Airplane Fast. Part 2

What's so dramatic. I haven't gotten in an airplane this week either. Pretty soon it will be no news.

But here are some observations...

• A question for Conversation Week was submitted from Mauritius. Not sure where it was, I flew over there via maps.live.com. It's an island off the East Coast of Tanzania. Well, back in the old days two months ago I could have imagined myself putting Mauritius with it's beautiful beaches (I could see them in my Internet fly-over) on the "Bucket List" - somewhere to go before kicking the bucket. If my fast goes longer than a year, or if in this year conditions change such that the cost of flying goes into the stratosphere, I'm pretty certainly never going to Mauritius. By land and sea, it is probably 3 months away.
• A deeper sense of belonging is creeping in here on my island. I am becoming part of those who stay put, who make the invisible web that holds the life here while others come and go. I bumped into a woman who was in the Vagina Monologues with me last year and she said with surprise, "You're here!" I replied "I live in Langley." "But you are always off somewhere," she said, "You're never here." I am beginning to feel the difference between my friends who are here and the ones who travel a lot. I really miss my traveling friend... just when i want to take a walk or have a cup of tea, they're answer machine says, "Off to Mauritius (my new code word for far afield), back in two weeks for a week, then off on a cruise in Arctic, gotta see it before it melts."
• Today I realized I'm going to have a challenge in the Fall. There's a conference in Austin I've long wanted to attend, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. Is that when I do a road trip in my Honda Insight for a month, visiting friends all along the way? Do I go by train and treat myself to 10 books on tape for the journey? Do I by then figure our a way to attend electronically? Or host a regional gathering here for all the "left behinds".
• Thanks to Leif Utne's work on Conversation Week, I'm entering even more fully the world of Web 2.0, the internet swarms on Facebook, Skype, YouTube, blogs, surveys, webcams, virtual meetings and more. Here in cyberspace, the world is vast and within reach. The future is in the conversation, the infinite permutations and combinations. Decisions aren't made per se, they are born in one conversation and raised in another and become all stars or weaklings as people around the world starve them or feed them attention.
  

Stay tuned.