Good Tuesday Morning, everyone.
I have to give credit to my friends for keeping my brain working and my ideas polished up. I had a conversation the other night about “does the world feel smaller” these days. To my friends, the answer seemed to be “no” - the world seems larger and more complicated than ever, and the chances to see it - to truly see it all - are getting further and further away.
To me, it seems the opposite. The world feels terribly small to me, that the ability to get away - to not be found, the ability to go and have an experience that is unique in a place, the ability to have a part of the world all to yourself, and to learn and experience it in a way that no one else can, is vanishing, and vanishing faster and faster every year, like a puddle drying up.
I feel like I see it everywhere - folks have written articles about how we all take the same travel photographs, folks talk about Green Bank like it’s a magical Shangri-La of a place, since it doesn’t have cell service or wireless internet (although it’s not clear how much longer that will be true).
Sometimes I can still find the feeling - this morning was one of them. Hiking through the fields with a heavy frost on, remembering the smell and feeling of many, many mornings like this on the farm - headed out to the woods, or to school, or to do work, but the feeling that I “knew” this place, and that there was a world full of these places.
So, readers - I would be curious - does the world feel larger, or smaller to you these days, and why?
Field Frost - West Virginia