Telluride Times, June 25, 2026

“The digital world is a shadow of the real world.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer

In our region, it’s not uncommon in a museum or visitor’s center to see a medicine pouch in the life-sized dioramas section—a pouch usually containing some combination of prayer objects, sacred minerals like crystals, seeds, pigments, plants, pollen, and talismans.

These recreated scenes of tribal life have always riveted me, providing a visual and visceral clue to a life lived more tightly bound to community, to a sense of place, and to the present moment. I know I have stood there imagining that world. I could imagine holding one of those objects and opening a kind of portal—something that could transport me beyond myself into a larger field of meaning.

Within the pouch, as stated, were revered objects. Depending on the particular tribal way of life—Ute, Navajo (Diné), Hopi, or Ancestral Puebloan—these items might include materials used for healing, protection, ceremony, or guidance along a life and spiritual path. In the case of a medicine pouch carried by a healer, the contents were not so much a personal collection of objects as components of spiritual medicine, entrusted to someone in the community for sacred use.

Recently, I caught wind of a social media flash-in-the-pan touting the idea of “analog bags,” essentially totes for carrying non-digital activities—things that might allow the perpetual smartphone accessory to be set aside for a few minutes, an hour, or an afternoon. It wasn’t clear to me whether anyone was actually doing this or whether it was simply another viral dust storm moving through the cultural landscape (likely both).

How does this relate to spiritual healing? At first thought, the analog bag feels simplistic and a bit silly, right? Who is going to take crocheting to work just so they can “touch grass” during a 20-minute lunchtime crafting session? And yet, here we are in a moment when the human attention span is increasingly fractured, when screens have become the default interface between ourselves and the world. The analog bag, in its goofy way, suggests the need to step back into physical time—into boredom, presence, old-school activities, and wide-eyed observation.

File this longing for simpler days under the rubric of “anemoia,” a word meaning nostalgia for a time or place not personally experienced. It is backward-facing yearning, but also something more relevant: a sense that life once upon a time had to have felt less frantic than this, less empty and less overfull. For me, this nostalgia applies not only to distant history, but also to recent past versions of ourselves, before our having been pitched into states of constant alert and notification.

A couple of weeks ago, while camping near Gateway, we discovered we had forgotten essential cords for keeping phones charged and also had not charged the chargers meant to charge those. There was not enough juice to support even our small daily digital habits, including a word game called Spelling Bee that has filled the honeycombed part of our word-making brains. In addition, we had inadvertently arrived without any analog supplies—no crossword puzzles, journals, sketchbooks, or physical books for whiling away the delicious hours.

The fact is, without phones, a variety of things can occur, as we all know. Restlessness, frustration, mortification that proper paper maps of the area are not in the car. Soon enough, however, you start hearing the orioles and the Dolores River better. You start relishing the delightful breeze and being in the dappled shade. These fill you up inside—and start charging your very own batteries. You can enjoy being less occupied—and can begin planning your own analog bag for future trips, to support slower fun.

Because, as of now, it feels as though the smartphone has become the medicine pouch—the duffel—of our time. It contains information, communication, orientation, memory, entertainment, and distraction. It collects our data, marks our personal journey, tells us where to go, and eventually tells us what to do in case the dog ate a pile of another dog’s poop so mysteriously poisonous, he ends up in a trippy state of semi-torpor for a good 12 hours.

It is the object we reach for when we are lost, bored, anxious, or alone. The question is not so much one of technology versus tradition, but what kinds of things actually help us remain present to our own lives. I imagine this can be different for each one of us—from actually touching grass and crocheting whenever we can, to meditation, to taking a short walk daily without a phone.