"'Hey Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesn't.' He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together, their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed toward the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs, gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds.
And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other.
That was surely the purest kind of kything.
Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words."
From A Wind in the Door By Madeleine L'Engle
As a person who has lived overseas before - though for a shorter period of time - I've come to appreciate the new technology available to keep me connected with family and friends back home. When I studied in Scotland during my undergrad I only had email, 'snail mail,' Facebook, and the phone (a land line because I chose not to have a mobile phone for only three months considering I didn't even have one in the US). That was almost ten years ago. My how things have changed!
This time around the same options are available (except the land line, my flat doesn't even have a phone line installed!) plus a few new ones. I, of course, have a mobile phone. Unlike during my undergrad I've developed an unhealthy reliance with the thing and can't go a weekend, let alone a year without the dastardly thing. And then there is Skype, the mother-load when it comes to international communication.
