Blog

I remember my first night on the internet. My husband had a big desk PC. I got the address of a friend’s fan website and entered it and a green line appeared, filling in an empty line space for what seemed like hours. I had never “surfed” before. I remember thinking I was seeing the arrival of the future as that green line filled in and, finally, an image popped up. Hello future.

When I was younger, I thought that burial of bodies in coffins was obviously going to have to end at some point (now that I’m older, okay, I’m more lured by the illusion that graveyards are enjoyable real estate and do I want a view? But, ashes to ashes, honey.) I imagined the best way to memorialize people’s lives would be to have a shoe-box-sized Memorial Box – yeah, like a bank deposit box – with their written thoughts. This assumed, of course, that people would all write down their thoughts, which ignores vast swaths of oral tradition. But if we subsituted them simply for all the mahogany and brass coffins in Western culture, it’d still be a good idea.

Blogs are the Memorial Boxes! And we can visit them while the people are alive and changing them! This is a good thing. The evanescence of the digital world – well, I’m an actress. I’m used to evanescence. Whatever goes out onstage in a performance is impossible to capture unless you’re there in the audience to receive it. It’s what the spiritual masters call Darshan, I guess. Or Dharma transmission. Getting something from the fact of simultaneous physical presence in space and time. This isn’t that.

Welcome to my Evanescent Memorial Box.

Yes, I twitter. I blog on more public sites (pdamerica.org and HuffPo). But here – well, it’s me thinking Inside the Box, which we all must do. It’s a good thing. When we start casting our egos about in inappropriate places and trying to figure out what we think by acting out what we haven’t thought through – well, it’s less helpful if we haven’t done some contemplation and meditation as prep. I’m an activist. I believe in action. But not any kind of action: thoughtful action, effective action. So we have to be freer in our thoughts, to consider the possibilities. And writing is thinking. And I”m grateful for it.