One of the curses of being wired to the world in our modern, advanced civilization, the one we think of as the zenith of mankind\u2019s endeavors, is feeling like what happens in some village in Indonesia somehow should be of interest to me. \u2018Honey, I shrunk the world\u2019 should be the theme song to every YouTube, Yahoo News, Facebook and Google feed. It\u2019s important to stay tuned in, I suppose, maybe know what the folks in Tierra del Fuego think of the recent killing or the Estonians are doing about Russian meddling in their politics. Hard enough when we\u2019re swamped with news stories here in our own little country, everything from impeachment hearings to the latest mass murder in some town we may or may not have heard of before the media rolled in to cover the mayhem. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s not only exhausting, in case you didn\u2019t notice, but \u2026 well, it\u2019s a constant distraction from living your life. When I first dropped anchor on the South End, I didn\u2019t have a television, much less a computer. We had a telephone and a stereo that played cassette tapes and records. The telephone was on a party line with a mom and her teenage daughter. In other words, we really didn\u2019t have a telephone that was usable, not with that single mom and her chatty daughter using it 24\/7. Not that we really had many people to call anyway\u2026.<\/p>\n
I bring all this up because the last few days I\u2019ve been sliding back into those early years. It\u2019s winter and the days are short and getting shorter. Back then we did a lot more reading, I played a lot more music, we did a lot of hiking the beach and the woods, time was plentiful and we had to find ways to fill it without resorting to the babysitter we call internet. Early this morning I walked down to the beach with some crab bait, rolled my boat over and lowered it into the water, then rowed out to my pots. Mt. Rainier was perfectly framed in the Straits, golden glaciers in the sunrise glowing majestically. A half dozen cormorants watched me from a raft moored far out from shore and the gulls waited to see what I would toss them from the bait traps when I got to my pots. The now familiar seal that follows the wake of my rowboat kept popping up and checking on me, each time eliciting a bark from me, not maybe a real good impersonation of a seal bark, but he was listening. A fogbank beyond Whidbey lay like a dropped blanket at the foot of the Olympics, those mountains now immaculate with new snow after a summer of melt. Nothing much but me made noise. My oars dripped a line of water each stubborn stroke, circles falling back following small whirlpools both sides. The world was perfect. And I was in it. Not distracted, not jumping to the next crawler or ad, just a tiny sliver of the world with me pulling at the oars, gliding through it. <\/p>\n
We\u2019ve lost that, I think, now that I\u2019m back on shore, back up at the house. We\u2019ve let it slip through our fingers because we\u2019re bored, we\u2019re lonely, we\u2019re forever looking for something to fill up the space between the last thing and the next thing. But it\u2019s like calculus, the intervals get smaller and smaller, but they never become Now. Now is now. Some days, like today, I remember where to find it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the curses of being wired to the world in our modern, advanced civilization, the one we think of as the zenith of mankind\u2019s endeavors, is feeling like what happens in some village in Indonesia somehow should be of interest to me. \u2018Honey, I shrunk the world\u2019 should be the theme song to every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[2276,2277],"class_list":["post-12340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-be-here-now","tag-reality-is-what-you-make-it"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12341,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12340\/revisions\/12341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}