FootprintsintheWind.com

Tragedy is humanity’s manure.

:- Doug.

Can we talk?
It will be work
Is there precedent?
There will be pain
There may be joy
There will be violent opposition
It may backfire
It will be lonely
Won’t get what we expect
It is sabotage
In the end
We can’t know
Unless we try

:- Doug.

Attend, only attend.

:- Doug.

Find a community with whom to test—open space with them, there.

:- Doug.

Who says conversation has to be direct and answered in words or glances? Quiet flows too.

Answering may return to another, elsewhen.

:- Doug.

By kindred souls
of many generations
surrounded

:- Doug.

Meet the grandchildren
in silence shared

:- Doug.

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.

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.