Several years ago, I experienced a sharp longing for a more unified life. I was in the throes of welcoming new technology into my home, hoping it would help harness the countless needs of my business and growing family, but instead of the promised simplicity and streamlining, I began to feel my life fragmenting.
She mentions that in order to re-integrate, she began to journal:
These journals, which I began in 2016 and begin publishing today, are the fruit of my self-diagnosis. Not only was I fragmented, but I discovered our culture was fragmented, and those fragments had begun to polarize at a disturbing clip. I began questioning how I could knit them back together, picturing the exercise as lashing so many barrels from a shattering shipwreck together, like the Swiss Family Robinson.
This relates to a process I went through and mentioned indirectly here. I stopped blogging regularly right around the time my first granddaughter was born, in mid-2014. I could never quite get used to social media, which at the time was growing explosively compared to blogs and email groups and the like.
My kids left the major social platforms first, and it took me longer, because I had a friend-and-family list that encompassed my past history all the way back to college. Plus, people would ask for prayers, and I could pray for them.
Increasingly, though, I dreaded loading up the social media apps. The mechanics of their function were obnoxious, to a point where it overwhelmed for me the benefits of the connections. It was like going to a big reunion where Big Brother is the master of ceremonies. At his most charming, of course, but sometimes the real face showed through, especially during the pandemic shutdown and after.
So I gathered my resolution and finally pulled away, though leaving a few pieces of myself behind that still give me phantom twinges.
A few times I tried to start blogging again, but it always felt weird. And a bit vulnerable, because in the years I was away from the internet, those fragmented pieces of our culture that Regina Damon refers to developed some pretty sharp edges and seem to be exploding outward away from each other.
Now there is more of a sense of kairos, of being drawn into the moment, and since I can't really explain how it is presenting itself -- it's a combination of many things that perhaps I can describe someday -- I am collecting things that seem to evoke it, like the idea of a Culture Recovery Journal, which for some reason makes me think of monastic scribes collecting and copying manuscripts, or the image of lashing barrels together to float on them and bring them back to shore.
Also I am almost a senior citizen and need something besides knitting and yardwork and dozing to think about! In that regard, I like the way Regina Doman talks about Learning to Brake:
Given that the Shadow will always Fall between our potency and our existence, between the motion and the act, one blessing that God gives us is slowing us down and frustrating our desires.
Since today's Septuagesima reading was about the Fall and God's response, it also makes me reflect that some of God's judgment after our first parents' sin involved that very slowing down and frustrating of desires. It's hard now for us to bear and raise children, to make the earth fruitful, and so on. We are slowed down; the promise of technology is to surpass and override and speed up nature, but it's often in the end sterile and scattered, if not more tyrannic than what it promised to improve on.
As far as writing on this platform, which also may have its issues, I will have to see. I can definitely see why people choose Substack.
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