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this is a fantastic way to avoid doing Economics homework. Don't you agree?

phew. I just stopped by and talked with Alice Corbin a few minutes ago. She is a gem, maybe the best-kept secret on this campus. We talked of simplicity and the way that the world is getting more complicated. I can't help but wonder aloud if it is a good thing. Connectedness, while nurturing the virtues of relationality and openness of information on the one hand also cuts into simplicity, singularity of purpose, focus, sabbath, and so many other glorious virues. Yet I feel as though I do not belong to my culture, to the people that I love, if I do not operate on these levels of connectedness. My cell phone and email, facebook and myspace, blog and journal--all of these are each one piece of myself that becomes available until I am so available I can't find myself. I am so busy that I quite literally do not know how to rest or be still. I am so caught up in the service to so many gods--most of them claiming to be in the service of the One--that I forget to serve the One God, who made heaven and earth, who knit me together in Donna May's womb, who knows my inmost being, the God who has been content without blogs and cell phones and email for thousands/millions/billions/trillions (pick whichever you fancy) of years. If the silent swirling cosmos which slowly cooled into explosive volcanoes, land forms which separated out into the deep waters and mountain ranges and plant and animal life which have culminated in the zelem of God are enough for God, then I suppose they should be good enough for me.

We're past functionality. We are at a point in human history where our ability to produce more does not create prosperity or blessing. Instead, the concentration of the production in the hands of the few and wealthy creates poverty and waste instead of blessing for all. I can't help but think of the scene from Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in which an overabundance of oranges are poured down the hill and then, in order to keep the impoverished workers from taking them for themselves and their children (thus relieving the great need which drives capitalism's production), there is gasoline poured on the perfectly good but unmarketable fruits and they are burned as starving onlookers lament this waste.

Going small but deep. I think I'm scared of it because I seem to get my friends and employers mad at me whenever I am without a cell phone for a week or so. We just don't know what to do with ourselves.

I'm questioning whether "Its the world we live in" is a valid excuse anymore.