What is astonishing about our contemporary world is how few people are present to what is physically occurring around them. Distracted thumbs on phone keys are a brilliant, iconic image Shakespeare would use today, were he alive, to illustrate the desperate need to be busy and remain undisturbed by a larger horizon of human endeavor for which we might feel inadequate. There is an unconscious sense that if we refuse to be present to the physical world around us, we will be held harmless from any of the greater physical patterns that might disturb and destroy the protected, often virtual worlds we have taken so much effort to construct around us.
David Whyte