Virtual Thursdays, Chapter One

Say hi to Philip

---

I have a lot of lives I could call second lives. They’re relationships, really, or interfaces. They’re ways for more of me to emerge and express.

Nature and discovery
I have a tiny garden in a patch of dirt between two driveways, and yesterday I had the exquisite thrill of finding a tiny praying mantis, sheltering under a snapdragon leaf. That’s a life of mine.

Children
The two year old daughter of my closest friend stood on the futon next to me last month, still and quiet, staring into my eyes. I melted into her gaze and there, in our connection, an entire world. A life, full of feelings and promises, that I enter whenever I think about it.

Paris
I plan to live in Paris for a while, go to school, learn French. Most mornings include the Paris map with my coffee. At Peet’s, people stop by my table, magnetized by the simple idea of the city they’ve visited. They tell me a story or make a recommendation, and sigh with desire. Studying Paris for months, I’ve come to know a place I’ve never seen. I can almost smell the Seine, feel the air where I will walk along St. Germain. A life I can experience through constructs in my brain.

Virtual intrusion
Second Life has entered my consciousness, in the fragmented way of Internet-delivered worlds. A few months after I first recognized it as a “thing,” I saw something that made me realize it was time to understand what virtual worlds are, what they’re doing in our culture.

Since my realm as a person and an author is the imagination, and my book (Little Shifts) is about “using imagination to transform culture,” well, how could I ignore a world that is a direct product of imagination?

Though I’d like to go visit, the fence is too tall. For now. My laptop is inadequate. I’m ill-equipped.

But I’m not ill-equipped to learn. Wagner James Au’s book, “The Making of Second Life,” is a good primer for me. Some other Thursday I’ll do a proper review of the book. For now, I can tell you what I’ve experienced in this early exploration of Second Life.

Remember the feeling of your stomach in your throat when you went too fast down a hill on your bike or in your wagon? A little like that, or like the off-balance body rush when we landed in the Bonanza in a stiff sideways wind a couple of days ago. Following that analogy, what happens next, for me, is a closed-fist grip on something earthy. Just reading about Second Life, with my overamped imagination galloping into new creative territory, I find myself missing nature with an emotion near to grief.

I know it’s coming, my life in Second Life. The edge of it is already shoved up against me, a ruffled mushroom in an Alice-in-Wonderland dream. A confession: I already have a Second Life name, and it gives me a little distant giggle. Here’s a cloverleaf, then, which you might grok if you’ve been reading my posts: I named my praying mantis Philip.

Yours,
Suzanna