Note: This article originally ran at Earth & Altar. “Clearly, whatever you are, you are in your self; you are not derived from another. You are the very life by which you live, the knowledge by which you know, the goodness by which you are good, and so forth.” –St. Anselm, Proslogion, XII As finite beings locked into a linear timeline, it is easy to think about the “what-ifs” that could have been. Where would

“New Year’s resolutions go in one year and out the other,” so the old adage goes. Given that this piece is running in late January, it is safe to assume countless New Year’s resolutions have been broken. My “resolution,” though I would hardly give it such an official status, was to evaluate my habits of social media use. For years, I labored under the rather Gnostic assumption that the thousands of disembodied interactions we have