Cell Phone: Lost

So, wait a few weeks until I have a new one and then call me. 'Cause I don't have your number any more.

The story is relatively interesting. On Thursday nights I make a pilgrimage to Blue Mounds, WI. This is an odd place where my yoga teacher has opened a Dharma center. It is also a place where Ray-town homey, A. Allred, has moved into a waterless cabin in the woods. I go to Aaron's at night, sit in front of the woodburning stove, untangle the twists of being, disgorge my woman problems, and absorb the quiet of the forest.

In the morning, I get up early to go to yoga practice from 6-8 at the Blue Mounds Dharma Center. Then, I go into the forest for a walk. Today, I went snowshoeing.

As I was clumping along, I thought, "gee, this isn't all that much more efficient than walking in the snow." This is not true, but I was disappointed that the snowshoes were not more buoyant upon the snow.

I tried running. Wow. While striding across the frozen fields on top of the west mound, I realized the effect of snowshoes. I was moving much faster than I thought was possible. It was in the thrall of this excitement that I suspect the small demon I carry on my hip took its leave to lay at the bottom of a foot and a half of snow.

I retraced my steps, had Scott call me, and sat paralyzed with unanchored anxiety. I was so fixed and focused on the ground and any sign of the phone's entry into the powder, my neck began to ache. And after all that wonderful, neck-freeing yoga.

I got back in the car with blue fingers and my corduroy pants inundated with ice and snow. For a moment, the entire world was silent. The pause broke as I felt a vibration on my leg: I could still feel the missing phone ringing! I felt a very deep pull in my stomach as if I wanted the phone so much, I was hungry for it. I was disoriented and confused. What was I going to do without that phone? My eyes focused again on the white field around me. The trees stood silently dormant. The wind began to cover up the cell phone entry point that I had failed to find in the surface of the snow powder.

Then I laughed. It was more like a chuckle. My chest felt light, as if a weight from my left hip had been removed. I have felt oddly free and disconnected all day, as if I really had been let loose from a bond. The phone was a particularly stealthy bond because I could carry it around with me. It was a karmic lodestone that was far denser in its actual weight than I had thought it would be based on its size and gravitational weight. It's actual weight included the massive social node I had sculpted that phone to be. I relied on its powerful little electromagnetism to connect me hundreds to of people. The phone carried that weight and I did not realize how heavy it was until I lost it. It was not the moment at which it parted from my body, I was too delighted to fly across the snow to feel that. It was the moment, or series of moments, in which I realized that I did not have the phone-as-social-node with which to access vast networks of people.

I have been drifting in social anonymity all day.