There was a gentle rain falling as I woke this morning. The sounds of rain outside my window are delicious, and the rain also makes everything smell good. It is one of the benefits of living on the edge of a pine forest. We need the rain. We simply didn’t get sufficient snowfall during the winter, and the summer promises to be long, hot and filled with fires. Getting a little rain right now is a blessing.

My garden is in, such as it is. After taking a year off from vegetables with the rush of events last summer, I do have tomatoes, spinach, radishes, cucumbers and, of course a row of sunflowers. I like the sunflowers. I’ve got a lot of things going on this year and don’t want to make too much work, but I also enjoy the garden. There is nothing better than the taste of a homegrown tomato.

I find myself spending more and more time in front of a computer these days. It is an essential tool for my work, but I also use the computer for entertainment. There are only so many funny cat videos that one can watch, but there are far more available if you ever feel a shortage. I also do some research on the Internet, trying to find the best ways to solve a problem or information about the cost of items that we intend to buy. I’ve found it to be quicker to look up instruction manuals on the Internet than to find the paper copies in my file cabinet.

Advertisers are trying to figure out how to use the Internet to promote their products. There are more and more advertisements showing up on the web sites I visit and increasingly they are customized, promoting businesses in our area, and sometimes responding to a previous search I have made for some item. Some of these make sense to me. I’ve looked at a variety of web sites that sell kites, so it doesn’t surprise me to see an advertisement for kites when I got to a news web site. Some of the formulas are not as good. For example, I purchase some items from Amazon.com. I order books not just for myself, but also for others. Because I purchase multiple copies of books, the formula weights my reading towards certain subjects. So the book recommendations from Amazon are rarely what I want to read. On the other hand, being a voracious reader, I often see my “picks” on Amazon contain mostly books I have already read.

What concerns me about our connected world with computers, online shopping, and a plethora of electronic entertainments from video games to downloadable movies, is that it seems to disconnect us from the world of simple pleasures that are available if we just walk away from the computer and go outside.

I like to walk barefoot to the end of the driveway to pick up my newspaper. I do so through most of the year. I’ve been known to go out barefoot when there is snow on the ground. It is only a minute or two and the change in temperature is a reminder that I am alive. Whether or not you are into getting your feet cold, there is something wonderful about the feel of walking on grass. This morning, the wet grass feels wonderful beneath my feet. The feel of the gentle rain on my head is also a pleasure. There isn’t anything on the Internet that is quite like that feeling.

I know that more and more of the people of the world are congregating in urban areas and that cramming people into high-rise apartments creates a distance between them and the natural world. In a sense, my easy access to the natural world is a luxury that is not available to all of the people in the world. That is, I think, sad. There are some beautiful parks in urban areas, but a park is rarely as inviting as wild country. The one experience that we had living in a city was Chicago, where the lakeshore gave easy access to a place that had no people. I didn’t have a boat in those days, but a walk along the shore was sufficient to feel that I was getting away. I suppose that there are many other places along the world’s coasts where people live in cities but can see places that are not crowded.

All of this is a rambling way to say that I am grateful to live in this place. I have the company of neighbors, but the luxury of knowing that they aren’t too close.

Humans have tried to balance indoor and outdoor space from the beginnings of human time. We need shelter. There is a big difference between sleeping with an open window so you can hear the rain and trying to keep warm sleeping outdoors with no place to get dry. Cold rain can be life-threatening if there is no shelter. One of the basic survival skills is seeking and building shelter.

Once we have a basic home, we keep adding more amenities. Instead of dirt or grass for a floor, we find carpet and linoleum. Instead of piling on the blankets, we have central heating systems. To keep oput the cold and still allow access our homes have doors and windows that open. Running water and modern plumbing eliminate the need to make a trip to the outhouse in the middle of the night. Pretty soon our homes create such a successful barrier from the natural world that we begin potting plants and bringing them indoors. This can, of course be exaggerated. There is a hotel in our town with an atrium lobby with an artificial waterfall and trees that grow indoors. It is a pretty neat space unless you compare it to Roughlock Falls or any of the natural waterfalls in the hills.

I think that in the balance of things, I spend too much time indoors and need to develop ways to spend more time outside.
I’ll head outdoors just as soon as I watch one more video. Have you seen the one where the cat chases a bear out of the yard?

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.