Intruder, Intruder!

"The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place, but it can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvellous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one. This is only be expected. It is, after all, wholly man-made. And it does not have the confidence in its own various preachings even to allow coexistence between different faiths"

(Christopher Hitchens)

* "The Milky Way from the Uludag National Park in Turkey. The stunning natural spectacle hangs above manmade pockets of light from the towns and villages below." Tun Tezel/Royal Observatory

'I share therefore I am'

“Texting, emails, posting. All of these things let us present ourselves as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete. We get to retouch face, voice, flesh, body. Not too little, not too much, just right. Human-relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology.”

(Sherry Turkle)

For a long time, I have felt that this text of controlled spacing, backspace buttons and immediate thesauruses (sounds like a clever dinosaur) are like little islands that create lands made of only footpaths. It feels unauthentic. I feel unathentic. There is no doubt that when we are texting and typing we try so very hard to let ourselves show through. Perhaps choose a different font type, add an emoticon or punctuate with a little onomatopoeia. But spell checks remain reminders and immediacy is subject to ourselves and only ourselves. We control the time we can use to craft a sentence. Texting serves narrow purpose and should remain within such constraints but it's growing, has grown, and doesn't cease in fragmenting ideas and ourselves. We're untraining ourselves, we can no longer listen or talk, we can't bear silence, we don't understand how to be ourselves irrelative to other people. We need the opportunity to say the wrong thing, we need the opportunity to be unconsidered, we need to be real. I don't doubt that many a meaningful conversation has (for me), occurred over the space of a LCD screen, but my words feel borrowed and my thoughts, processed. There are times when this is great, of course. Like if your friend has an annoying voice, or if you're in the middle of an argument that calls for google support. I'll admit I've never felt the availability of education to be so wonderfully accessible but it still remains that this kind of interaction doesn't require communication. Lubricants might be a trusty invention for many but let's not lubricate all of our words and experience it all a little more naturally, and be a little rougher on ourselves (sexual innuendo intended).

Worry about how it works.

I do appreciate a quality vlog or fifty.

Jelly babies.

The wonderful thing about children is that they are yet to know how wonderful they are and will become, that they still have no clue how much wonderful is in this world. To them, there is so much that is dormant, quietly waiting to be woken, shaken, made alive. To children, the world is endless wonder. They question and chase, wide eyes filled with a skin of hunger adults have long ago shed. There is not an instant they are not learning and eager for such learning; repetition has not yet clung to them like the words in my sentences do. They carry hands with muscles readied for captures and never passive palms. Their miniature minds and bodies form new memory production lines, experience everything without a history that burdens. Instead it is new and vividly fresh, like waking to the smell of good baking permeated into your pillow. The worlds of children are made of possibility never permanency. To me, there is nothing more exciting than being a helping hand in their discovery, as they grow and grow and grow to become another near impossible coincidence of wonderful.