The electronic garden

I was out in the meadow admiring the play of wind through the leaves of the sycamore trees along the creek, but I was haunted by a feeling of deja vu. The subtly shifting shapes and colors, the random movements of leaves in the wind created a familiar picture: it looked like something I'd seen recently, something I'd encountered often, something quite close by.

It looked like a screen-saver.

When wind moving through sycamore leaves starts looking like a screen-saver, it's time to close the laptop.

I'll admit that my laptop computer has been spending way too much time on my lap this week. I've been following online discussions, posting electronic assignments, and commenting on students' work, which involves a lot of sitting and clicking, sitting and clicking, sitting and clicking in front of the screen. As much as I enjoy the insights my students bring to online activities, the whole click-wait-type-wait-repeat routine is just boring. It's much more fun to wander around engaging a room full of students in discussion of interesting literature--to watch the ideas waft through the room like a breeze--than to sit on the sofa going click-wait-type-wait repeat all morning long.

After lunch, laptop fatigue finally sent me outside the house, where I hoped the perfect fall weather would blow the cobwebs out of my brain. I walked by the creek, looked at the fall leaves, watched a red-tailed hawk wheeling above the meadow, and then noticed the sycamore leaves shimmering in the gentle wind, reminding me of a screen-saver and taking my thoughts back to my laptop computer.

If I can't escape the machine in the garden, perhaps I'll move the garden inside the machine. I'll catch that image and imprison it in prose so it can linger inside my laptop long after the last leaf has fallen.