You Call This a Course?

Her colleague from down the hall stared at her. She had just spent
an hour writing 10 tweets, 2 blog posts and 3 comments. "You call
THAT a course?" he scoffed. "Where's the paper trail?" She
shrugged, knowing she was learning something new every day. "T
Yet she knew that the amount of time this was taking away from her
day job and her family was not sustainable #4life. The 'course' was
just a few weeks but how to keep connected afterwards? It dawned
on her now that she could manifest the virtual connections in
physical form. The course, made visible. Her fellow professors gaped
at her as she began to string colored yarn from her office to her
home to her garage, on to the library, and why not stop over for a
coffee and let her coloured yarn have a rest before moving on? Then
on and on. She left the town and the connections continued to
emerge and as she crossed the border into Canada, her only
thought was of the fly-fishing that awaited her at the Waswanipi
River. Would the thread reach that far? She didn't know but, as with
everything these days, she was willing to take a chance, to push the
boundary of what she knew and didn't yet know. She pulled the yarn
tight and hoped that it held fast. Arm over arm, she kept herself
anchored to the thread, committed to an unknown path. As she
moved forward, she felt the brush of cobwebs against her skin,
whispering against her forehead, her cheek, fine tugs at her hair and
neck. Ahead of her, she could see what looked like glowing rocks.
The scent of cinnamon wafted back. Was it a trick? or was it really A
Cinnabon stand in the middle of the jungle? She continued on, still
leaving her colored threads behind her, feeling a bit like Gretel. Off in
the distance .. she heard voices. Or what seemed like voices in the
wind. She recognized something in the sounds, something that
sounded like a 6 word poem? A poem that someone then made into
images, to breach language barriers for people of the web. A
blogpost that someone made into a zeega, to transform the words
into emotion via music & images and she realized, with each click of
the page, the music moved her deeper into the connections. Closing
her eyes, she could see the words flow into image, into music. Then,
she heard another odd sound in the background of the track. Her
eyes flickered bac back and forth with the images in her mind, trying
to identify the odd sound. Was it a foghorn? A bellowing bull? How
dare you say you're listening to my noise, when you won't stop
talking long enough to hear what I have to say and sometimes I
wonder if across the distance you can really know what I mean. If I
can only see that little bit, how can I know the rules? It's like
watching jump rope and sometimes it spins so fast I wonder if I'll get
it right, or fall down in front of you... And if I fall, will you catch me, or
will you laugh at me? Will you help me stand up, will you extend a
hand, or will you watch from a distance and send me positive
thoughts?" she wondered, and kept on walking. This journey was
taking longer than she thought it would, but then anything worth
doing was worth doing well. She was suddenly reminded of a
childhood game, where one child would Pick a letter of the alphabet,
and the others would find words that start with it in different
categories, a country, an animal, a food, there was room for everyone
in that game, whatever their hobbies and interests, whatever
knowledge made them tick. She loved that game- not knowing what
would come next, free of expectation- and thought S...the best
tasting strawberry and saw its coulour and searched for the words to
express the delight of reaching to pick it and found no words, but
managed to share a smi le and wondered what her childhood friend,
Samantha, would have thought of it. She was more of the natural
writer, after all, pulling stories from thin air, or the night sky, and
regaling the kids with tales of pirates and renegades and those never
conten t to settle for anything other than soul making. Thinking about
Samantha reminded her of her own childhood and the joy of listening
to story. It always felt as if the teller was a kind of magician who knew
what she was thinking and dreaming all at the same time. That gift of
storytelling was something she had always cherished and the stories
seemed to ooze from her whether she was consciously telling the
story or not. Painting pictures that became wove n memories, and
then those stories were constellations which exploded throughout the
sky. What would come next? They waited with bated breath. The
inky black sky was illuminated with a thousand colors that
rearranged themselves into a map that showed a clearly marked
path from their location to an atoll in the middle of the South Pacific.
Everyone knew that time was running out and this was th eir last
chance to find the zombies. They knew that South Pacific Zombies
were the most feared, but were curious if the rumors of their
viciousness were true. But that would be a story for another time,
another place ... another fold