FootprintsintheWind.com

What natural desires do people have to which our stories/messages/images might hitch themselves for a ride and expand their range? Sweetness, beauty, intoxication, control? Beauty, truth, goodness? Ecstasy: “[O]ne ecstatic, wayward pulse of life.” Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p 100?

:- Doug.

Meeting is changing.

:- Doug.

We must change. We must also bend change toward good.

:- Doug.

This all is evocative: man the changeling. It is what we are about, and we are about to change more quickly and dramatically, if science and technology advance their promise. This will not hold only good, but is wholly good. Can I say wholly, or better to say likely? The question is rather, What do we push for? Is there an edge, a disquiet here, a choking shiver? Then we must say it, say Wholly.

:- Doug.

Words creating worlds: what worlds would we make?

:- Doug.

Here a half step beyond the edge touched when I guessed that complexity, mixing, unfinishing, undefining, just these things make us human. Now I see a new humanity or at least quality arising: humanity the changing. And this we owe to those next and next, to the species, and to the all there is: to prod to goad them into changing.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2003

Plant a tree
under whose shade
three or four generations
may sit enjoy
perhaps refresh

Say a prayer
under whose light
seven or eight generations
may feel invited
softened opened

Feed a stranger
something for stomach
for wondering and wandering
nourish these
ten or eleven generations
invite to leave his or her
seedling prayer & bit of food

Please pass it on.

© c 2021, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Humanity is made in the mouth, in the eyes, and above all in the ears—the thread running through them may be imagination, another word for which is spirit.

:- Doug.

Writers are prophets—speaking forth worlds: imaginers who create in their mouths.

:- Doug.

Homo mutabilis: How will our generations differ from us, and what can we do to encourage them?

:- Doug.

To send a message to another, especially across centuries, we must accept it will be a changeling. Meaning like beauty must turn to breathe.

:- Doug.

If the “colors and shapes of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive,” as Frederick Turner writes us, what do humans find attractive? Recall that a shiver and disquiet also propel us. What then? What flowers us?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2002

Do I dread the end of covid-time, this familiar not having to dress well or use mouthwash? Have I developed a liking for holidays without a tiringly long visit by dozens, without having to clean the house before. . . and especially after when I’m so tired? Ahh, Christmas in covid-time!

Please pass it on.

© c 2021, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Is what defines our humanicity our undefinability, what limits us our illimitability? Inexpressible are we.

:- Doug.

There is indeed a tension within our mixedness: we needs must hold all of it, we are a wholeness, not this nor that.

:- Doug.

For what is this meeting seeking?

:- Doug.

Can we grow human? Should we concern ourselves with the root stock? Toward what direction? Toward being aware there might be a direction? Toward choice? Toward not making a choice, rather growing diversities in tangles of diversities? Is profusion a high good? Are there high and low, desirable and undesirable?

:- Doug.

Perhaps it is our complexity makes us human, our very mixedness, our unfinishedness, our indefinability. And so do cyborg aspects in fact make us more human?

:- Doug.

What is the edge of being human?

:- Doug.

In search of the shiver.

:- Doug.

To be tough on self and others, to have an edge, is bigger than worthy. Disquiet. Shiver.

:- Doug.

This goading, shiver-inducing, disquieting is beyond oughts and shoulds, all the way to Bolton’s reflection and reflexivity. It is a filet knife, turned on self, not to kill or eat but to find life, free it.

:- Doug.

Now some time to reflect and rest and find my direction for this day.

:- Doug.