One of the affirmations I acknowledge on the regular is, “Everything is time sensitive.” I might add that not everything is place sensitive. What I mean by this is not just a simple of acknowledgement that home is sweet. It is sweet but it is also a thousand threaded root of experiences. Home feels way beyond complicated, but not every place we call home is home. If I had to compare it to something in the natural world, I would say that home is like a bamboo rhizome. You can uproot it, but at great hardship and much hard work, but once rooted it becomes situated and ‘at home’.
This led to a surprising discovery I made recently with the help of some insights from my friend, Simon Ensor. What did I find out from him? Digital places can be home, too. In this case, the homes I refer to are Twitter and Wakelet.
I wrote this post
Simon responded in the comments section of that blog post to which I replied with a poem.
Simon tweeted back.
This bamboo rhizome, this new digital gestalt, is just the same as my sense of coming home, created anew everytime I drive back on my 1/2 mile of gravel lane.
Simon put all the root threads in one place, a digital space called Wakelet that we have both used for years. I hadn’t thought of it as a digital home place before, but now I know it is. Now you know it is, too. See the Wakelet below in all its non-hierarchic, rhizomatic glory.
I mentioned this in a tweet to which he replied
Yes, that’s how I felt it. It was an interesting exercise to see how changing the layout settings of Wakelet affected it and me. It is wholly resistant to hierarchical organisation as am I. It is soul expression.
— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) July 8, 2021
This series of connections and growth brought a frisson to the hairs on the nape of my neck. My body recognized that we can extend Wendell Berry’s idea of a sense of place across the atomic space of bits and bytes to that of a digital place and digital home, too.
Yes, that’s how I felt it. It was an interesting exercise to see how changing the layout settings of Wakelet affected it and me. It is wholly resistant to hierarchical organisation as am I. It is soul expression.
— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) July 8, 2021
This series of connections and growth brought a frisson to the hairs on the nape of my neck. My body recognized that we can extend Wendell Berry’s idea of a sense of place across the atomic space of bits and bytes to that of a digital place and digital home, too.