LETTERS FROM HOME: VIRTUALLY ALIVE AND READY FOR THE LIONS OF SPRING

March 2, 2000

Dear Julie,

If a dog barks onscreen while we're home watching a movie, Hank and Lucy do not react. She continues staring at the wall. His usual state of low anxiety is undisturbed. That's because the noise in the movie is a virtual bark, a reproduction that to our ears sounds like a bark but doesn't fool those who know what makes a bark real.

We humans have virtual conversations through our computers, developing virtual friendships. In our stores and at our restaurants we can buy virtual foods bloated with hormones. Poisons kill weeds, insects and diseases to produce "healthier" crops. Virtual violence is on most any TV channel.

Here we are in the year 2000, virtually alive.

The technological drift of the times is seductive. What wonders our fingertips can summon. But can pictures of Hawaii ever hint at the intoxication of being there?

The space-bound astronauts in "Star Trek" went to the Holodeck to have experiences like life on terra firma. But movies, TV and even the most extravagant amusement park are poor mimics of nature.

Walking in a forest, something happens that does not happen to you watching a film of the same forest. Walking, the senses explode. Watching, you reach for the remote control if a lion doesn't appear. There is not enough stimulation.

The thrill of the real is that lions -- perhaps only the size of ants but lions no less -- are everywhere or might be.

We have become afraid of the reality we have created. We question what's is real anymore. What is "Real TV"? What is real time? What are our real feelings? What is real love?

These are confusing questions because these unbelievable things we can do now can distract us from our mission to find peace within ourselves, to treat the Creation with respect and to spread God's love.

Somewhere below me in a box in our basement are the 33 1/3 rpm albums that kept me company through teenhood and beyond. They sit there in the dark, artifacts of another age, out-virtualized by compact discs.

Among them is Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty," an album filled with loneliness and lostness. In the same box is the antidote by Andy Pratt, someone few people have heard of, an album about the miracles that occur when you show people love and about still being afraid to express it. "Gotta love this beautiful liar enough to make him tell the truth," he sings.

How difficult to love ourselves in the face of all the toxicity we are capable of creating.

Some would rather fantasize about the woman or man on the screen or on the Internet than be confronted with what's real. We say we want closeness but fear people will not like the reality. It drives us to seek more separation.

But other people are the mirrors that allow us to know ourselves better. In your eyes, I see me. In your reactions to me are the clues to the parts of me that need nourishment, that need to be looked at with compassionate objectivity so they can be acknowledged and then changed.

The cellar is filled with artifacts that are no longer useful but represent chapters in our story. We think they are just things in boxes but they symbolize parts of ourselves that have not been incorporated into the whole, made real.

The beginning of March is a good time to begin clearing out the cellar.

A crow outside my window is calling forth the spring. In the backyard, the feet of insects drum on the earth, exciting the seeds to sprout.

All of us are like seeds, encased within our shells. In time, given love and warmth, we break out.

Love, Sam