Go outside and play!

I'm delighted to say that I've noticed that children seem to be reemerging from the enclosed walls of their homes and are engaged in outdoor play. For the past several years I've walked, biked and driven my way around towns noticing the lack of children at play. Swing sets sat abandoned, the only motion offered by passing breezes, sidewalks were bare of chalked hop-hotch, lawns languished sans footpaths and body imprints, even driveways lacked the toppled bikes and tossed aside jumpropes and skateboards.

Lately though I've noted a return of children - hoola-hooping, hide-n-seeking, tree climbing, bike riding and running across lawns - Ah, they're finally back. I wonder if our slowing economy is literally bringing the children back to the great outdoors and to the world of imagination. Perhaps mom and dad are finally stating they can't afford all the electronic gadgets and games and are saying, "Go outside and play!"  Or is it that people are simply tired of that computer, t.v. or phone screen and are embracing the realness of true life and living?

Whatever the case may be, I'm glad to see the children playing again. Now go outside and play!

Cell Communication or Communication Cell?

Gone are the days when I left the house and was completely unavailable to others, that is unless I physically turn off or silence my cell phone. And, now if I so choose, I can even be reached via e-mail, twitter, facebook, and who knows whatever other programs that follow me through my day. Freedom or confinement? Communication or entrapment?

It seems that the walls of the world are rapidly closing in, similar to those of Poe's pit.

People are running about in a fevered frenzy seeking to connect themselves, not with the connective filiment of Whitman's spider, but the cellular commincator. How might a Whitman poem read in today's society?

An impatient and often demanding tweet
I mark'd how, to explore the engorged surrounding,
It launched data, data, data out of itself;
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand, walk, or drive,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measurless oceans of information,
Ceaselessly musing, imposing, tossing, ---seeking attention
to FEEL connected.
This age of "communication" leaves very little time to ponder life's conundrums, much less soul search the connectiveness to the universe.
My advice: Unplug