FootprintsintheWind.com

We study the microcosm for scents of the macrocosm, for ranging truths and long patterns, for how we might live our microcosm. Less often we regard the fecund mesocosm, the community and our companions. Let us learn, together.

:- Doug.

We ask questions. What can we learn of humanity? Of ourselves? What is our role in the stream of humanity? What can we learn of coming generations? The flow of humanity is seldom if at any time straight lines and smooth curves—rather, is jagged and discontinuous. Still we can find traces of future people. We can write and speak toward them. They can be heard by us not as we hear one in front of us, rather in the flow we detect, in our knowledge of humanity’s ways, in our imaginative ways of putting it together. We ought not cross over into sheer creation and fiction. Neither is it all drudge and mathematical computation: there is magic and a spirited unpredictability human. It is important work to think on and work toward those who are to come.

:- Doug.

Let the poem
carry you

:- Doug.

Characters, persons in our stories of people yet to be, ought to be full of contradictions and unknowings—real.

:- Doug.

Tell us why humanity even matters to the world.

:- Doug.

Some writings almost say what is newly understood. The task becomes to true it bit by bit.

:- Doug.

Community with the ages is whenever you find yourself.

:- Doug.

Don’t push so hard
Let them come to you
What do you want of me?

I would know you

:- Doug.

The call of the ages, their whisper: this is mine. Because they are there: can you not see, Blake asked us, the company of the heavenly host around the sun, singing Holy, Holy, Holy? Do you see only with your corporeal eye, and miss seeing through to the rest of the real?

:- Doug.

Have you figured out how to unflush a toilet?

:- Doug.

I am to tend a garden watered by reading and fed by thinking.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2043

It is a profound Work, a holy work, to give attention to those who come behind us. It is to add our part, perhaps a better definition, to the task of becoming human. Can future generations become more human? Can this generation?

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

One work aspect is to develop my imagination of the ages.

:- Doug.

What were the stopping points in today’s reading? Think here.

:- Doug.

But I don’t know anything—this has to be my starting point.

:- Doug.

The whisper of the ages
Hear

Why work with those generations ahead? Because they are there. Because we need one another. Because it is worth imagining how we could change humanity.

:- Doug.

Where ages touch
A gnarly vine
Carries juicy life

:- Doug.

Intensive research into how the ages can meet for life’s good.

:- Doug.

What comes after the United States collapses? What comes after humanity goes extinct? What word might we have?

:- Doug.

What is it I am exploring? Grandchildren, generations, futures, humanity, humanicity, ancestors. Generating. How we might converse across the ages: to improve life. Converse, ages, life.

:- Doug.

Now to my hardest work: Thinking—out of ignorance—by diving into what I do not and cannot know.

:- Doug.

In life the lived
No straight lines

:- Doug.

We cannot imagine the 11th generation because we have not practiced making up real persons with skin, bones, loves, struggles, and strangenesses. And faces. To a lesser extent but still large, this lack of trying accounts for saying “There might not be an 11th generation:” it is a failure to imagine well. Did not someone call us to envision the faces of those who never will be?

There is a touch of failure of courage. To meet the unexpected face.

:- Doug.