily representing your user base unless you actively try to choose people who represent your user base. And as humans, we are really bad at doing that. So the next model would be electoral. It does add a ton of overhead. You can have explicit time limits. You do need to have multiple people who offer to do the same thing. You need to have a large project and contributor base to do that. But if you have a sponsor, the sponsors might require you to do that. So it's a good step for a lot of larger projects.  You want to be the one making decisions. You want to decide the pace of the project. And not everything that people see in that project are things that are relevant to that project. You might have a closed source part of the ecosystem that influences the decision you make here. So it makes sense to you. But you want to have it open source because you want to engage a broader community. You want to increase that option. But it's kind of open, but it isn't. It's kind of a walled garden. It looks really nice from the outside, but it's not clear for people how to get in. You might have dual license system, which means people who contribute, they might be happy to contribute to a free open source project. But if you're making money from their contributions, it's not clear to them why you make that money, but not them. And the one with the most overhead probably is if you create a foundation for your project. The foundation will do all the legal for you. It doesn't have to be the same people who lead the foundation, who lead the technical part of the project. So you might have two different leadership teams. You might also decide to join another foundation or an NGO. Like Non-Focus is for a lot of non-focus-sponsored projects, like Non-Py, Sci-Py, Mathplotly, Psychicland. They're all a member of that. It does give you a lot of better funding opportunities because it's much easier for the funders to pay the foundation instead of an individual. But which one should you choose? It's a really good question. And these few that I mentioned are not the only flavors. It's a spectrum among different axes. You need to see what kind of community do you want to build.  Or is this something that is a main asset to you, to your group or your company and you want to keep it inside? Do you want it to be kind of thing that works really nicely in five years? Or do you really want to be fast and you want something to be delivered in six months? All of those define how fast you want to go and how much you want to engage the broader community and then you can decide what kind of governance you want to have. But it's better to be very explicit so that when people come to your project, they know what they're dealing with. The next common issue is no path to success. That means when users or contributors come to your project, they have no idea what success is and how to succeed. Does it mean that they should be pinged and their opinion should be cared about when about certain topics? Do you have different teams like, I don't know, committee X, committee Y, like an advisory board or a core developer committee or a triage member team? How do people advance? Is that clear? And it matters because it sets the engagement level that people will have on your project. If they don't, some people might be more than happy to just code, but a lot of people don't and that's more than okay. They want to know how they can progress in your team. You need to be clear about how they can do that. And then that also brings us to internals versus externals. If you treat people who are inside your team differently than people who are outside your team, then people who are outside, they might not feel like they want to be a part of the project because I worked, for example, as a consultant and I was always the external. I was never treated the same as the people who were employed by that company. That's why after two and a half years, I was like, ah, it was nice, but like I want to belong. The sense of belonging is really important for a lot of people. So practically, if you have workflows that wouldn't run for others who are not in your team, try to fix them. Do your team members have a workflow which is very different from people who are not in your team? Try to encourage them to follow the same workflow. It would also, if there are pain points, it would show you what those pain points are. So try to treat people as much as you can equally if you don't have to differentiate between insiders and outsiders don't. The next one is poor communication. Communication really matters, even though like a lot of us would rather that it didn't, but it does. And we think that it doesn't matter or we don't want it to matter because we don't want to do the extra effort of doing good communication, but we will be offended if somebody else does like treats us badly. And 50% of texts and email messages are misunderstood. That's because first of all, humans have a tendency to assume the worst and all the emotions and body language and tone is lost when you write a message. Also people who know each other treat each other differently than people who are strangers. So if two people who know each other on a thread have a kind of a communication that is okay for them, but an outsider comes and sees that, oh, that looks really harsh. I don't think I want to be a part of that community. That's something for you to think about. And reviews, code reviews, are kind of by nature criticisms, supposedly constructive criticism. So it's really easy to offend people. Try to use emojis. Bring your emotion to the game. In most cases, your emotions are not bad. They're nice. And if you also, you need to have somebody at least who watches all the communication going on, on your lists, on your issue tracker, and sometimes when, if people are really passionate about something, the discussions can get really heated. Be the person or have somebody who's a good mediator and try to mediate all those very heated discussions and try to cool it down a little bit. The next one is lack of transparency and it comes in many different levels. The easiest one is if you have a bunch of people working in the office, they might go have lunch together. They talk about a certain aspect of your project. They all agree, they come back, one person opens the pull request, the next person approves and it's merged. From an outsider's perspective, they don't know why that PR was opened. They don't know why it was approved. There's no discussion. They might disapprove, but most of all, they don't feel that they've been included in the decision that was made there. So if you do talk about something, first go and say, hey, we talked about it and this is what we talked about. Does anybody have an opinion? And if your team is distributed, the rule that a lot of companies follow is, have at least don't merge anything sooner than 24 hours after it being opened unless it's really a hot fix that you have to fix. It allows people from different time zones to chip in. If they want to. And then this comes in different layers. You might have a company Slack that you have an open source product, but you talk about a lot of stuff inside your chat channels or internal systems. Then it excludes outsiders. But even if you're talking about only people who work in your company inside that system, you might be having some private conversations that excludes other people who might care about this project that you might not even know. So try to be as open as you can. It slows you down a little bit, but in the long run it really helps with keeping people and bringing people in. And the last one is not seeing ourselves in others. Basically have empathy. We are not necessarily the best people who have empathy for others, but it really matters. If somebody comes to your project and they open a really grumpy issue, try to understand where they come from. Ask questions instead of being like, no, this makes no sense. I'm going to close it. Okay, why are you hurt? What's bothering you? Try to understand their pain points. It might be good for your product. It might be something that they are feeling that others are feeling too and try to fix that. Try to have emotional intelligence. Until a few years ago, I thought that's absolute garbage and I don't need it. And then somehow I was convinced and it does help me. It really does help me. And try to be a feedback magnet. None of us are perfect, but that's totally okay. People don't want to give you feedback, especially if you are a core maintainer. If you are in any sort of position of power, most people don't speak truth to power. If you want them to talk to you, if you want the feedback, you need to actively go and seek specific feedback. So, to give you maybe an example of why all of that matter, I can talk to you about my personal experience. Around 2018, I started working a lot more on open source and back then I was using TensorFlow, so I thought, I can go contribute to TensorFlow. Why not? I started, I opened some issues, no response. I tried to open an PR, no response. Okay, I guess this looks like, and then I looked at the commit histories, it was all coming from a bot that was coming from Google. So I realized it was kind of a product that is developed internally and it's kind of just pushed out. It's not something that wants to involve the community. So another thing that I was using was Scikit-learn. So I went and I found an easy issue, documentation issue on Scikit-learn, I opened a PR and I got a response pretty quickly. I was like, oh wow, and then I fixed the issues and it got merged, it was an amazing feeling. And then I kept going and at some point it became kind of my full-time thing and my weekends and my evenings. And after a few months, then somebody pinged me on an issue and I was like, hey, Adrien, what do you think about this? I was like, oh wow, somebody cares about what I have to say. And then a few months later, I woke up to an email asking me if I want to join as a core developer. I'm like, what?  And then that changed the whole course of my career. That single first interaction and the way that the community worked changed how I was involved in that project. And at least for quite a while, I had a lot of contributions to the project. Whether or not that's a good thing, like the jury's out. But you do get people. And from your perspective, if you're a maintainer, a random person opening a PR, especially if you have a busy project, is just yet another random person with an insignificant contribution. But that person has the potential of being one of the main members of your community. So to end, I'd like to talk about some resources that you can go and it's a massive topic. You can't really fit everything in a single talk. If there is one thing I want you to take from here is to read emotional intelligence. I thought the book is going to talk about things that are not scientific and I'm not gonna like them. But at least the first third of the book was about the neuroscience of emotion and how we make decisions because we have emotions and how our emotions influence our decision-making process. It's great. It's from the 90s and it coined the term in emotional intelligence, but it's great. Another one is this book is a little bit dated. It's a little bit US-centric and it treats gender quite binary, but it still has quite a few listens for a lot of us. How and why men should mentor women, if that's something that you care about, like in your projects, because I think you should.  This book really helped me understand microaggression. It helped me understand Poiland principle and how impact is different from intention. Something that you say you might be very well-intended, but it might have a very different impact and that matters. If people are offended and leave you, even if you didn't want them to, you can't blame them that they did. You had an impact on them. Another really great book on the open source side is Working in Public by Nadia Arbal. It's a great book. It talks a lot about the dynamics of open source. Then when you look at the open source, each project as an organization, then you understand how decisions should be made and having everybody engaged. The open organization book is great. It talks about how decisions are made and how red hat works internally, but you can apply that to any kind of project where you have a bunch of people making decisions and some of them might be more senior than others. And the last one, Producing Open Source Software. It goes in a lot more detail on a lot of topics that we talked about, but a lot better. And if you're not into reading books and you prefer online resources, there's a ton of them. I can't include everything, but they're great. And with that, come to an end. Thank you. Thanks, Adrian, for this amazing talk. And if you guys have any questions, please walk by to the mic. Yeah, so I think everybody has. If you like your open source ecosystem session. So yeah, thanks again for it. Thank you. Yeah.


Hi, I'm Christy Harkin. I've been Bitcoin Man magazine's managing editor for the past four years With me is Andreas Antonopoulos a long-standing Bitcoin evangelist and educator and author and speaker Andreas welcome to the Bitcoin magazine having Event so great to have you here couldn't do it without you Thank you so much Christy. It's a real pleasure. I've been a huge fan of Bitcoin magazine ever since the first couple of Editions in fact, I remember one of the first editions was sold to me at a conference by a Very nice young man by the name of Vitalik Buterin Great. Yeah, he started it all off and running and we've taken it in lots of different directions since so this is your third halving and And so we're going to be getting your perspective on the state of Bitcoin for each of those separate epochs and Get some ideas of what you see coming in the next one because goodness knows there's a lot of exciting stuff coming down the pipe Absolutely. Yes. I was lucky to just about catch the first halving in 2012 So lots of excitement. I came in halfway halfway between number two and number number two and number three Or no between number one and number two. Yeah, so this is this is my second So, yeah, wasn't much of a big deal when we did the second one I think in fact Aaron van Verden had an article saying we had the halving and not much happened But it's always in the weeks and months and years that follow that things get interesting So if you're to look at the first three and a half years or so of Bitcoin four years leading up to the 2012 halving, how would you characterize that period? What was what would your impression of that be? I? Think those were the obscure years Bitcoin was very much an obscurity and Very very few people had even heard of it and Had any idea what it was so the the user base was tiny the Community was extremely small. I remember going to the first conference in San Jose and meeting Basically, everyone the entire Bitcoin community almost at the time that was in the US was there and You could fit everybody in a room It was quite quite tiny There were a few interesting areas little pockets of development. I know that I think by By 2012 there was a London conference happening There were some Meetup groups all sort of springing up in lots of different places. Were you involved in the meet-up scene back then? I had just started getting involved in the meet-up scene. Yes I co-founded two meet-ups in the San Francisco area, which is where I lived at the time Yeah, and I think that now in terms of say development of Things being built at the time. What were some of the most striking things from the the brief Halving number one that really stood out as markers for you that showed that we're gonna actually go somewhere with this. I was really excited at the time with a Very interesting new technology called p2sh or pay-to-script hash with the emergence of a new form of address which Started with a three instead of a one something that's very familiar to us now, but in 2012 that was new until then the types of scripts that you could put into Bitcoin transactions were severely restricted. So there was a fundamental test that occurred in the system For standard scripts, there were a few standard scripts that were Let's say approved by the consensus rules. So after the initial launch of Bitcoin developers went in and they identified a few bugs that Satoshi had overlooked some edge cases some Difficult scenarios that could emerge and in order to protect against certain types of bugs The code was changed and the Bitcoin script was restricted with a lot of the kind of more exotic capabilities disabled and this number of scripts allowed Limited and so by 2012 that started opening up and things like multi-sig Really started to expand at that point So you could you could do some really interesting things with multi-sig as well as more complex scripts started becoming possible And when you say that like those kinds of developments really opened up things like multi-sig Why was that important? Why did that make Bitcoin more usable and more have more potential? Well because When the the primitive building blocks that are in the script language are expanded it starts kind of tickling the Creative brains of people who are thinking about these things and they gradually come out with with some really strange radical and exotic ideas that then take years to come to fruition, but eventually become very important innovations so for example the use of the op return parameter to Be able to embed small amounts of data which created the possibility of the first second-layer capabilities colored coins count a party Omni or master coin as it was called at the time which then Gave people like Vitalik Pateran the idea of making more expressive scripts that led to Ethereum a lot of people don't know that Vitalik started trying to build Ethereum as a layer on top of Bitcoin using the master coin Layer all of those capabilities opened up with the opening of the script types in 2012 so The door opened then and then the innovations continued to trickle out Segwit and its possibility of being implemented as a soft fork in 2017 was based upon Some of the peculiarities of the script language the lightning network which appeared as a fully fledged idea with an implementation design effectively two years three years later was based on the capabilities of Complex scripts and multi-sig at that time so it takes a while For primitives to become fully fledged ideas and for people to build interesting things with these Building blocks and then for those ideas to become workable code and then deployed networks and then finally features in user wallets But those of us who are paying attention and and kind of can see where things are going when we see these doors opening at the primitive layers of the protocol can kind of see where that might lead and so Start imagining new things When I was thinking about the first epoch I started thinking like if I had to sort of put a chapter heading on it or something I was thinking something along the lines of what is this Bitcoin? What is this and what can we do with it? And yes when we look at sort of the the timeline of things that did happen, you know We're getting first experimentations with exchanges. We get our first couple of bubbles. We get experimentation with different forms of wallets and you get the HD wallets starting to come in and how that opens everything up So if there was a lot of the whole like you've just got a brand new toy, but you don't know what to do with it yet and then following the second in if you I mean in a way the Havings are kind of Arbitrary benchmarks if you like it's all coded in and one thing doesn't necessarily lead to the other But it's an a useful parameter. I think for us to think of these My as milestones and and what can we say about the periods in between? So the second one I was thinking of in terms of so from 2012 to 2016 sort of as an experiment build and break Section there was a lot of experimentation a lot of building and a lot of breaking a lot of a lot of stuff went down in those four years There's and a lot of regulation started coming in people outside Started looking at Bitcoin and going what is this and what do we have to do about it? In fact the first encounter I had with you Followed your speech to the Canadian Senate on what was Bitcoin and how Whether or not Canada should be regulating it So, how would you look at how would you look at that section second period of Bitcoin? Well, the the second period of Bitcoin. I think is when people outside of the very very small community started taking notice and a lot of things Good and bad happens. I remember 2013 as being this absolute tornado of a year where so many things happened in one year that It was a transformational year for my personal involvement in Bitcoin But but also a lot of a lot of really Shocking and exciting things happening And what really what's what comes to mind specifically what what is your what's the one thing that really stood up for you then? Well for for me it was back-to-back the appearances on the Canadian Senate floor as a witness as well as Shortly thereafter at the Joe Rogan experience podcast which has an enormous audience and kind of catapulted me into Recognition in a way that I wasn't really ready for or anticipating It was the beginning of my work on Mastering Bitcoin the book. It was the first big rally where people suddenly got Very excited some people got quite rich and some people got quite greedy and that led to a slight change in the perspective of Outsiders who were now more attracted to the possibility of quick riches it was the beginning of the first altcoin and Ico fever and Just just an overall crazy year I also remember it was the first time we saw some real cracks in The ability of empty gox which at the time was an anchor kind of bedrock exchange the only really big exchange that existed and it really creaked under the strain and Threatened to fall over which which kind of presaged what was going to come next which was the biggest Collapse of a custodial system in the history of Bitcoin Yeah, the the other thing that I think another kind of big ish event that happened right after It was right after the the first halving was the takedown of silk silk road as well Which was one of the first big big use cases for Bitcoin yes, absolutely and and the shockwaves that sent through the the community and forced people to Reckon with the the the moral ethical implications of this technology on both sides Yeah, those were two narratives that Bitcoin really had to handle a deal with was the the silk road side and the collapse of mount gox so you had the whole that whole sort of Bitcoin is for criminals and It's not safe, which I think that took several years really for Bitcoin to Really recover from and get changed the story and change the narrative and prove its its actual value Yes, it was it was a big setback Which I think set set back the whole narrative by probably a couple of years then again, what it also did was it took the steam out of The the speculation and the anticipation of riches which again allowed The community to refocus But I find those periods the busts that follow the booms to be periods when there's a clear out in the community and a lot of the Opportunists Who have kind of flooded in in order to take advantage of the rapid rise in price and to stake a claim and Things like that they get washed out And what stays behind is people who it may have entered the space looking for Some kind of financial gain, but then are attracted to some of the principles and Then stay and want to learn more about why it matters. Why it's not about the price why it's about openness and freedom and the lack of control and intervention and censorship and Of the traditional financial system and so we have some very good conversations It's also a great time for those of us who are doing work in the space to Be able to tone down the noise and and really focus on what matters and get down to work Because when the craziness is happening during the boom cycles, there's too much noise and too much distraction And It's very difficult to to get any real productive work done. So I ended up finishing my book during the next two years and Got a lot of work done building kind of education And we we did some of our best work And I think the same thing applies with the core developers who were working On a lot of different things a lot of people produce some excellent work the Lightning Network paper was published at that time Ethereum launched and started a whole new interesting chapter in this saga and And you know Everybody got ready for the next boom cycle the next having and it didn't take that long And that's what I would have probably be be labeling the third the third epoch that 2016 to 2020 was boom and bust And also sort of the boom of the new financial products that started coming out I think that everything sort of All of that initial interest that keep that started in the second epoch really exploded in the third one And we got a lot of the institutional Interest in Bitcoin Yes, and It's more than just the institutional interest in Bitcoin I think one one of the things that happened that was really interesting is the second to altcoin and ICO season because Everybody remembers the altcoin and ICO season in 2016 2017, but most people forget that the first one happened in 13 and 14 We had ICO is then that's when the term was coined right and it and then In in 2016 2017 what happened however was that Ethereum proved One of its fundamental Propositions, which was that it made it so easy for anyone to tokenize anything and with that came The the double-edged sword that it made it so easy for anyone to tokenize anything That everyone tokenized everything including things that shouldn't have been tokenized and altright scams and we had the a much bigger second round of altcoins tokens and ICOs and When the space exploded in financial terms in 2017 That's when every shark in a suit piled on You know some people like to call that The institutional interest in Bitcoin I think of it as sharks in suits Circling at the smell of blood in the water and hoping to get a piece of chump for themselves Because the most of it wasn't serious institutional interest. It was very very opportunistic. We didn't get The the creme de la creme of the financial services industry What we got is the bottom feeders of the financial services industry and they flooded But they've since a lot of been shaken out and now Exactly as soon as the boom turns to bust all of those opportunities get wiped out and Make grand pronouncements about how they never really believed in Bitcoin They're much more interested in blockchain the technology behind Bitcoin Which is kind of a sour grapes response to failing to Lambo It's it's really funny. But again, that gives us an opportunity then to Batten down the hatches focus on the important work Educate the people who are willing to stay and learn about the principles get prepared for the next wave of newbies And really start differentiating the signal from the noise Again, it's a very productive period for those of us working in the space That's when the Lightning Network was actually built was after the boom That's when I finished my second book mastering Ethereum might publish a couple of books about The Internet of money in the meantime, but the second big technical book happened then And here we are again So, where are we gonna go? What's what's the one thing pick because real quick now one thing that you were excited to see coming in the next epoch well First of all, I think that the same prediction that I made the previous two havings applies again, which is that a Whole lot of nothing is going to happen and For now for now. Yeah, because The monetary effects If any and I'm not an economist, so that's not my primary of interest The monetary effects take quite a while To make themselves felt in the market more than the speculative enthusiasm that that kind of races ahead of any real fundamental change so What we're seeing now is this kind of frothy excitement That doesn't have much substance to it But that is overwhelming any possibility of getting some kind of signal from the market fundamentals It's gonna take a long time before the signal from them from the fundamental change in the inflation rates of Bitcoin's issuance Breaks through all of that noise and becomes a dominant signal that that really is is felt in the market But markets aside what what is exciting to you about what's going to be coming in the next couple of years? well, I Think the the most exciting two developments in this space are The changes the underlying scripting language that are almost ready to deploy and I hope they'll be deployed faster than our previous Change with Segwit and those are schnoar signatures tap roots and tap scripts that come as a package of changes Those open up again. It's as I mentioned before as in the first era They open the door. They create new building blocks on top of which a lot of exciting things can be built There's a couple of other potential changes to the scripting language that are being proposed that Massively increase the flexibility of the scripting language without making it turn complete and those are very interesting The other area of development is the maturation of the lightning network to me The lightning network until now has been primarily a fairly raw and kluji Protocol implementation a prototype that is gradually getting polished but the rough edges have mostly been polished off and We're getting to a point where the user interfaces in the lightning wallets the infrastructure the reliability of the system the consistency of the experience etc are beginning to Shine through all of the efforts that have gone into the last two years of running production networks are bearing fruits And I think that's going to monumentally impact how Bitcoin is used how it's perceived and Really transform the environment Until now a lot of what we are doing with Bitcoin at least on the surface With stuff that you could also do with traditional financial services Lightning opens up a whole new dimension of time and space In terms of time we're talking about transactions that take less than a second to be fully cleared irreversible and trusted and Where you can do thousands of transactions per second potentially and in addition to that the Opening up of the dimension of space where until now the minimum transactions you could do viably on Bitcoin was about a dollar to ten dollars and We're going way below that to Subcent transactions true micro payments and even nano payments below that That open up a whole range of applications. What's interesting is that now we're talking about applications That are unprecedented But simply do not have an equivalent in the traditional financial and payments industry and once we start exploring those That's when this technology really comes into fruition That'll be really exciting to see in the next couple of years and and beyond even but Would be good to resume this conversation again in another four years and see where we are and what else has popped up As a you know really promising development everything moves Exponentially quickly as well from where things were every four years. Who knows where we're going to be in another four So, yeah, I think though a lot of people are Anticipating something momentous happening at the moment of the halving because it's been pumped up by all of the reports And we talked early about milestones, you know milestones You know the word comes from markers that were put up every mile on our on Roman roads and Just like when you when you pass a mile marker not much changes in the scenery The halving as a milestone will be completely uneventful in fact We hope it will be completely uneventful from a technical perspective. Yeah, the difference between blocks six twenty nine thousand nine nine nine and 630,000 Is going to be nothing It's going to come across as an a somewhat anti-climactic Experience because within that experience We will see the Fundamental experience of Bitcoin and the fundamental experience of Bitcoin is tick-tock new block. That's it Perfect. It just keeps doing that It's dead.  It's for criminals. It's not for criminals. It should be regulated It shouldn't be regulated all of that noise and in the meantime what Bitcoin does in the background is tick-tock new block and Continues to chug along 24 hours a day 365 days a year Unstoppable that's what is that's remarkable. That's the remarkable thing about it Exactly, and that's what's gonna happen during the halving nothing's going to happen because by design Nothing is supposed to happen and then once it's worked then people can go back to oh it didn't die and Now we can we can see what the economic impact might be or other things that will come as a side effect of that Everyone will breathe a big sigh of relief except for those of us who are kind of grizzled veterans who've been through this before and we'll continue and Everybody will forget all about the halving in three and a half years from now I'm going to be explaining it all over again to journalists that are going to be asking me about the possibility of a death spiral imminently Which happens so often when you know new people come across this technology and misunderstand it quite dramatically No That pretty much sums up I guess all of the good stuff. Thank you so much Andreas for doing this again and We'll see you in another four years If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe like and share All my work is shared for free. So if you want to support it join me on patreon


What drew me to the torch was the ability to create different styles of arts and still make a decent living doing it, so interested in it and intrigued that I just had to have my hands on it and be in front of that torch. A lot of the art styles I use in the glasswork came from my tattooing abilities and the ideas that I get even with the woodwork as well.  What glassblowers initially inspired my style would be the puke and beagle was a huge one, Ron Worm, Steve Bates, Swagger at the time, Donk or Lester and Sean, they were great influences on the person that I have become at my glass-building today. Depending on how much wood to glass ratio there is, if you get too much glass on too little of a body, I've noticed they're kind of tinny, but most of the time I leave so much wood on it that most people wouldn't know the difference. At any given point in time, on top of my regular everyday production work, which I don't stop doing, I have anywhere from five, six, seven guitars going on, doing the woodwork, doing the glasswork, some of the challenging aspects that smokers may overlook when it comes to glassblowing are that it's quite difficult. Some of the things we make look very easily, but it's more of a repetitive thing. When a lot of smokers are like asked for custom colors and such like that, I don't think they realize how hard some colors, if impossible, are to do certain things with blowing a simple bubble or doing lacework with it, it's just impossible. You want red, well, red boils real bad, certain shades of red and such like that, and a lot of smokers would definitely overlook that. At some point in time, those simple things were very difficult to make, a lot of getting cut, getting burned. The most rewarding aspect to being a glassblower is I think the art fact of it. I have light bulbs just going off in my head all the time that I could create this or create that some things don't work, some things do work, almost the things that don't work sometimes you learn more off of than the things that do, and it goes towards advances in future creations and such like that, and I just love it.