on the roar of the internet

is there quiet? are you sure?

i thought about when i started reading people on the internet as a teenager and the voyeurism of reading the, then new kind of publishing, so raw and intimate. i thought about this because for much of my life there has always been so much of this kind of news. i remember the freshness of it and how it delighted me to see and feel other people becoming right before my very eyes. i remember the hopefulness i felt about the internet, a place to connect to each other, the ways to glimpse our collective at its most real. and how over time it changed into a roaring din that feels like standing too close to the freeway all the time.

and how many years later i find myself wondering what kinds of hearing have i lost because of the noise. i think we learn to listen based on the sounds we recognize over time. this is how inference and meaning are made. we are made relationally as the stories of the time tell themselves through our experiences.

but i wonder what can we not hear, not make sense of, what have we maybe forgotten or tuned out because of the roar?

i don’t know that for me this is means something, i guess i just wonder because i looked at the peach tree that we planted last year. it was nearly destroyed by hungry deer and this year with water, and a new fence it is growing and even blooming but it is a strange misshapen thing, the leaves have leaf curl, the blooms are huddled in towards the trunk. i’d like to be able to hear enough about this tree to know which branch to trim to stimulate growth, what kind of weird shapes are survivable and which ones arent. i suppose i say this because when i start to look i notice the multitude of ways that the constant prioritization of connection to a global human world changes my (and undoubtedly everyones) connection to a smaller less human world. i don’t know what this means. i don’t think it means we should return to some other time or place.

and when i look, here are a few things i see:

-a print of birds flying on a big blue sky. they are starlings. i know them because they remind me of how music feels when it washes over my body.

-a bouquet. one perfect piece of grass, roses, calendula, california poppy, chamomile, chrysanthemum, and lupin. now its droopy and slightly rotten but it was part of mothers day table spread, as bright as spring.

-an empty tea cup, that i keep refilling with the hope i wake up

-all the tabs, the bookeeping tabs, the scheduling tabs, the podcast i hope to listen to one day tab

this week i smelled chaparral. thick and dry in a big jar, heavy with resin.

i soothed a child back to sleep, as she dreamed through her fever shouting “stop, that doesn’t feel good!” to some kind of opponent in sleep. i was quiet in the middle of the night rubbing her back. it was something to be in the dark, just me and the rustling skunk, the irritated child, the stretch of the moon. i just had a body aware of the temperature, a mind not scratching for the next thing, an imprint of two shapes warm and okay enough. we were here, listening, or sleeping.