FootprintsintheWind.com

There’s advantage to not being able to put words to the spirit, to being stretched to do so, to find and create, to come up with what has not been heard nor tasted before.

:- Doug.

Articulate the voices we so seldom hear or want to hear, sacred all.

:- Doug.

Shall we live?
Attempt to hear

:- Doug.

I want to hear the multitudinous sacred voices: whispers and shouts, gentling and soul-burrowing.

:- Doug.

The center of the human sphere is in each other of us, and its circumference cannot be drawn.

:- Doug.

I have not been moved by my descriptions of this work. I need to know: what do I really need to say? You are the man: the one you’re trying to find the words to stir.

:- Doug.

For nearly 3 decades I have been exploring and writing about the human spirit, and more recently the special role of elders to tend and befriend that spirit. So it is I find myself working across generations to spirit better.

:- Doug.

If we want to go further in time-space, we may have to go slower, stick our paddles in deeper.

:- Doug.

We have an idiosyncratic way of imaging our world; it morphs from generation to generation. Just now we love our computer metaphors: networks, bandwidth, calculations per second. Life will change these, gradually and dramatically.

:- Doug.

I want to meet you. I am afraid to meet you. I hold back. You are fearful. Why do I have a hard time knowing your hospitality? There is a fear of meeting. We want to help those in peril, even stranger or other. Here a way. Exercise: you meet a later one, and are confronted with the large peril or injury to this one. How to help?

:- Doug.

I seem to be on the cusp of something that is becoming clearer as it grows. It is burgeoning, perhaps threatening to drown me. Perhaps then I arise new. Or I die. Haptic, write the haptic. Hold it, turn it around, crack it open, peel it, toss it in the air, see if it bounces. Mix them up, put eyes in the skin, tangles in the roots.

:- Doug.

Porous we are we do
holes only holes
fill match entangle

:- Doug.

Seeking 1 or 2 people with whom I can explore how to communicate with people 300 years from now; . . .how to design deeper questions.

:- Doug.

Head on: We know we cannot talk with people 300 years on (we can question this later); so how would we communicate to them—and receive from them?

:- Doug.

Tasks: generate hypotheses; design experiments; study the results.

:- Doug.

Invite us to caricature and exaggerate, so as to learn of the later ones.

:- Doug.

Invite conversation with later elders: the elder writes with your dominant hand and you answer with your other. This forces us to understand and meet more of what we know, do, and are.

:- Doug.

An open hand, hospitality is core human.

:- Doug.

We are going to the edge, where generations do not touch, but might know one another.

:- Doug.

Poems of spirit
Meetings of generations

:- Doug.

Her name is Sarah. We meet on the beach of an island in a wide and gentle stretch of a large river. She has been waiting for me and takes me by the arm up a path to a place where we sit on logs and talk. She is my granddaughter. She is grandmother to some she can name and many neither of us will hold in our arms. She is alive in a time when I have faded from memory, 300 years from now.

:- Doug.

I’m still trying to describe and define the course. Instead, do the course. It will do the rest.

:- Doug.

If you have come to this course for what you can get, get out. I say in all kindness get out as fast as you can. You will get nothing for it. Indeed it will cost you much, perhaps everything. Ideally everything.

:- Doug.