“sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”  – Niel de la Rouviere 

Having read much this week about crowds, groups, networks, tribes and demes, I considered what precisely the word node meant. Deciding to look it up in the Merriam- Webster Dictionary, I found there were definitions for the word in different fields such as physics, astronomy, anatomy, botany and grammar. In botany, the definition stated that it was the part of a plant stem from which one or more leaves emerge. Looking at my endogenous Kumu Map, I realized it looked a little like a flower. Grammatically, the definition with regard to generative grammar, is defined as a vertex or endpoint in a tree diagram. However; if we are viewing the word from a technical standpoint, it is a point at which lines or pathways intersect in a branch from a central or connecting point. Therefore, I hesitantly put myself at the center of the map. 

How am I connected? Most of my connections are within the Immigrant Services Society. Being a large organization, I elucidated that it was only logical. Also, the longer I had been away from the organizations plotted on my map, the fewer connections there were. Would I have been able to maintain more of these connections if social media had existed while studying at the University of Calgary or Toronto Dance Theater? Perhaps. I do sometimes wonder what new connections will be made during these next two years. Inversely, I sometimes wonder what happened to all those connections that got lost along the way. 

I am a Node in a Network of Other Nodes • Untitled map / Untitled view • Kumu