Connections
I was telling a friend of mine about the travails of a group of kids who grew up in Hastings in the late 1980s and had used drugs. Some were dead. Some were still wasted. Others had never grown emotionally past the years they had started using. Her own son was a few years younger than they, and she had heard some of the names before.
“Something's broken with those kids,” she said. “Something's really broken.”
The idea that something is broken spoke to me powerfully about what this website, this journey of ours, is about. Above all, it's about people making or breaking or missing connections, and the ways we are linked, often obliviously, to one another. We all want to embrace people, ideas or feelings that are larger and stronger and better than we are ourselves and, at the same time seem somehow rooted within our psyche, or our souls, or whatever we personally call the essence of our selves.
When we feel connected — whether it's because we are in love, or have read something that brilliantly rearranges how we perceive our perceptions — we seem to shimmer from the inside out.
It seems sacred and mysterious.
It is rapture.
It is getting high.
Some of our connections are tragic. An addict's connection is the source of both her ecstasy and her pain.