Tuesday, and friends are coming over late in the morning.  Friends of many years become scarce with the passage of time.  Life becomes more complex, or worse, we are uprooted and forced to begin all over again.  The latter is often the case as demands of employment mandate a move to a new town or city.  There is much movement here in the West, as if movement itself were desirable. 

A current questionable assumption is that reality, life, by and large is lived online.  The idea place does not matter.  That it is normal for “work” to happen virtually, on a two dimensional pixelated LCD screen.  Work from under a beach umbrella on Azul Beach in the Yucatan, or from where ever.  Where doesn’t matter.

That “friends” come down to the number of “likes” on a Facebook page, or relative to a host of flavors of social media options: Tik-Tok, Instagram, Twitter promoting “relationships” unmediated by material connections or by things..  Thousands of internet followers?  A digital and soulless swarm…  The older norm of “real” life, rootedness is considered irrelevant, unnecessary… 

I ask myself often if anything that I “see” on a television expansive LCD screen, is a straight forward, “what-you-see-is-what-you-get presentation?”  I don’t think any of it is.

It is a privilege to entertain old friends today, to walk around the yard, to introduce them to the place where we now live.  Place is important.  It is possible to fall in love with a place.  It is possible to understand one’s identity as representative of a particular family, that has lived for many years in a particular town, etc…  This suggests that identity is a composite, a matrix of kinship and neighbor relationships.  It suggests that the texture of a self has been conditioned by the features of Nature, the natural environment that has served to nurture and inform and sustain the physical and emotional well being of an individual.

Or so it seems to me…

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This is our tune for today, a life line thrown to us from the lifeboat of “civilization” as we continue our course “down” the river of time.  Sometimes, on some days we relax, feeling secure in languid pools of serene beauty between the wide banks.  On other days roiling rapids are ahead, one sees white water…

Hang on, hold on, — enjoy.

No matter what, keeping holding on.