Lech l'cha. Arise and go. Move yourself.
We first leave womb when we are exiled from the home, but just in time since we would have died in Eden. Seek pastures new. Over yonder, under horizon, left at rainbow. Earth flying at 66,000 miles an hour, there's no being, only becoming. I am what I will be.
Liberated, we spend our exilic lives going into new exiles, doors closing, opening, lost and found, travelling away from, towards, sojourning, at home, among foreigners, family, friends, foes (often blended). We stay in our pond and feel bigger as it shrinks around our expanding girth. We make a break for the open sea and disappear, anonymous and animated.
The whole wide world is a narrow bridge connecting us to our future selves. Fear is part of the journey.
The urge for home, the itch for adventure. Stillness and movement. To every think there is a time. We pass through shocking new terrain, from blob into newborn into baby into child. Each stage and age a necessity, no scenic circumventions allowed. Adolescence, quarterlife, midlife, new life. Curiouser and curiouser.
Lost life. What doesn't kill us, but did kill those near to us, makes us stranger and once again we must go into exile or wither in the old country.
Kiss and kin is not what it used to be. Blood and soil is now rootless cosmopolitan, we're all immigrants to Netland. Here, there and everywhere, but always "here". Post-patriots, global villagers, how do we expatriate our online identities? How do we freeze-frame our far-flung home if no longer in a fading sepia photo, stored safe as a gem ?
The past is a foreign country and so is our home and all that once we held. Dear friends were not so firmly planted in that cracked earth, were always strange to us and we to them. Complacent, we would condemn "American" friendship as mere business acquaintance, utilitarian, skin deep. But not we Real people, blood brothers and sisters.
You become a father, so you travel. To meet your son in the land of his birth. "Welcome, stranger", you say to each other. You travel to meet his mother in the land of hers. You travel because your home town is not where it used to be. You travel because there never was an alternative. Take me home to the future.
What is this "virtual" fear that stalks our first steps in the Land of Net ? It's the same fear that chased Gutenberg's "virtual" papyrus, through which he opened the doors of perception. Is a "virtual" friend a lesser friend ? Wrong question. It's human nature to make a virtual out of necessity. Count on thoughts, allow them to print on your soul, never mind how they arrive.
We're all strangers, to our ever changing selves as much as to others. We'll take whatever shoulders we can cry on or ears we can whisper into. I'll show you my friendship if you show me yours.
Travel with me a while, stranger. Together we'll be stronger.
We first leave womb when we are exiled from the home, but just in time since we would have died in Eden. Seek pastures new. Over yonder, under horizon, left at rainbow. Earth flying at 66,000 miles an hour, there's no being, only becoming. I am what I will be.
Liberated, we spend our exilic lives going into new exiles, doors closing, opening, lost and found, travelling away from, towards, sojourning, at home, among foreigners, family, friends, foes (often blended). We stay in our pond and feel bigger as it shrinks around our expanding girth. We make a break for the open sea and disappear, anonymous and animated.
The whole wide world is a narrow bridge connecting us to our future selves. Fear is part of the journey.
The urge for home, the itch for adventure. Stillness and movement. To every think there is a time. We pass through shocking new terrain, from blob into newborn into baby into child. Each stage and age a necessity, no scenic circumventions allowed. Adolescence, quarterlife, midlife, new life. Curiouser and curiouser.
Lost life. What doesn't kill us, but did kill those near to us, makes us stranger and once again we must go into exile or wither in the old country.
Kiss and kin is not what it used to be. Blood and soil is now rootless cosmopolitan, we're all immigrants to Netland. Here, there and everywhere, but always "here". Post-patriots, global villagers, how do we expatriate our online identities? How do we freeze-frame our far-flung home if no longer in a fading sepia photo, stored safe as a gem ?
The past is a foreign country and so is our home and all that once we held. Dear friends were not so firmly planted in that cracked earth, were always strange to us and we to them. Complacent, we would condemn "American" friendship as mere business acquaintance, utilitarian, skin deep. But not we Real people, blood brothers and sisters.
You become a father, so you travel. To meet your son in the land of his birth. "Welcome, stranger", you say to each other. You travel to meet his mother in the land of hers. You travel because your home town is not where it used to be. You travel because there never was an alternative. Take me home to the future.
What is this "virtual" fear that stalks our first steps in the Land of Net ? It's the same fear that chased Gutenberg's "virtual" papyrus, through which he opened the doors of perception. Is a "virtual" friend a lesser friend ? Wrong question. It's human nature to make a virtual out of necessity. Count on thoughts, allow them to print on your soul, never mind how they arrive.
We're all strangers, to our ever changing selves as much as to others. We'll take whatever shoulders we can cry on or ears we can whisper into. I'll show you my friendship if you show me yours.
Travel with me a while, stranger. Together we'll be stronger.
March 9, 2011, Bom Retiro, Sao Paulo.
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