FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2009

What if ancestors were not ahead of you in line (nor behind you in something some call “time”) but were all around you, all about you, sustaining you as you sustain them? You may get your hazel eyes from your father, your gait from your mother, and your grey hair from your children, but you get your bread from the bread delivery guy, and the farmer, and the wheat plants, and the bee, and the microbial animals, and that star above. We are ancestors to one another.

Please pass it on.

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He is skill building. Well, so am I, but I do not know what to call it. It is about reaching out and throwing something into the river for the grandchildren. Some of the river evaporates and the wind brings the spray and the vapors back our way. Circulation knows no single direction.

:- Doug.

Toss your voice into the flow of generations. This is the conversation we seek—a stream of gifts.

:- Doug.

Is there anything else about your covid day?

:- Doug.

Does a playwright have power? Does any individual have power? Does any individual lack all power?

:- Doug.

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.

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.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2008

We learned that divisions and differences were not a problem, rather what we most deeply desired. It turned out the problem was anger, heat. Once we realized that what we listened for in the echoes were differences—someone to say almost the same as us, to say what we said matters, to confirm our being in new words—we started looking for new experiences, new people, new expressions, reveling just here.

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

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.