It seems that almost every day, I am called upon to reaffirm my humanity, my identity and spirituality. Every day there is an e-mail that is sent by mistake, one that is misinterpreted or misread or that offends. The Internet is the most powerful information medium ever, it can also be the most thoughtless and hostile and awkward.

I embrace it and struggle with it. In my world, almost all of the people who used to speak with me do not speak with me directly any longer, there are mistakes, confusions, hurt feelings and misunderstandings almost every day. E-mail is a poor medium for clarity and understanding, even as it becomes more dominate every day.

One person stormed out of one of my Facebook groups because she thought I was aiming the site guidelines directly at her, my editors no longer speak with me much, they send me my books marked up in e-files in three or four different colors. It is strange to be a writer who has no idea, really, who is publishing his books.

This is a powerful medium, and a dehumanizing and isolated one, in so many ways. People are always apologizing to me for what they wrote me, or telling me they are sorry to have offended me when I have not, or scolded me for lecturing them when I have no idea who they are, or chastising me for failing to remember an e-mail message from a decade ago.  Or asking me to apologize for something I didn’t say, didn’t mean, or have the right to feel.

Then, there are the growing legions of people who ideas about dialogue have been shaped by cable news and online chat rooms, they sometimes live in a world of anger and outrage. They are losing the ability to communicate their ideas or learn from others. On the pages of Facebook, the world is a sad and angry place.

On my social media pages, I am bombarded with photos of dead and tortured animals, outraged petitions and enraged links and comments and information that is often foolish and inacurrate, sometimes nearly insane. Every day, there is hostility and anger and outrage to deal with, it is so easy to send angry messages, so hard to listen to other people’s ideas. There is love, too, encouragement and support. Love nourishes identity and spirituality, it doesn’t required me to affirm it. Every day I must decide who I am, and this is a gift.

Messages are lost, returned, sent to spam files, forwarded in error. One person I work with every week wrote the cruelest message about me and forwarded it to someone she works with and sent it along to me in error. And the saddest thing about her message is that it wasn’t really even directed at me, it was just so easy for her to send, she was in a bad mood. I saw the message, took a deep breath and told myself to forget it, this is life in our world, my life is not an argument, move on, this is the test of my humanity. I did. Every day I tell myself that this is a test of my humanity, my long struggle to shed anger and fear and my long search for spirituality.

The tragedy of technology has always been that it brings things and takes things away, and we are thoughtless about using it, we bring it into our lives without much consideration, and greedy corporations are eager to thrust it upon us so that they can let go of the human beings who used to speak to us.

This is a gift for me, almost every day I am challenged to decide who I am, and who I want to be. Every day my sense of myself is being affirmed, is growing stronger. Every day I am growing stronger.

I will not live in anger and recrimination.  My life is not an argument.

My work must be nourishing, fun, challenging and I must feel good about it. I will set out shortly to change my life again, to find a  writing place where that is possible, I insist on working with people who will speak with me and try and understand who I am, and know me and let me know them. Sometimes I told an important friend recently, you just have to pick up the phone and talk to me.

Spirituality is not about the absence of difficulty, it is about the way in which we respond to it. I will be patient, stand in my truth. I will not live in fear or write in fear. The challenge of our disconnected time is to find and keep our humanity in a dizzying and intense and disconnected world. My farm and my love are my connections to the earth, my friends, family, the animals, my writing and photography. They are my sacred place, my center. I choose to try to be honest, to always be open to the world. This is, in a way, my life’s work. I am getting stronger, affirming my humanity.

This is what it means to be a human being, to accept the challenges of our lives and use them to make us more human.