The Artifact: Stories on Nature, Connection, and Awakening
About this audiobook
An unexpected reflection on a mountainside. A small, half-buried object that returns light without emitting it. And a voice that doesn't reach us through our ears but from a more ancient place, ready to listen rather than teach.
The series of stories that begins here traces this discovery through those who possessed it before: a woman who severs every bond before seeing herself reflected in it, a robot that tends an artificial garden while its creators forget why they built it, a loyal dog who learns, by observing humans, that true love is rarely unconditional, a man whom the world calls mad and who drinks from his own reality without asking permission, an old man who searches a trunk for a photograph and finds, instead, the suspicion that wisdom is more like a child's wonder than the weight of years.
Written with the calm of someone who has learned to walk a little off the beaten path, this is a book to be read slowly, like listening to the sea when you finally stop speaking to it.
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About the author
Diego Agustín Orlando was born and lives on the Argentine coast, between the sea and the wind—two elements he knows intimately. He is a diver, a sailboat helmsman, and a skateboarder, someone for whom the body in motion and the mind at rest are not contradictory but complementary.A public administration employee and certified in information technology and cybersecurity, Diego has always crafted a life of quiet contrasts: technical rigor and spiritual questioning, routine and depth, the visible and what lies beneath the surface.From a young age, he drew and wrote—rhymes, poems, and reflections he didn’t keep, perhaps because the time had not yet come. It was an intimate tremor—that kind of shake that doesn’t destroy but opens doors—that restored his voice with a new clarity. The reflections he had always carried within finally found the words they deserved.An autodidactic reader who has journeyed through Catholicism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Stoicism without dogmas or banners, a father of two, a man of his own faith and free gaze, On the Riverbank is his first book. And it reads as if he had been writing it his entire life.
