Only connect, how?

A sense of connection -- whether to another person, a time, a place, an idea -- is as important as water, food, sex, and sleep.

Even hermits, loners, or those antisocial family members no one quite understands need to feel connected to someone or something.

We read and write, paint and sing, make friends and flirt with strangers -- all with an eye on somehow easing our ultimately inescapable loneliness.

No one knows everything about us. It's impossible, when we don't know all about ourselves that there is to know. We are, then, left to try to know ourselves and all the fragments that define who we are as people. It's up to us to construct bridges within ourselves and between ourselves and others. Isn't that what E.M. Forster meant by 'Only connect!' in Howard's End, to connect the prose and the passion within us, to connect the fragments?

This site is my attempt at constructing bridges inside and outside of myself, to assuage that elemental isolation -- my own and, hopefully, others'. A character in a book or movie, a stranger in our favorite coffee shop, a lyric in a song, and so much more. There are as many opportunities for connection as there are for isolation; and OnlyConnect is my attempt to seek out and explore those connections. I invite you to come along.

Renee Geel is a freelance writer, editor, fiction writer, and blogger from upstate New York.