The pains returned Friday night. It had been a few months and I was hoping that maybe the kidney stone had passed, undetected. Nope. It was a painful sleepless night, leading up to my birthday.

So, as I sat in my chair, shifting my weight, trying to find ways to get comfortable, I started thanking friends who have wished me a happy birthday on Facebook. Last time I checked, it was 378. It is interesting to think about who shared greetings. Conservatives and liberals, priests and atheists, people whose houses I went to over fifty years ago and people that I’ve only met online through shared interests, white, black, Hispanic, gay, straight, trans, cis.

After this past week, where there has been so much violence, it is good to feel connected to all of mankind.

Some friends share a link to Choir, Choir, Choir, a large group of people gathering together to sing inspiring popular music, sort like massive karaoke on steroids, people connected to one another, like at Falcon Ridge, or, I imagine, at Miranda’s Hearth gatherings. I’ve been listening to a bunch of their recordings on YouTube.

Meanwhile, my youngest daughter has started playing Pokemon Go. For those who’ve missed it, Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game played on your smartphone, where you go to specific locations in real life and interact with objects in the game there. It is based on Ingress, which I’ve been playing for years. As such, the locations I go to for Ingress are the same locations that Fiona goes to for Pokemon Go. It is interesting to see the strong popular interest in Pokemon Go, when compared to the niche geek interest in Ingress.

All of this leads nicely into Connected Learning MOOC. It starts today, Sunday July 10th and goes til August 6th. I will try to participate as much as I can, although during this period I will be on Cape Cod for a week, and later at a folk music festival for several days.

The first Make Cycle asks, “Who are we?” During this coming week, I look forward to finding out who else is participating on CLMooc. Who will I be excited to connect with? What thoughts, projects, and ideas will we want to pursue?

I’m excited about the poetry part of CLMooc. For those interested, you can read some of my poems in the Poetry section of my blog. I’m also interested in mysticism. I’m currently listening to Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism during my commute, and reading some of St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle. All of this will probably feed into my poetry. It is fed by my religious journey in which I am exploring the possibility of becoming an ordained Episcopal priest. I’m very interested in online learning around religious and spiritual matters.

I heard about CLMOOC from RHIZO15. I’m very interested in a connectivist model of learning, the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and a bunch of other writers I lump together in the same larger group, from Lacan to Foucault. I work in social media in health care, and I’m working on an online health care professionals learning environment.

So that was my birthday, with kidney stones, and lots of interesting connections as part of my introduction to #CLMOOC 2016. I look forward to connecting.