FootprintsintheWind.com

Start with one single change in technology, life, or politics over 300 years and apply it to an issue of today stewed in all its complexity.

:- Doug.

Beyond seeing a bigger picture, we (the eleventh generation grandchildren and I) need to help us see the periphery and edges, and what we cannot see. “There’s a beautiful buck on that ridge” my brother-in-law said to his grandchild, “but we cannot take the shot: we know there are houses in that direction and our shot endangers them.” What we cannot see is real. It can be affected by our choices, can and should affect us. Grandchild, it is about vision and hearing, sniffing and feeling, tasting and imagining—a whole lot about imagining.

:- Doug.

Friend, I am seeing a larger world here and now. When I say now, spirit arrives, class starts, love is possible.

:- Doug.

Tell me of your oceans, your waters, weather, and winds, and your dreams of these.

:- Doug.

Spirit is somehow motive—the principle that gets one moving. It pushes. It pulls.

:- Doug.

Spirit does not oppose the physical—is probably not its contrary either—rather is more its complement, its other leg we use to stand, to walk.

:- Doug.

I could give my ideas for loosening but life is more knotted than I can know. Better to ask your ideas, so to grow.

:- Doug.

Story is for me a spiritual insurgence.

:- Doug.

In the name of the dewdrop—
and of the raindrop—
and of the beer—Amen!

:- Doug.

Grandchild of mine, elder of the year 2321, I write you seeking to know you. What is your name? Do you recognize any connection with those of us of this year 2021?

I am most interested in finding out the really real of your being. My imaginings of you and your life and your agency in your world of necessity will land far afield of where you find yourself. How could they not? There will be 11 generations between us, and each will live lives full of meetings and bumpings into others, some friendly, some prickly, some who make life difficult. All will change the people who were your parents of many generations, and they will change what they leave to you.

And your technologies might mean that you are not physically constituted as I am, mainly organic. You likely think differently from me. So will my language even have any meaning to you, and what are the chances my meaning and yours align?

Yet I am used to that. I am a poet and believe that the poem I write does not carry all the meaning: the reader also brings a meaning to it; and the meeting of poet and readers brings forth something none of us brought in. Meetings are like that.

So my question for you circles around with questions like: What are your soul-searching questions and struggles? What are you striving for? What is the meaning of your life and of human life? What is your purpose? How ought people to treat one another, and other beings? What is the quality of being human? About what do you converse with others, in moments of reflection?

For you see, I want to learn of you. If we, you and I, can somehow converse, turn together, breathe together, at this remove, then perhaps there is something I can bring to my generation to leave you a better soil in which to grow.

Your ancestor,
:- Doug.

I hang back, not quite ready to start, saying that will take a day to itself. And yet. . . .

:- Doug.

How do I stick my nose into everything of 300 years on?

:- Doug.

Let the picture develop in conversing.

:- Doug.

across centuries, converse

:- Doug.

As ancestors can we at most point? And in the right direction?

:- Doug.

Might we—might I—raise inner contradictions in you, Grandchild?

:- Doug.

But if you are to have a livable world we’ll have to. . .give up our comfortable cars, walk more, take cloth bags to the grocery, do more with less, think how we might leave you a better humanity, think about you. . . .

Really?! Imagine us! Imagine us.

:- Doug.

What O what do you want me to hear
You who come to me from ages hence?
Do you even care if I hear?
Do you even find worth in our converse?
Who are we each to the other, if. . . ?

:- Doug.

Along the way, I might find other approaches, reachings, comings near.

:- Doug.

Humanicity is at once a larger and a smaller thing than humanity: smaller in that it is only the quality of the beast, larger in that other beings can partake.

:- Doug.

curious = magical

:- Doug.

A little dew drop is our God.

:- Doug.

What is our humanicity?

:- Doug.