Machines are great, but there are too many of them in my life. I wrote over the weekend about the need to unplug. The irony of a message like that going out over a blog is rich.

Today I take my own advice. My son and I drove (granted, in a machine powered by fuel delivered by machines on a road made by machines) four hours into the mountains of Tennessee to go on a personal retreat. I'm posting this at an Applebees before we go off-line and I'll get my daughter to "take it live" tomorrow.

Cell phones don't work up there, so life slows down to a human pace. You've got time to reconnect with the parts of you that have been dormant for too long.

And if the side of you that machines helped create goes dark, maybe that's not so bad. The Facebook-self, the Twitter-self will wait.

When I return after a few days, I will again Facebook my friends. I may type "LOL", but it won't be the same as as if they heard my laughter. And maybe my little act of unplugging will cause a few of them to look at their emoticon-existence and ponder the question, "Am I tweeting myself into oblivion?"

These next few days of tramping about in the woods, praying and journal-writing should breathe life to my spirit. And I'll be praying that people I love (like you) find some space in their machine-enabled worlds to do the same.

In a way I'm typing my digital-self a warning with this post. When I return to the machine world, I need a better strategy for unplugging lest I lose that part of me that others like the most. When I return, I need to change my habits.

And that raises a question worth considering: Have you lost touch with the part of you that others like most? What do you need to unplug? The world will wait.