stuff i think

Well, I'm back.

Thirty days, more or less, unblogged. It was not a blogstunt, as some might have thought, geared to drive up the number of hits and start some sort of internet paranoia. It was time to pray, fast, prepare, and clear my head. Much of the thirty days were spent with the view above. It seems like blogging is a placebo for a cluttered noggin. I needed the straight stuff, not the false sense of having communicated.

Not connecting this way every day really spoke to me....it spoke to me that this is really not connecting at all. At the time when I stepped off the grid, about seventy people were reading this daily. For a writer, that's a warm fuzzy feeling. Seventy people peeking in to see what I did that day - read what I thought - communicate with me. Then I realized that if those seventy were all in a room and I walked in, I'd know about ten of them...and it felt rediculous.

To further illustrate the illusion of electronic community, an online tribe that I have been a part of for 2+ years - wonderful people with great hearts - took a very strange left turn through some sort of acidic relational swamp. That wasn't the weird part. All relationships do that at some point. The strange part here was that three days later it emerged back onto the road and the unspoken consensus arrived at was "let's pretend we never hit the ditch!". The speed with which we all tried to do a mental end run around what was clearly disfunction just reiterated to me how uncommunicative electronics can be. After a long time of thinking about it, I realized I was spending entirely too much time thinking about the goings-on of this group. I remain in contact with some of them - and haven't written any of them off by any means...but I am choosing to step away from the whole before I fall in. Pun intended.

All that being said, I'm glad to be back, and curious about you. Lurk if you must, but comment if you have it in you. I think I've readjusted my expectations of what community can be via the internet, so I promise not to expect too much, and I imagine you won't dissappoint me.

Much has happened in the last 30 days. Rather than give you a day by day, here are the high points.

• Met Loren Cunningham, director of Youth with a Mission. Amazing guy - he's one of only a handful of people who have been in every nation on the earth...a task that got a little tougher when the USSR went kaput.
• Bought a house and moved into it.
• Celebrated my 37th birthday.
• Began preparation in earnest for Burning Man.

I'll blog Burning Man stuff in days to come, but things are looking good. A team of sixteen. Fifteen thousand bottles of water. A caravan of 2 rental cars, a rental minivan, and rv and a semi will snake out of Reno and onto the playa the last weekend of August. I'll keep you posted - more than 30 days at a time.