FootprintsintheWind.com

The person I may be talking with might be alive today, might in 300 years be 300 years old, as healthy and vital as I am today, with a much wider panorama all around him or her. Then what our generation of ancestors offers is not advice from an old fellers and women, but perspective on how we got there.

:- Doug.

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.

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.

What is the hearing equivalent to a glimpse? Sigh, breath, hush, quiet, still, low.

:- Doug.

I see an entrance
to the forest
many possibilities invite

:- Doug.

I am sentenced
prison years are sure
I can do—nothing
hope is gone
a curtain rises

:- Doug.

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.

We step out, we act on common human matters, we move toward life.

:- Doug.

How human can we get? How much human can we stand?

:- Doug.

I am friend to the ancestors.

:- Doug.

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.

I do intend all possible meanings!

:- Doug.

In the name of the snowflake
And of the footprint
And of the wind, Amen!

:- Doug.

A tiny snowflake: here’s ours
melting nurturing
God enough

:- Doug.

I love, I love
fresh is the snow—the wind
quickens my step—& breath

:- Doug.

One must forgive oneself. It is the first step in forgiving ones you love.

:- Doug.

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.

Care for one another is self-care.

:- Doug.

What, dear generations, do you need to be happy and productive? Or is there something else you would rather be?

:- Doug.

An opening has come upon me
An opening that passes words

:- Doug.

Eleven Generations: A Conversation

:- Doug.

If a chorus we are, it may be a chorus who answers.

:- Doug.

Give up, writer, the conceit that your voice among the ancestors must stand out. This is important: chorus.

:- Doug.