Every Saturday morning, I held my little beige Motorola in my eight year old lap and my inner world magically connected to the world beyond Sand Creek, Wisconsin.
I plunked "froggie with its magic twinger" with Buster Brown and his Dog Tige. I can hear, still, Ramar of the Jungle's elephant! I flew with Sky King and the Royal Mounties and I traveled with Uncle Ted to the land of “Let’s Pretend.”
My mother usually allowed me to take a few slices of sausage and some crackers into the onto the living room sofa with me
and I stacked them on top of the radio which automatically heated them up. Heating and seeping early plastic into food now seems like a very dangerous past time. Good thing I did it just once a week. I savored every sound and saved every crumb.
Sixty years ago my little radio connected me to stories, to ideas and to other lands. Now it’s the Internet. And thanks to people like Amy Lenzo,
who talked me into leaving behind my safe digital immigrant techno-peasant status, women are becoming more integral to what was once only a man’s domain. Like the grassroots responders to President Obama’s campaign, women now see the bottom-up potential for networking—or networthing, as Rhonda Hull puts it. She’s the co-founder Circle Connections with Ann Smith (Ann is on the left, below; Rhonda's on the right). You can see who else is part of Circle Connections by visiting here.
Here's how I experience the Sophia net working:
I told my friend Joanna Gillespie about SophiaServe. She knows Ann and sent her an e mail suggesting she check it out. Ann contacted me by e mail, inviting me to join Circle Connections and sometime in the near future to be on their radio blog show. You can listen in without a bakelite Motorola.
I just listened to one archived show which raised a very provocative question:
Does the Internet contain women, or do women contain the Internet?
On their site, I learned of a Sophia conference next year in...where else? Sofia, Bulgaria! On May 25-29 participants will focus on gender equality, and on a peaceful prosperous, sustainable world.
Circle Connections and its blog site, Light Pages, are dedicated to co-creating a new earth: one circle, one connection, one step at a time.
How shall we travel to this new world, Uncle Ted?
We'll use our hearts and our typing fingers and we'll connect. We'll take the old and the new, the feminine divine in each of us and we'll co-create together a world worth living in. We can all weave "light" words now that reach the far reaches of the planet with a bold flick of the little finger. And it won't be "let's pretend."
On the Internet, we modify our understandings of space and time and it becomes very real.
(Illus. from the Circle Connections website)
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