here we are trying to get to the moon when the bottom of the ocean is beckoning.

today i heard a story on NPR about eric whitacre's virtual choir. apparently it's not a new thing, just new to me. maybe new to you? anyway, mr whitacre is completely into choral music. he writes it. he arranges it. he conducts it. he comprehends the transformative power of choral music and wants to share that. remember singing in grade school music class? or, at summer camp? or, on the bus with your friends on the way to a football game? or, maybe in an organized chorus?

if you've ever sung in community with other people, you know what i am talking about here. there is power in choral singing. power to move hearts, change lives. i am not kidding around here - there really is power in shared music, and i'm fairly certain we're supposed to be doing something with music besides amusing ourselves. (i believe you were given an assignment to ponder this, weren't you now.)

anyway, virtual choir. what mr whitacre does is he posts some music online, and if you want to participate, you download the sheet music and you learn it and you sing your part into your computer and post it on youtube, and then mr whitacre gathers all the pieces and puts them together into a chorus.

it's sort of haunting, this creation of communal experience through individual inputs. i mean, yay for us doing something together, but we're not actually truely together. we're only virtually together. we all shared the exact same completely different experience together.

not that being in person together changes the fact that we're all experiencing differently. i mean... we're all always looking through our own lenses, so we're not ever fully together. being physically near tends to cause us to feel that we are sharing something, but besides perhaps a cloud of body odor, is there an innate sharedness to simply being geographically closeby?

on the space-time continuum, we can share space or we can share time or we can share both. if we both participate in the virtual choir, what are we sharing? we do our part in different places and at different times and mr whitacre does his part and then we view the output in our separate places, at separate times. is this community? do we have a shared experience?