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Of Pen, Paper & The Muse…Before Technology Intruded
3 min readApr 5, 2025
- I remember the days when I experienced life fully in work and play and came home and at the end of the day I listened to the answering machine. Life paused in between its beeps. I chose the connection to make from the machine; it didn’t choose me.
- I once broke up with a boyfriend when he sent me fourteen texts that mirrored our incongruence. A conversation would have sufficed and filled up less space. It felt like an unwelcome leash then and it still does when friends and business people text me whole paragraphs.
- I don’t like technology weighing human emotions on my phone.
- In my teen years, I wrote poetry with a friend in the lifeguard towers by the beach. Those teenage words existed in that space where emotions screamed or cried on and off the page. Some passages grew longer and became stories in pen and ink and by college, I traded in the journals for words in my PC. Over the years while on vacation and during times of immense unplugging and art making I have found the journals again. There is a solitude on paper that technology cannot penetrate.
- There is a longing for a time without the clicking of the keypad. If I close my eyes as I type the clicking of the keys has an echo of crickets prancing about in the night calling for their mates.
- When I light a candle and dim the lights the clicking of the night sounds grow louder and the eerie blue lights of technology’s encroachment into our lives seem to take a step back…
