In recent years, technology and gadgets have become a bigger part of my life than ever before. This has been a significant and sometimes difficult shift for me. After all, as a native Floridian, I am often happiest in nature, without ties to batteries or electric sockets. I grew up playing in waves, climbing through mangroves and building thousands of sandcastles, both literally (on the beach) and figuratively (as Thoreau would say, in the air).

Lately, then, I’ve struggled to understand how this identity of mine – one tethered to nature, freedom and solitude – has melded into a reality that includes several iPods, a laptop, and an iPhone – all of which I regularly use. I sometimes ask myself (with noted discomfort) how I ever became even a little bit of a gadget enthusiast.

Although I have always realized the benefits of technology, too, I tended to do so in terms of convenience. For example, it was convenient to check email during flight delays and to upload photos to the web so that friends can view and order their own copies (rather than having to make doubles, which I rarely did).

But tonight in yoga class, when I was supposed to be thinking about how to “deepen my practice”, all I could think of was the beauty of email. That, and how our focus on the next, best gadget or the new technology or Google Wave (as the rage has been lately), sometimes means that we don’t stop to smell the roses. And I’m not even talking about nature here (though I do grow lovely roses for smelling). Rather, I was thinking of one of the simpler aspects of technology that most of us have long taken for granted now: email. Tonight, during yoga class (and yes, the irony is not at all lost on me), I fell in love with email. And I couldn’t wait to come home and write about it on my laptop. And then post it on my blog. (Ugh. See?)

Throughout our sun salutations, I remembered my first experiences with email: how, as a freshman in college in the Fall of 1994, I got my first email account at the University of Vermont (it was dherbeni@moose.uvm.edu in case you were wondering). No sooner was I online than my dad asked to email me. Unlike many people’s parents, my dad was a total tech nerd, an early adopter of everything gadget or computer related, and so he had long had email. He would bring home all sorts of early computers while we were growing up (I still remember the archaic Zorba sitting in our dining room since his office already had other computers). It was shortly thereafter, on some other snazzier computer, that my sister and I made our mother stationery with Print Shop and played Lemonade Stand for hours on end; sadly, the iPhone app has nothing on the original.

Email, however, was the best. Away at college, email – in addition to our daily phone calls – glued my father and I together even more. It provided space for my “hyperverbal” (as he called it) father to type out stories as they came to mind and to send them whenever he wanted. I’d go down to the computer lab in my dorm and loved to see his name in my Inbox. For years, we wrote each other on email almost every day. Thanks to email and a willingness to let me see other parts of himself, my dad started sending me mass forwards, even surprisingly including a few dirty jokes. Sometimes he wrote only to me or only to my sister. Other times, he wrote to both of us at once, which was almost as good as us all being home together on the sofa.

My dad would copy my sister and I on emails with his friends, bringing us into the fold. Years later, after he died, it was thanks to these cc’d emails that I felt like I knew some of these men. And to this day, they’ve kept in touch (also by email). The emails he wrote to me also served as records of what our lives were like at different times that, even now, I can read when I want to remember something about him or us.

The role of email between this daughter and her father is sweet enough in and of itself but my stopping to smell the email roses during yoga class doesn’t end there. There’s other magic to be found. You see, I’ve fallen in love over email: twice. I’ve never broken up with anyone over email (though I have declined a few dates that way). However, I have sorted out a few relationship dilemmas this way and, once, I was told by someone that they needed space from me after we broke up. Months later, he wrote (once again, via email) that he wanted to talk and to take a walk in the woods. I wasn’t ready yet but when I was, it was email – and not the phone – that led me to figure out a way for us to be friends again.

There have been times in my life when I’ve woken up at 3 or 4 in the morning to see if I had an email from a certain someone. And there have been so many feelings from emails: not just the stresses of work but the joys of seeing pictures of friends’ new babies, the excitement of seeing if “he” wrote me, the fluttery heart feelings of reading poems an ex used to write, or downloading songs someone else would attach, and the wonderful-ness of seeing how my mom learned to open up her emotions and her memory bank over email in ways that didn’t happen offline.

My work, too, is like magic thanks to email. As a sex researcher, educator and columnist, I am so heartened by how many people trust me with their secrets over email – how they open up and let me into their lives and their dilemmas and the heartbreaks and longings of their bedrooms.

It’s crossed my mind that maybe these are mundane thoughts. Or too new-agey. Or that I am the late one to the party who has been too busy, until now, to stop and marvel at the magical ways that we can communicate about our lives with people over this thing called email. These weird metal folded box-like things that sit on (and sometimes uncomfortably warm) our laps. All I know is that this new found appreciation helps to ease my identity crisis a bit, to see how technology – and specifically email – has made me enjoy the nature of human relationships more than I ever realized. And for that, I am thankful – and, yes, a little bit in love.

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