the gift of the on-line journal - private and yet, so connected

We live in amazing times.
We can click on these little metal machines and be connected to other little metal machines anywhere on the whole blue/green globe.
There are 6 billion of us, and we all know who the world leaders are, what McDonalds is, who Madonna is, how to play soccer.
We will all know about the Olympic Games.
We can click here and there in a blogger program, and find ten other people who are making journals that are quite similar in focus and intent to our own.
We can communicate with these like-minded souls.
This is an amazing thing - but my kids don't find it amazing. They find it routine.
We have so so much and we are so so not aware of how wonderful it is.

Yesterday I went on a walk alone in the woods of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton - it is a spot of woods that almost no one goes to - Einstein used to walk there and it is a magical place filled with bird song and unseen flowers.
I was totally alone with my thoughts and didn't come across another human, until I was leaving to go to my car, and someone approached me.
"Are you here to be in the movie?" he asked me.
They were filming somewhere and there had been a call for extras.
I didn't stay to be in the movie, but it was a surreal thing to be asked.

All alone, yet so much human activity is always right there.
I work in my journal and it feels like an important exploration of the inner me, yet I share these pages and hundreds of people see them and think about them. It is really quite an extraordinary thing. . . .