Friday, February 23, 2018

Terrace Garden - Feb 2018


This is actually the second video I made this week. I discovered that in the first one, I did something weird with my voice- I think I subconsciously used a 'bedroom voice', which I do not have! :D

The garden is thriving and we're all so happy.

Thursday, February 15, 2018

Connected

It's funny that after such a long gap, I felt the need to write about being connected. I've been blissfully disconnected, warped in a world of simple joys: work, dogs, plants, art, cooking and TV. Or perhaps it's best to use the words 'otherwise connected'. 

There's a lot of talk in the current global culture about the fact that we're all connected. I don't doubt it for a second. But I do wish it was more tangible. Let me explain...
(Before I do, a Note: I tired quickly of searching for and using synonyms to refer to ancestors, so henceforth, I will use 'ggp' which stands for 'great^x grand-person' ;))

I asked my mom recently about who she misses the most from her past and she named two incredibly supportive teachers from her childhood. As she talked about them, I wished I could have met them. Then, it struck me - I could pass by one of the grand children of these teachers on the street and I wouldn't know. This amazing connection between two people simply passing by, unacknowledged and unknown. That's almost tragic. I've taken to thinking in this vein a lot of late. The people I walk past or ride with on the bus or train; they could be related to me, or we could be connected by a friendship or even a shared incident between our ggps. There are so many possibilities!




I wish we all had our own personal screen that pops up in our field of vision. Just like in the movies. As each person walks past, a descriptive line or two about what you share with them. You wouldn't have to stop and acknowledge each person or gush over your connection or share a forced conversation just because you think you ought to. But to simply know would be nice. To feel for real what being connected means. To be a witness to one's own history. To share more than genetic material with your ancestors. Wouldn't that be cool? To know that this guy walking past you is the great grandson of a man who once heroically saved the life of your great grandma? Or the woman selling bananas belongs to a family who used to own a large area of land, on which stands a tree one of your ggps planted? Or oooh, way back in the Stone Age, our ggps worked on a flint knife together? I think we'd all smile at each other in absolute delight.  

Of course, there'd be bad stuff too. Like seeing the progeny of someone who enslaved or abused one of your ggps. It would be a bit of a shock, I imagine, on either side. Maybe incite feelings of shame or anger? But in time, wouldn't we learn to be more accepting and forgiving of even these links? I don't know. It would be an interesting social experiment, for sure. 

Being prone to thinking things through thoroughly, I tried to imagine how this could come about. The vastness of the intelligence required to keep track of and constantly disseminate that kind of information to billions of people- if such a machine existed, wouldn't it be the equivalent of 'God'? Which leads me to contemplate- if God does exist, can you imagine such a creature? Billions of billions of billions of gigabytes of memory, processing speeds faster than the speed of light, inter-dimensional existence, an intelligence far beyond our imaginations....it boggles the mind. I'd like to be connected to that. Plug me in.