FootprintsintheWind.com

Open your hand
Open your arms

:- Doug.

Stand up to greed
Stand up to retribution

:- Doug.

I am seeing dimly some sort of world where the eat-it-all-up-now, more-more-more has crashed. It lightens me. Maybe some early morn we all know it for what it was—empty. Then we go the gentle road, sharing the plenty and the beauty of all life—and the joy and pain of living.

:- Doug.

We can’t help but give it all away to the future. But we can help by how we give, and by what we choose to pack in it. We can pack it in little tickly bundles of imagination. We can pack in a seed bank of ideas. All of which obligates you and me to meet and converse and generate both seed and whirly bird to carry it on the winds. After us, other relatives might imagine themselves anew.

:- Doug.

After turning to one another
We turn outward together
To walk with all our relations

:- Doug.

It is our place to open space for the good, the true, the beautiful in all our relations.

:- Doug.

To be generative for coming kin we must, at base, become compost for them.

:- Doug.

Did you realize the earth, the one after today, will count you its ancestor, the earth and all its living sheath? What is an ancestor? Primarily a story bearer, a story carrier, but especially, an ancestor is a story. A story often untold, unknown. What story am I? Are you?

:- Doug.

Write less, say more.

:- Doug.

Where mystery
there danger
we desire

:- Doug.

What’s the largest thing you are working on? When will it be done?

:- Doug.

If we are working on something we can complete in the time remaining to us, we are thinking eleven generations too small. We ought put our minds together with theirs, starting with us two.

:- Doug.

An ancestor is called to account by her ancestors. Do you know yours? I don’t. I must think on them. Do you sing to your land? I barely sing.

:- Doug.

Come to the land
you can imagine
where persons walked
how they warmed themselves
whom they will dream
their songs and stories
of yet

:- Doug.

What kind of ancestor have I been up to now? Ignorant, that’s what. Oblivious. You? What questions can we ask each other to get better? Is any generation away from us? Consider.

:- Doug.

Spaces
between droplets
of mists
are ever there        here
even       especially
when coming together
and you dissolve

:- Doug.

Do you believe you are an ancestor even if not remembered?

:- Doug.

My writing wants to tend.

:- Doug.

Most important humanity: someone there with you at end.

:- Doug.

As ancestors how do we converse with the generations?

:- Doug.

Antecessor does not have to be
a heavy thing
most are not aware
today
they are making
someone else’s
headwaters

:- Doug.

No gathering but in loosening.

:- Doug.

What is the most profound part of life? What is its constant? What holds us together? You might think change, if you think long. But I think, after, it is loss, ending, death. When we are finally severed, bone from bone, heartbeat from heartbeat, we are closest to opening. Fire.

:- Doug.