I’m Sherry Dryja, a neurodiverse writer, creator, vegan baker, and theologian living in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood.
I live in a high-rise soap opera with a rotating cast of eccentrics—and somehow, I’ve become the neighborhood’s unofficial archivist. Not with spreadsheets, but with felt.
Stranded on a dark San Francisco street, Mike slumped onto a stoop, looking less like a guy with motion sickness and more like someone who had lost a fight with a bottle of tequila. People crossed the street to avoid us. That’s when I realized: we weren’t just stuck—we were being judged.
Cartagena is hot. Not ‘Oh, let me grab my sunhat’ hot. More like ‘I am melting into the pavement and will soon become one with the earth’ hot. By midday, I had transformed from carefree traveler to overheated swamp creature. So, when we walked into a fancy restaurant without even changing clothes, I was already feeling like a sweaty disaster. But I was not prepared for what happened next: a full-body collision with Benjamin Bratt’s bare chest.
I had spent four years being told what things are—cups are for drinking, saucers are for holding cups. But here was Grandma, breaking the rules in the quietest, most matter-of-fact way.
Maybe I wasn’t Jesus. Maybe no one is. Or maybe we all are—not as saviors, but as hands and feet, as hearts capable of kindness, as people who, in whatever small ways we can, bring light into the world.
Stand outside at dusk and watch Venus rise. If you sit long enough, you might feel it—the Earth rolling away from the Sun, the vast plane of the solar system stretching around you. Teilhard glimpsed this grand unfolding. Indigenous wisdom has always known it. This is an invitation to step into it.
The Noosphere was never meant to belong to billionaires and bots. It was meant to be a shared space, where knowledge and connection flourished. How do we reclaim it? By choosing intentionality over algorithms, community over consumption, and real conversations over performative engagement.
Teilhard believed humanity was evolving toward something higher. But higher for whom? His vision of the Noosphere preached unity, yet his own biases excluded entire populations. So what do we do with thinkers like him? We wrestle. We reclaim. We expand the vision beyond his limits—because the Noosphere must be for all of us, or it is not progress at all.
I wasn’t looking for love—just a place to write. But then a stranger’s message popped up, and the Internet became more than a tool. It became a bridge.
Decades before the Internet, Teilhard de Chardin predicted a vast web of thought connecting us all. He called it the Noosphere. And I was living in it.
As we savored the unexpected treat, we couldn’t help but admire Ted’s audacity. Who would’ve guessed that a Kremówka truck could lead to such joy? In hindsight, we all wished we’d followed him instead of trudging through yet another church.
