Life in the Digital Age

Nearly 3/4 through the month, and someone had the good idea to call this a Guest Post day -- give us all the chance to step out of our lives blogs and into someone else's for a few minutes.

My guest blogger is Debi, from The World Without:

In this age of the internet, I sometimes struggle with the definitions of very simple words. What constitutes a 'conversation'? When did I 'meet' a particular person? What makes someone your 'friend'? Because some of those words mean a lot more than they used to. I talk to my mom every day - face to face - over lunch. I talk to my favorite sister-in-law a few times a week by Google Messenger while I'm getting ready for work and she's corralling my youngest niece and nephew into the beginning of their day. I also talk to Lisa every day - through emails, an online group we both belong to, and our respective blogs.

Today I tried to decide when I first 'met' Lisa. In the traditional sense, I suppose I met Lisa in February of 2005, when she traveled to Savannah specifically to see me. But in the truest sense, I'd met her months before, at an on-line book site called Readerville. By the time she hit the road and headed South, she was one of the dearest people in my life. She made that trip to personally deliver a true work-of-art constructed with her own hands and that was spectacularly important to me. Someone she'd never 'met'...but definitely not someone she didn't know. And in the years since since that trip, thanks in large part to the magic that is the Internet, Lisa has become one of my very best friends.

We have visited in person, in good times and bad, and those visits were wonderful. And I know that, lord willin' and the creek don't rise, we will visit each other in person again. But in the in-between times, one of the best parts of my life is that Lisa, like many people I call 'friend' is always as close as the ends of my fingers. I can talk to her whenever I need her...without waking her up in the middle of the night. I always know where to find her. She encourages all the best things in me: mindfulness and awareness and honesty, because the words I say to her will live forever in the bits and bytes that carry them from here to there. She has helped to redefine not only words, but the life I live each day. Lisa is my friend and I talk to her everyday and I met her on the internet.

What's your Internet Friend story?

(This is where I'd usually post a picture or three...but, sadly, I don't have any pictures of us. How is that possible? I know they exist!)

[This is the work of art Debi spoke of -- the marzipan wedding cake topper I made her.]