Without promise of fruition
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.
Archive for January, 2021
Machine outcasts?
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.
Hearing a glimpse
What is the hearing equivalent to a glimpse? Sigh, breath, hush, quiet, still, low.
:- Doug.
I am sentenced
I am sentenced
prison years are sure
I can do—nothing
hope is gone
a curtain rises
:- Doug.
“Complicated and thorny”
Somewhat like Havel in prison fighting himself to make his letters “complicated and thorny” to get them past the censors, so we each are in a prison of our own making fighting to get out past our censors a letter. Becoming human is just such a “clumsy search” for one self.
:- Doug.
cloud crowd fractal
We think of the ancestors, the forebears, as a straight line back and forward. Yet that is not the only percept: the writer of Hebrews speaks of a cloud or crowd: so we could have a fractal or a circle or spiral, a gathering, a dancing, a whispering. Linear is not the only geometry, two are not the only dimensions. Hear. Taste. Invent.
:- Doug.
In the name of the snowflake
In the name of the snowflake
And of the footprint
And of the wind, Amen!
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2007–A building now violated
Footprints in the Windsm # 2007
What is the true foundation of our life together? Is it a building now violated? Is it this set of laws and constitution? Is it one particular person, or one set of beliefs of what (call it democracy, rule of law, or right to X) is our foundation? Or is it something living that runs through us all, mostly unnoticed, unremarked? This ethereal something is more solid, more foundation, than any stone set upon another.
Please pass it on.
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Must forgive oneself
One must forgive oneself. It is the first step in forgiving ones you love.
:- Doug.
Not close enough
An old joke about the mathematician and the engineer: each step only takes him half the distance to his lover. The mathematician will never get there; the engineer will get close enough. In covid time we can get to within six feet of our dying parent, but it cannot be close enough.
:- Doug.
What do you need?
What, dear generations, do you need to be happy and productive? Or is there something else you would rather be?
:- Doug.
Must stand out?
Give up, writer, the conceit that your voice among the ancestors must stand out. This is important: chorus.
:- Doug.
