Carl Setzer

A friend just told me My haiku reached her heart's depths Connecting to truth

Lately I've pondered "connection". With several hundred Facebook friends, LinkedIn connection, over a thousand Twitter followers....maintaining connection starts to feel easy. Too easy. I'm noticing that I interact with a smallish group of the same people on those different channels. These are dear friends, but not  even close to the larger group of people I want to maintain relationship with. So many good folks that I keep thinking "why don't we get together more often?" That bothers me. I signed up for Plaxo ages ago, and I really haven't done anything to maintain that list. But I get emails reminding me of birthdays and any other events (anniversaries) that I noted in my contact when I synced. These reminders are nice in that they trigger me to reach out. That's a start. So, I'm trying to "up my game". Going to build a list of those contacts to, well, contact. I would like to start sending notecards out, too. That just seem...

3:00 am, I receive a text, and slept through it. Logical, acceptable, and yet still painful. A friend hurting, and I wasn't able to be there. She worked her way through, so no guilt on that. No, it's deeper.  I value my friends, my family. I value helping, to be present when needed. Thus, one of my core values failed. That is, and should be, painful. It's not about effectiveness, or any of that.  I know that these sorts of things will happen again and again. Failures of theses elements should cause discomfort, and reflection. That's different than guilt. More akin to sadness. Which is fair to feel.  I hope that feeling remains. Keeps me striving, pushing, growing. Another thing I value. 

I've seen life's frivolousness, the extreme fickleness of fate. A randomness haunting life. This uncertainty drives many to fear. Me? Connection: my drive is to connect, deeply, richly. Not simply awareness of Facebook updates (or Facebook's kin). Rather to comment, engage, share: whether that's humor, insight or compassion. An actual presence, of which we both are aware. Friends and family: this matters most. If, at the end of our life, no one cares, or worse, our death generates a feeling of relief, a release from the miseries we've inflicted, has our life any value?

Hey gang, A good friend of mine, Daniel Flahiff, has qualified for the  World Triathlon Grand Final Auckland this October. As you can imagine, raising the ~$4,000 for travel is out of reach. However, through the power of the internet, all of us have the opportunity to lend a hand. Via his Go Fund Me site, we all have the chance to share in funding this dream. Besides have the vested interest in seeing a chum do something great and once-in-a-lifetime, I'm also pleased that the internet offers up ways to crowdsource solutions like this. Perhaps, pre-internet, a bunch of us would hold a car-wash, maybe engage a local tv or radio station, and have a small scale crowdsource through a local bank. So, yay to www.gofundme.com for offering up such tools, the internet ( Twitter , Facebook , et al) to broadcast this sort of thing out, and, of course, the generosity of strangers...which is, ultimately, what makes these sorts of things work. Here's a video about the event: ...

My e-chum, Veronica , recently returned from a trip to the Phllippines . This picture is part of her trip, and just made me howl.