Given my earlier thoughts, perhaps you can see how you're a real treat to me, because I can map all these mental projections about who you might be, based for the most part on what I've read by you, (and now what I've felt, and the bits I've heard) of you, and a resonant hologram - kind of an art piece, a portrait, if you will - of you rolls around my parietal cortex and starts to imply an entity that I'm very interested in talking to.

Of course, there are those that would say I'm just talking to myself, and to that I have to agree. I'm certainly not writing these things to have you, or anyone else, respond to me. In fact, I'm pulling these out of the letter box (though there is a comment place) simply to relieve any expectation of response or dialogue.

Besides, I don't want to expose myself to the pitfalls of developing an emotional attachment through e-mail. I don't mind at all you either reading - or not reading - these pages. E-mails are a little different, and I thought it prudent to separate the e-mails - the things that I really do want response to - from the rich flow toward you that my words are simply the natural coloration of.

And it will be interesting to see if you're here, or not. Even if you don't reply, but you read, you'll know more of me. You'll know the me I feel like sharing right now, when we can't be near each other, but when I feel something tangible for you that I've decided to express. It will be fun to see what Spirit does - and what you and I do - with the opportunity.

When we met, I thought it was curious that you expected a very different person than who you felt me to be on the ground. I'd said that I felt like one could come to know someone in the virtual. You maintained that the virtual connection between two people was intellectual only.

You have a lot more experience than I do with virtual territory, and so perhaps what your observation means to me is that the intellectual manifestation of a person's being is a rich - not flat - place, imbued with soul, because that is what I feel with folk I meet through the web - a line to soul. Of course, how it steps down through the other bodies and filters a particular incarnation's being is a completely different matter altogether.

But to the extent that my map of you is coherent, and reflects who you are or who you're striving to become, I'm communicating, and not just talking to myself. I wrote a poem to that effect once...

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2001

Answers

Besides, the important thing about all of this to me is that I'm responding so viscerally to an image - you - that's drawing me out to reflect on a variety of things happening in my world. I have a lot to think through. I *want* to think it through. I want to contemplate what I've just been through, especially this past seven years.

And I process the complex metaphors of experience best when I bounce them off my understanding of, and desire to reach, Another.

This is sort of where that god-thing I do comes in again. My capacity to feel Connected seems to ebb and flow. I'm learning to feel its presence more in my life (I get energy Juice that is, as I get older, increasingly hard to ignore) and cultivate it when it begins to swell. That means acknowledging it, and making a room for it, and engaging in dialogue and transaction with it, and cherishing the presence of it.

Sometimes it's a non-human presence that moves into my life. The Plants are a good example of that. So's the store. And the moments on stage in synch with the audience and the music. But sometimes it's a person that gets to wear that ebbing - or flowing - presence. I try had to keep seeing the *You* inside the more ubiquitous you that is Other.

Actually, I think it may be the most important thing to stay focused upon, and one of the hardest - to actually see the transitory, this-life-only-ego-manifestation of the very special Soul that's moving me and love *that* being just as much, or even more than, the Soul inside.

Funny how a lot of the New Age dialogue on relationship seems to be about getting with the Eternal Soul of another, and I seem to see that as just a bit escapist, or at least doing the easier thing. The harder thing must be to align with the frazzled, volatile, novel, and increasingly tired Ego du Jour, and loving *that* one deeply and fully. It seems that if I can manage that, the Soul Love is a given.

Remember, I said it can get confusing. And if *I* can't keep it straight, I doubt anyone else could do it for me any better.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2001