“The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years.” (-Rupert Murdoch)
My grandmother’s blue and white pitcher traveled in a physical journey by ship, all the way from Scotland to America. It was long ago broken, and I patched and nursed it together again with glue some years back. I’ve called upon it to hold flowers over the years, and often, as I fill it with water, I think about how much life it's lived, and how well it has survived. Then, it also traveled with me over the years to Virginia and North Carolina, still durable despite its mended cracks and age lines.
Late last night, I was browsing through my Flickr photostream as I am often wont to do, and I learned that a woman I “know” through the Internet, named Karin, who is living and teaching students in China, had her birthday today. I was excited for her, and then immediately had to calculate in my mind whether or not my note I would write to her would be a belated happy birthday in her time zone.
None of us any longer has to physically move at all; I can “travel” vicariously to distant lands and over time zones in a way that I never imagined would be possible some years ago, and all the while, I never have to leave the comfort of my own couch.
I’ve “met” a distant cousin in Scotland I’d never have known if not for the Internet and the genealogy work I did. To date, I have never physically met him, but I’ve Skyped him for hours on the computer and feel almost as if I’ve sat with him in the same room.
Every day, I interact with so many people around the globe whom I’ve never met, and some I may never meet, and yet I somehow feel I know them and understand at least some of the things that make them tick. They each enrich me on a daily basis. I have so many new “friends” in my world: an interesting gentleman, John Ward, in England, whose walks along the Thames fascinate me; another couple in Australia, Ray and Lorna Tomes; Jane and Bob Humphrey, a wonderfully charming couple in California, whom I've actually met; Karin Faulkner in China, who continually educates me about fascinating and foreign cultures; Chris Bonney, the wonderful photographer, in Virginia Beach, whose acerbic wit continues to delight me; Carol Gillott, that fabulously creative artist of "Paris Breakfast" fame, in New York, with whom I spoke on the phone just yesterday; Jeanette Sclar in Missouri; and a number right in my own back yard, Lin Frye and Laura Frankstone, two more inspired artists whom I never would have even known existed but for that amazing tool…the Internet. I have actually gone sketching with people around the country I've met through that wonderful vehicle. I even had a woman send me a note asking if she could buy the rights for something I had posted so she could use it for a young children's board book she is publishing.
Yesterday, I noted that on one of my blog posts recently, I received a note from the distant descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Willow, from “Life at Willow Manor” (in Ohio) noted “That is totally amazing that a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s commented on your blog” and I most definitely have to agree.
“I have an almost religious zeal…not for technology per se, but for the Internet, which is for me, the nervous system of Mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up.”
(-Dan Millman)
