Suddenly, My Life in 140 Characters . . .

Have been hanging with my best friend . . . a maven extraordinaire, cooking phobe, riotously fun, bright as hell, engaging, and all around good tweeple . . . Ha! I’ve spent a few days with her, and now I know what tweeple means--cool, huh? Tweeple is Twitter People, a tribe to which I now belong. I’m a baby tweeple, still sucking my twumb, scratching my belly and for the most part, blurbing my babbling nonsense into this foreign country while looking for my blankie.

Like any infant, I’m sure this baby tweeple will make all kinds of messes before I get my twains working properly--that’s Twitter-brains--my lexicon. Suddenly everything in my life is tweeting . . . There’s my twingers--tired Twitter fingers, my tweyes--tired Twitter eyes used to a life of observing trees, lakes, the ever-green landscape of the Pacific NW, and birds in flight instead of the computer screen. The only birds I’ve been observing for a few days now are avatars . . . Wild!

Why am I so attracted to participation in Twitter? It seems illogical that a nature loving artist who happily devotes so much of her life to deep listening in the quiet wild places with, of course, the excellent company of Callie the border collie, would choose to participate . . . On the surface I don’t seem to be a fit for this fast moving, hip, constantly morphing, put your oar in with 140 characters community. I spend my time thinking, observing, painting, listening, and, up to now, have very carefully chosen my involvement in community. This move to Twitter appears antithetical, paradoxical, and yet . . .

I sense something of great importance here in this immense, at times confusing, and very human community . . . and maybe that’s it. Twitter seems to be not only a very human community, but a global very human community incorporating all the brilliance, creativity, good and ill willed energies we as a people are capable of. No matter who you are, where you live, how you were or weren’t educated, the color of your skin . . . If you walk on two legs and have opposable thumbs--you’re part of humanity. In joining the Twitter community I sense that I’m letting in more of this reality. It isn’t any wonder to me that any gathering of this dimensionality will potentially carry all our human family can create . . . We are a people of great caring along great abuses . . . a largely mixed bag of ever related, ever evolving DNA.

I clearly remember the time I saw the first picture of the earth from space. My breath caught in my throat and I was speechless. I experienced a deep YES. The YES was a recognition of the reality that we are one family as complex and varied as our earth, a human ecosystem. Separation is the illusory myth we must see through to evolve into a higher order of being. I think Twitter and social media in general are offering something like a technologically organic connective tissue into our human story to assist in dispelling the myth of separation. This is something I care deeply about . . . How we evolve and raise consciousness. This is what my art is all about, visual pages corresponding to my life journey as I extend my energy into this mix.

Wrapping this all up in metaphor . . . Twitter is providing something like a global get to know ya party. You enter and have a fair shot at extending your humanity into the mix along with everyone else, the good, the bad and the ugly of us. It’s the capacity to connect around the world in a fluid, dynamic conversation that intrigues me--all in 140 characters at a time. At the moment, a lot of my energy is going toward wrapping my brains around my relationship with the Twitter world. I’ll need to get back to the quiet wild places soon . . . But for now, there’s somebody I want to Re-Tweet!

That’s what this artist is thinking about today . . .

PS . . . Now I’m really stoked about Twitter . . . just tried to re-tweet and got a screen that said . . . Twitter is over capacity! We’re on the same page . . . so am I!!