FootprintsintheWind.com

Cultivate surprise. Awe follows. Then mystique.

:- Doug.

We have the ability to stir one another. Consider the play “The Diary of Anne Frank,” when the audience sits in silence at the fall of the curtain. Somehow the audience was so affected that this response was more appropriate than applause. To stir thus is miracle.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2534

To thing-ify something is to seek to possess it. Nouns in English point to our Western overwhelming desire to conquer new lands, plant a flag on the moon or Mars, to own slaves, to name things after ourselves. But in our truer nature we desire not to be possessed rather to be understood, met, heard, accompanied, allowed to be larger, each important in our own way.

Please pass it on.

© c 2026, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Everything in.
All in.

:- Doug.

Barely aware are they, barely know how they are fathers and mothers of generations. They move from vaguely shadowy to acutely subtle, elusive, faint, baffling.

:- Doug.

Whatever I write is the starting point, not the ending.

:- Doug.

One generation invites the next. It persuades, offers, co-imagines, lures: thro’ to beyond.

:- Doug.

We are the crux of all generations going before us from which we issue, and the possible and unseen events coming behind us which arise in our wake, smoke from the pyre. We are Schrödinger’s box of possibilities! In us, in some actual way, those future persons, generations of them, live and move and have their being. So they can be alive in us if we wish.

:- Doug.

How to build/layer a generation?

:- Doug.

The transcendent is the immanent.

:- Doug.

Of what does forming consist? In-forming of lives, of generations? It must be more subtle than school lessons, more in the salts and silts and trickles of tributaries than in the rush of rapids. Is it in comparisons of our lives to theirs, in “What would Mom do?,” even unawares. What do they add not to you and to me but to the flow of we—knowing we are eddies?

:- Doug.

If I write a song of generations, what would the lyrics be, the rhythm, the melody?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2533

I stand at the fire
Stirring
Heat into food

Please pass it on.

© c 2026, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

How did people choose to build cathedrals?

:- Doug.

Food speaks to the communion and the flow thro’.

:- Doug.

What can we learn from a future and a past and a humanness we think not open to us?

:- Doug.

I don’t know if I like my beard, but it is growing on me.

:- Doug.

Myths, even stories, are ways generations talk with one another. Think of bedtime stories. Think of the love of Grandparents for Grandchildren, passing along hard earned knowledge, maybe wisdom, and of the disdain of youth tossing it all over, only years later going to search for it—and for Grandparents.

:- Doug.

As we progress, perhaps we will discover some things about conversation. . . and ourselves. . . .

:- Doug.

What you think you read is not, cannot be, all there is here to be found.

:- Doug.

For you see, in the dark, here something hides, here hides our delight. . . .

:- Doug.

Did you realize that when you are conversing you are bringing forth in front of your eyes—birthing—a person? —A person never before seen, who will disappear as you part?

Do you recognize when your conversation rolls over into meeting, then you begin to meld an us out of the two of you?

Do you stop in your tracks open mouthed when something arises from those two of you meeting, something you know, maybe even you dare to name it soul?—A soul not of yours or of your friend’s but brought to being out of two?

:- Doug.

I am working at becoming better at writing.

:- Doug.