FootprintsintheWind.com

What would make this moment more wonderful?

:- Doug.

We are a milling of persons, each one of us. Not merely emotions passing, but confused and sure of ourselves, exploring and implacable. This is me.

:- Doug.

We can decide to change.

:- Doug.

Proposed: We can altar how we human.

:- Doug.

Disputable proposition: We can get worthy at doing human.

:- Doug.

How can we be worthy of the invitation we extend?

:- Doug.

Sarah is my descendant, born 300 years to the day after me. So she is precisely my age. I met her on a canoe trip. Since then, we have been working to become worthy of one another, so that the human race might be good for all life for generations running on and on.

:- Doug.

To focus on particular people facilitates the growth of life. To say we grow life is noble, and of no pull. To say I grow Sarah wrenches me.

:- Doug.

Maybe if I start digging, start talking (at least aloud to myself), the spin will begin to center. It is said that centering the clay on the wheel is the most difficult part of the art of pottery. And finding the center of the mystery is definitionally impossible. Yet it is a question of how we and these grandchildren make ourselves worthy of one another. We become worthy, yes. And we become worthy, sacred, by holding one another sacred. That is the first thing, then other ways will stem from these roots and hyphae.

:- Doug.

Much of what I have written above serves the twin purposes of putting a conveying, understandable, perhaps disputable language to what I now am about so others will understand, and providing me with a center of spin. It does not take me on the trek. Yet I need to know what I am circling before I start to explore, Yes? Maybe No.

:- Doug.

When I speak of our grandchildren, I mean the grandchildren of our age, of our generation.

:- Doug.

How shall we become worthy of our grandchildren?

:- Doug.

What is worthy of our lives?

:- Doug.

To give of our thinking toward our shared grandchildren is a sacred act.

:- Doug.

How might we human holy?

:- Doug.

You can affect how we human by simply attending, by hearing.

:- Doug.

Ears can affect how people die.

:- Doug.

Humans are oddities, surprising.

:- Doug.

Wisdom is not an achievement—even between people. It arises and disperses in the meetings of beings, instant by instant, a beastie with one wing and the belly of a worm.

:- Doug.

We have power—and not just in our words—to affect how people die.

:- Doug.

In solitude we can empty ourselves not of everything—we’d not want to drain our generosity, for instance—but the things which are standing in the way of first our better natures and second our ability to receive the mystery human—the oddities and surprises we have presented each day.

:- Doug.

Our work has aspects of hot air balloons—we only need to get the air a degree or two warmer, rarer than that around us.

:- Doug.

Invite long conversations.

:- Doug.