Is Interpersonal Connection Circling The Drain?

In this moment I am basking in the warmth of my friends. Some of them are brand new. I’m reconnecting with others after having been separated from them for a little over three years. Quite frankly, it’s the reconnections that are making my heart soar. It’s not that these new friends aren’t exciting to have – I mean, after all, they chose to come in to my life because they are attracted to some of the things I stand for – it’s just that in these three years, I have been aching for the kind of intimacy I once had with those other friends. And now, I’m wondering aloud, am I crazy to think I could even come close to experiencing what I once had, with either the new ones OR the old ones?

In this moment, I am also doing nothing more than hitting keys on a keyboard, and imagining that I have a connection with more than the thoughts that run through my fingers. There is not a conscious human being within twenty feet of me. My housemates are asleep. I don’t have what I’d call intimacy with any of the five of them, and now that I think of it, there’s not a one of them with whom I’d even want to share what I’m going through.

Yes, they’re right here, right now, but I’m not really there right now with them. I’m in the act of articulating my experience, which is not really happening, but only being thought about. In my mind, I am building community. My fingers are doing the work. But in my heart, I’m really touching, or being touched by…no one. There is no community here, only an assortment of ideas, digitized and up on a screen.

Part of me really resents that I’m here. What my heart longs for is connection and relationships that I can touch. But, in this changing world, my survival depends on my putting more and more time in Cyber-space, with you, whoever the hell you are.

The people whom I hadn’t been in touch with for three years were fellow communards from an Intentional Community. I lived, worked and played with them for five years. It was one of the most personally satisfying times in my life because through it, I learned to have people mean something to me within the context of an 87-acre parcel of land. Prior to that time (47 years worth!), I was pretty much a concrete and asphalt-oriented lone wolf.

In that time I learned a lot about relationships; about how love is a moment-to-moment decision after all the bells and whistles die down, about the importance of seeking cooperation to build bridges between different ways of thinking, about sharing in the burdens of debility, injury, death and horrific life changes with each other.

But perhaps most important is that I experienced the magic of physical proximity and interaction with people within the context of the natural environment. Life has a hell of a lot to do with sharing our energy with the nature of which we are a part.

Our natural environment is becoming more and more narrow, our interactions with it, less and less. Now, with the advent of things like this Cyber-space networking system, nature is a place where we barely go anymore with each other. How long will it be before we don’t go anywhere with each other, either?

This is not a flippant question.

My fear is that, just like we’ve lost true connection with the natural environment, we will lose true connection with each other.

How could that happen? Well, when I was 40 I started spending time with a traditional Oglala (Lakota) medicine family, living and working with them on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Just by walking the land around the Rez you could see evidence of our accelerating detachment from nature, the land, and each other.

The land of the Rez was as barren and “unproductive” as could be. It took me a while, but I did start to detect, and then experience, a bit of how the traditionals experienced their own lives. In my opinion, they did not experience themselves as separate from their environment.

This was a remnant of how things have been through most of the history of mankind. It is our foundational way-of-being, and being with each other. There was no one who lived their lives -- separately or together – without having to interact with that which was given, as opposed to that which was built. Survival of any member of the tribe was dependant on survival of the tribe as a whole, and the only way that could happen was by eons of learning the art of living in cooperation with each other, in intimate circumstances as determined by the nature around them.

There were also a few, small, family farms around the Rez, owned by Whites, which still showed evidence of a connection between an extended family and the land. With minimal technological marvels, each individual in the family (including, usually, long-term helping hands) functioned in a well-defined role that was built on a web of connection and a mutual rhythm with the ebb and flow of nature.

And then were the mechanized conglomerates that, massive in scale and impersonal by self-definition, viewed the land as a commodity designed for the utilization and exploitation of its available resources, and people as vehicles for such conquests.

So here, in one place, was clear evidence of a progression of separation: Not only between the land and the people, but also between the people and each other. Functionally, we’ve pretty much taken the natural environment out of the loop. Are connections -- true connections -- with each other going next?

Technology is distilling the energy of people and funneling it into a homogeneous mixture of frequencies that can only be tapped in to by more technology. Witness the cell-phone. As illustration, I offer this article called Cell-phoney: http://ezinearticles.com/?Cellphoney&id=81920 which also illustrates the seductive pull of communications technology that lures us into less and less connection with each other.

And now, as I spend more and more time portraying myself as someone worth getting to know through the vehicle of Cyber-space, am I depriving myself of the opportunity to not only be seen, but also touched by people that are in my life, right here, right now?