Back in the Dotcom era, I’d often get asked to speak on panels about this new thing called the Internet.  The moderator’s final question to the panel would always be something like, “Where’s it all going?”  When my turn came, I’d begin with the line:

“My grandmother was a witch…”

It would get everyone’s attention, for sure.  After a beat filled with lots of blinking eyes, I’d explain that my grandmother knew how to dowse for water with the forked limb of a peach tree, and when I was seven or eight years old I’d asked her one day when she was burning trash in the rusty barrel behind her house how she did it, and she said, by way of explanation, “I’m a witch.  Didn’t you know that?”

After she put it like that, I noticed things about her that, to my young and fertile imagination, seemed like total witchcraft:  How her flowers and vegetables grew to enormous sizes–chrysanthemums like volleyballs and corn on the cob as long as your forearm.  How she would talk to her animals, her hens and her cats, and how they’d talk back.  And how the same voice that could chat with cats could throw off the pitch of an entire congregation singing a hymn in church on Sunday.

I’d tell the audience that I had come to believe that what my grandmother knew was just a tiny part of a whole body of folkways and connections to the Earth that must have, at one time, been whole.  I suggested that centuries of science, rationality and organized religion had shattered and scattered this body of knowledge to the ends of the earth, but that it still existed, as little slivers and remnants, like what my grandmother knew.

I said that what I thought would happen is that the people who are the keepers of these little pieces would be able to use the internet to find one another, and re-connect what they know, and reassemble those slivers in beautiful new ways, and that maybe these new ways would be what saves the planet.

I’d get nothing from the audience.  Blank looks.  Crickets.  Maybe one older woman in the audience nodded in understanding, but that was about it.

And then someone  else on the panel would say something like, “I think e-tail is going to be driver for growth in the tech sector in the foreseeable future…” and you could almost hear the audience sigh with relief as the talk got back to terra cognita.

Today, when I get asked to speak about social media, I will sometimes tell this same story, about My Grandmother the Witch.

Today, almost everyone in the audience nods in understanding.

Next chance you get, plant a peach tree or something.  We’re going to need it.