FootprintsintheWind.com

Is this awe, or wonder? A mix? Does meaning serve this?

:- Doug.

With your mother’s eyes
    Are you called to life
From out of her womb
    Her eyes search yours search
And you are known
With your mother’s eyes
    You are called forth
You gazing back
    Become known
    Become person
    Become real

:- Doug.

What is a mind
That it is so easily stretched
That it stretches at all?
That it loves to be
And is frightened to be?

:- Doug.

I am a mystery-teller
For you I offer a mystery
Ancestors

:- Doug.

Some progress on ancestor thinking. Inheritance, kinship, sustenance, mutuality, weave. Change those to verbs: Inherit, kin, sustain, mutual, weave, feed, eat, nurture, digest, strengthen, direct, point, sing, story-tell, flow, contradict, oppose, negate the negation, walk, maintain. What is the image, the fragrance, the tune, the rhythm, the texture and temperature of the surface and the deeps?

:- Doug.

What are you doing to maintain—
Generations yet to come?
Generations gone on ahead?
Generations walking alongside you?
Beings not at all like you ancestoring you?

:- Doug.

Adversity is the guarantor of ancestry, the contraries that Blake says lead to progress, that McKee calls contradictory, contrary, and negation of the negation.

:- Doug.

You ancestor are the story, the song with snatches of tune and maybe almost no words remembered. This melody makes persons of lonely strands. Of DNA. Of estranged blood. Makes mutuality of these persons.

:- Doug.

An ancestor may not provide shoulders to stand on. Rather, sustenance, nurture, food to be taken in, eaten, digested, turned to strength and direction. A help for choice in dilemma. This is my essence: eat.

:- Doug.

Ancestors call forth echoes of inheritance and kinship. Mutuality in these words. Sustenance.

:- Doug.

We are touched by the melody, but can we carry the tune to others?

:- Doug.

This of the vocabulary—

Incorporated lived oral enveloping intimate being threshold language undifferentiated inseparable belong muscular tactile embodied oppositional contradictory intention allusion tension conscious unconscious drives participation sustaining experiencing natural penetrate convince veracity age origins history human use wear death fear process supersede span life sensual reality time near gaze perspective pluralistic democratic contextual inclusionary horizontal caring mystique foster communal present moment texture weight density space shadow dark evokes resist bodily interpret manipulate

—What the language?

:- Doug.

Story telling is not simply re-telling. It is wrestling with your life’s meaning.

:- Doug.

Unless you are offering yourself in the course, offering as a sacrifice, a sacred slaying, the course is not worth their time, nor yours, nor divinity’s. Go beyond what you know. Push through the thorns and underbrush. Risk what you know.

:- Doug.

The hero’s and heroine’s journey is not a compact outline for a story. It is a roadmap for the story teller’s day.

:- Doug.

What you know is not enough. Your thoughts are not enough. You must think. You must go beyond.

:- Doug.

To repackage stories, say Bible stories, to explain or analyze, is to stay at arm’s length. You wear them as a coat to ward off wet and cold, to keep your own warmth and breath to yourself. Instead, if you risk your self, your soul-essence, then you come closer. Then you test the stories by making your own. Then to this species you are of value.

:- Doug.

I am for the moment saying too much and not going deeply enough, trying to speak to one audience member in generalities and so missing the opportunity to say anything to anybody.

:- Doug.

If you are thinking, life will from here advance.

:- Doug.

A vision: we climb out of covid in small groups. We tend and befriend, hug and touch these. Larger scales lose their power. We help those in other groups, at a kind distance, with an easy heart, smiling. We are human to one another.

:- Doug.

Your journey is not the hero’s or heroine’s journey. This journey is your own risk.

:- Doug.

The hero’s and heroine’s journeys intertwine, roots in the forest seeking the same nurture.

:- Doug.

The writer must go over the cliff’s edge, must risk his or her pulsing sacred soul. There is the old story which both applies and no longer applies to you—you must go beyond, make your own, lead the species to a new opening. You will lose the old story. You will wager your soul for your species. You may find a new one—you cannot know from here. Crisis is life.

:- Doug.