FootprintsintheWind.com

We fasten great hopes on the next generation and are often disappointed; perhaps we could unfasten, perhaps we could extend our ambit.

:- Doug.

Our society has provided us Social Security. We might, if we consider, find now encouragement to do things lasting.

:- Doug.

No production, please. Let the world turn without you today. Bending the arc perhaps, or just adding the weight of a smile to it.

:- Doug.

Journal of a man who has very little figured out.

:- Doug.

I do not have the way
nor can there be
invite face stir

:- Doug.

To the generations
I turn my face
a flower

:- Doug.

Human complexity
wildness of Dionysus
is not turned by
Apollo’s decree
of order and goals

:- Doug.

Buddhism seems to stand over and against beauty, truth, goodness—is this so?

:- Doug.

With faces turned toward you
welcoming beckoning informing promising
just this stability in the human instability

:- Doug.

In Pema’s Nirvana
left brain dominates right
if there is a right at all
groundlessness & everythinglessness
no one cries
no one cries
no one laughs

:- Doug.

This morning I set myself the project of attending my sense of touch throughout the day. What my fingers feel on the keyboard, what my hand feels washing my arm and what my arm feels being washed, the gurgling of my tummy, and all the normally unattended sensations of feeling.

:- Doug.

Moving liminally. Rather than asking how maybe just move. Moving stirs. Stirring might stir blood. Will the 11th generation even have blood?

I think it probably will: machines do not grow new machines; cyborgs do not grow new artificial body parts: those need to be manufactured and installed. Then again, when machines learn to build new machines, what will be the difference between genetic transmission and manufactured transmission?

If we can then live to be 300 years old, the machines will make us obsolete, so we will not want to live long. As machines develop new generations each in half the time of the prior, the old are destined to be scrapped in days, hours, milliseconds. There will not be patience for people to develop from babe in arms through even one of the 100 stages to adult in 25 years.

So it is unlikely that those much past the 11th generation will survive, let alone have blood.

With machines (what does that term mean?) taking over from humans and discarding humans, or keeping them as pets, how soon before the spring gets wound so tightly it cracks?

“We will not want to live long.” Maybe there can be a spirit among us of What new can we be?

:- Doug.

We are to call forth women and men original.

:- Doug.

Am I to be liminal actor twixt this world and that generation? What distinguishes—or calls together for meeting—a world and a people?

:- Doug.

Who erected the frontier
between the generations
but we constructors of time?
Can this stream by them
be forded? bridged? skirted?

:- Doug.

Do the big thing. First.

:- Doug.

What is the God you don’t believe in?

:- Doug.

The person I may be talking with might be alive today, might in 300 years be 300 years old, as healthy and vital as I am today, with a much wider panorama all around him or her. Then what our generation of ancestors offers is not advice from an old fellers and women, but perspective on how we got there.

:- Doug.

What is hope? Hope is doing the good work, knowing it is important, without promise of results. So that is my work: doing the good work, the important, without promise of fruition.

:- Doug.

How it might be if people saw those who had a certain amount of machine in them as outcasts? Or vice versa: those with nanobots would be “smarter” than those without. Would there be wars, massacres, pogroms?

What then is our response today, to head that off? Just do the work with our grandchildren? Be found on that day doing the work. Yet some of the work might just be reaching out as I have been trying to grasp, part of the cloud of witnesses, singing the whale song, writing my letters, poems, stories, aphorisms. Listening to hear.

:- Doug.

What is the hearing equivalent to a glimpse? Sigh, breath, hush, quiet, still, low.

:- Doug.

You get lost in the forest
only because you don’t
want to be there

:- Doug.

I see an entrance
to the forest
many possibilities invite

:- Doug.