“Every day he read with dismay the things people he knew said online. He’d grown up with many of them, known them all his life. Yet when he read their comments or posts, he began to wonder if he’d ever known them at all. When had they become so full of hate? How could they so easily categorize and condemn entire groups of people? Many times they were people just like them, like him. Had they always been this way, just constrained by the standards of social and human decency to filter themselves? Was cruelty easier when expressed from a keypad or keyboard?
Over time, he began to disconnect from this electronic existence. Of course there were people and photos and events he’d miss, but the world of so-called connection was proving to be corrosive, even incendiary. To read and be silent felt like a betrayal of his convictions. But he had no desire to add to a noise that was too loud for anyone to hear a single voice. A soft voice. A kind voice.
At night he would take a quilt and climb with his dogs into the foothills behind his house to one of the meadows tucked among the walls of rocks and trees. He’d lie staring at the night sky, blurring his eyes until he could imagine himself inside Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting. He thought back to the art, the books, the music he’d loved when he was younger and a more naive version of himself. He thought a lot about Thoreau and his wish to live deliberately in solitude.
If Thoreau were living today, would he go off the grid?
Can I? he wondered.”
I take photos. I write. My volunteer job is taking photos of rescued dogs and cats transported by the rescue group whose records I manage. Since working and volunteering don’t leave me a lot of time to write, I’m spending 2017 borrowing from what these dogs and cats are writing. They said it’s okay.