#tinyspeck

Grendaline is hard to overlook. 

We worship Her without knowing - swearing under our breath as we stare at a swamp laden with beauty and life, or wading laughing into the ocean to feel it curling around us, or tilting our head up to the rain, or drinking straight from the tap on a hot day.

Loyal though She is, Grendaline is no nurturing and gentle Giant. Her world is both the water of the womb and the terrible crushing certainty of sinking under the ocean. She has killed for us, and killed us as well. 

People speak of the ocean as cruel, but water as a whole they call gentle. I tell you now, neither of these things is wrong but neither are they true.

The ocean will cradle you to safety, a puddle on the bottom of your tub will send you crashing to your death. There is a terrible ferocity to Her, however.

However.

Powerful as it is, water is vital, and replenishing, and a kindness we often do nothing to deserve. We don’t have to deserve it - we earn it simply by living. She sees us, and She gifts us with this one thing so essential for our lives. She may not be kind always, but loyalty? That She can give us.

The loyalty She gives us is not always kind - it is, however, reliable. Water is not fickle; water is a constant. Ice might be frozen, but it is still water. Steam is still water. She shifts her form but She is, and always will be, there. Her loyalty is Her steadfast resolve to stay by our side, despite everything.

Zille, the Giant in charge of Mountains and minerals - in charge of the bones of the world itself - is a Giant much overlooked.

She has an important responsibility, but save the utilitarian moments when we need her immovable form, her solid edges, her stability - she is often overlooked.

She’s a neurotic creature, Zille - she’s friendly and she wants acknowledgment, but she shies from it if it’s given too forcefully. She expects to be relied on.

As one of eleven Giants, Zille might be the least revered. But she may be the most powerful: of all the Giants, she is the one who has a well-tended sense of responsibility. She has work ethic - not because she feels obligated by outside forces, but because she has found the core, the centre of herself, and that centre is in the creation of every mineral and rocky land-formation, every hill, every barrow and butte and cliff. She loves what she does, and she puts that love into something which, like her, is often overlooked.

People are grateful for her work only when they directly benefit from it, and I think that’s something some of us find difficult to tolerate, but under such circumstances one’s sense of self can thrive. Think of carpenters, of cleaners, of decorators, of factory workers; these jobs are necessary, but they're background noise to most people, only admired for a short moment when brought to a person's attention, that attention waning quickly.

Imagine doing all you did without acknowledgment. Of course, at first it seems a lonely idea, but aren’t we all tired of needing constant validation to enjoy our own work? Zille is not just a labourer - she is an artist as well, and her art might be something we consider simple, but everything from opals and diamonds to quartzes to shale all come from this one, friendly Giant, who expects only our acknowledgment, expects only those moments of appreciation before her work is once more in the background noise of our minds.

Zille hosted Zilloween - obviously a play on Hallowe’en - and when the world was ending, she gave us one last Zilloween celebration, that stretched on forever. Appropriate that she is the only Giant to have bones in her depiction, but the festival - while hosted by her - was not a time for worship and adulation, it was a time of connection to one another, a time of quiet gratitude and loud celebration. A time to come together.

Zille, to me at least, is a gentle and patient Giant, one slow to adapt and constantly inventing small, necessary things we don’t notice day-to-day. She’s the Giant who does the most unacknowledged work, and she’s kind about it.

Neuroses play a part as well - while the ideal is to work on things without the need for praise, even a Giant might feel, occasionally, neglected without some level of acknowledgment. Zille is happy enough to labour in the background, to create without the need for constant affirmation, but it certainly doesn't hurt to gently express one's appreciation.

In the end, Zille has a tranquility and a sense of self-love we might all aspire to, but it’s important to find the Zillots in your life - whether they know they are or not - and to make sure their neuroses don’t erode their self-worth. To make sure that, once in a while, they feel valued.

Be open, be kind, and thank them, and Zille, in simple and clear terms. There’s no need to grovel (gravel). There’s no need to fall over yourself with praise: simply make sure they know that their work is appreciated, and Zille herself will smile down on you.

Okay, so for those of you in the know, this might be stating the obvious, but here’s a little summary. 

In the now-defunct game Glitch (by TinySpeck), there was one overarching antagonist, and that antagonist was a seemingly hive-minded series of birds referred to as a singular whole: the Rook.

In Glitch, you could die - it was temporary, though, and not that scary; hell had a few layers, some grapes and tomatoes, a bar... And death wasn’t caused by the Rook!

Instead, what the Rook did was attack an area, and slowly drain colour and energy out of everything living that was there. Animals would slowly sink down to the ground, trees would wilt, and rocks - as they could speak as well - would go miserably dormant. 

Sounds more or less straightforward, right? Fight the Rook, everything springs back to its former glory, everyone goes home for a nice cuppa, etc.

Except that you couldn’t fight the Rook. The game had no weapons.

You could drive it away, though - a temporary fix, as such things always are. And the way you did it was to call your friends, to gather your forces, to donate to the Giant’s shrine of that street and to meditate together. You focused the force of your will to continue, banded together, and drove the Rook away from that street with lots of small groups of Glitchen huddled around their meditation orbs. And people got good at it, made channels just to talk about where the attacks were happening. They made sure that nobody had to fight the Rook alone.

But here’s the thing - the Giants imagined this world, and the Rook was, in the end, tearing down their capacity to think. The Rook was the brain-fog that comes with chronic depression, the exhaustion that leads to stillness and sleep.

It was also necessary for the flow of the game.

When Glitch shut down, a lot of people considered this the triumph of the Rook’s evil, but I say otherwise - the Giants imagined that world for us, and their imagination led to consequences, led to the Rook, but the Rook is no inherent evil. Instead, the Rook is the stillness of rest.

It’s impossible to keep oneself feeling bright and shiny through everything. The stillness of exhaustion, of that fog, can be a welcome respite from the kind of grief and fear that comes from being imaginative and losing something - when a beloved friend dies, or a house burns to the ground, the Rook is precisely what we need. The capacity to shut down for a while, to focus only on oneself and take the time and space to be still and to heal, that is what the Rook is.

Like the Giants themselves, the Rook is neither good nor evil. These concepts can’t apply to an integral part of life, and allowing oneself to sink into the cotton-wool stillness can sometimes be necessary.

That said - when it drags on, when it drains the life from you... it’s time to call the cavalry. It’s time to find people who can be mindful and compassionate and alive with you. Focus your energy on something, no matter how small, with a friend - a game, a hobby, anything. 

Let the colour leach back into your world.

 Okay, so.

This blog is mostly being started so that I can undergo a year's meditations on the positive, neutral, and destructive nature of each of the eleven Giants from Glitch, as well as the Rook. The Rook, which is the antagonist of Glitch, is an entity which represents stagnation and exhaustion. 

The thing is, the system I follow with these creatures doesn't have any "evil" in it, no inherently malevolent power, no fickle trickster to pin blame on - these Giants have entirely neutral traits, which can have positive or negative results.

There will be other things I look at in my posts, but here, for now, is a quick summary of each of the Giants. I’m putting it under a Read-More out of courtesy.