The Real Internet

"I wake up in my apartment in Brooklyn. I slap the snooze button on an alarm clock made in the Philippines. For a few moments I lie on a bed manufactured in New Jersey, on sheets woven in Mexico, under a blanket from India, reluctantly gathering the mental energy necessary to rise and face another day in NYC. With a deep breath I get out of bed and make coffee with a French press, the way my mother taught me. I grind coffee beans grown on a Puerto Rican plantation. I boil water that comes from a number of reservoirs in upstate New York. This water has pulsed through an intricate web of ducts and unseen pipes that some forgotten engineers constructed decades ago, so that the tens of millions of people in the metropolitan area can stay alive for yet another day. When the coffee is ready, I pour it into a mug manufactured in China that says "Don't Mess With Texas". I add the requisite milk that a few weeks ago pooled inside the udders of cows on a huge industrial farm in Pennsylvania.

"Right now, though, I'm not thinking of any of these places, or the people and animals in them....."

An excerpt from Ethan Nichtern's first book, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence - as one reviewer remarked, "arguably the first truly 21st century dharma book". I have not read the entire book (yet) but was fortunate to have heard a reading of this section at a meditation program last winter.

"....Within this system, if someone should happen to smile at me - even by accident - I might smile to the rest of the world for hours, spreading warmth along the sidewalk like a lip-curling virus. If I bark at people mindlessly, they might infect twenty other innocent bystanders with their frustration before they even make it to lunch. This is the real Internet - the organic network that transcends cyberspace - and we're all connected to it and through it."

I am he as you are he as you are me
and we are all together

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