Talking

"...we spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information.  This seems to be our most urgent biololgical function; it is what we do with our lives... It has become a tremendous enterprise... All 3 billion of us are being connected by telephones, radios, television sets, airplanes, satellites, harangues on public-address systems, newspapers, magazines, ... words got in edgewise... Already, there are no closed, two-way conversations.  Any word you speak this afternoon will radiate out in all directions, around town before tomorrow, out and around the world before Tuesday, accelerating to the speed of light, modulating as it goes, shaping new and unexpected messages, emerging at the end as an enormously funny Hungarian joke, a fluctuation in the money market, a poem, or simply a long pause in someone's conversation in Brazil..."

~Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell~

We spent an amazing ten days with morningstar as a guest here in our home.  She quickly came to feel more like family than a guest, pitching in to help with dishes and meal preparations, walking with me to carry the day's trash down to the dumpster each evening, keeping watch over Master and I as we walked each morning.  We touristed around our town and around our area, seeing things we wouldn't have if she had not been with us.  We laughed, we played, we watched lots and lots of baseball.  It turned out to be an interesting "vacation" for us all. 

An awful lot of what we did though, was sit and talk.  Exchanging ideas, stories, jokes, memories.  Some of that was just the silly and light chatter of people getting to know one another.  In other moments, we dived deeper, talking about the things that make us uniquely the people we are in the world.  To be sure, there was nothing particularly earth-shattering in the torrent of words we unleashed with one another.  We didn't solve the problem of world hunger, and we didn't answer any big existential questions.  We learned about each other, and we learned about ourselves. 

Did you hear us talking?  Did you feel the currents we created? 

Maybe not.  Maybe that's because, the conversations that we had here were really just part of the larger conversation that we are all involved in -- face to face, or here and there among all our various pages, we are each and all engaged in pouring out those words that connect and define and open us all up.  This is what we do...

swan