FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2063

Why do I want to get grandparents talking across generations? Recently I answered really authentically: mutual influencing. Why mutual? Because we have something to learn from them and they from us; and beyond that to carom and engender. Why influencing? Because we can get better as a species.

Why get better? No, it is not an ego thing. Sure I’d like people later to know my name, but what good does it do me? Now? None at all.

I want to give because I have a responsibility to help my co-residents of this planet, this universe. It is my fair rent for the space I am occupying. We are here for one another. Only this.

Maybe later generations will not agree with me. That is OK. They will grow as they will grow. Whatever happens is the only thing that did. I want to give them as many choices as possible.

Mutual influencing, mutual imagining, mutual opening. These are my why.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2062

I am asking a bigger question. Can we get better at being human? With the help of strangers at a distance?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2061

I want to find out how these people live with each other, what their dreams are for themselves and their grandchildren. I want to know how they are addressing the quandaries How then shall we live, think, grow, relate, expand, human?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2060

A butterfly among the ancients I appear to be.

I tend the community of ancestors, I play and sing among them. It is an impossible task, and so I get to it. Unending, incomprehensible, imperceptible. Ethereal, and most real of all.

A butterfly. . . .

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2059

You came and sat with me
in lively conversation
and then you disappeared
back into that dream
O I learned and so did you
tho I can say nothing
of what it was
Let us meet and here again
more likely we then will be
in different guises and places
yet we may each suspect
Was it you in my dream
or I in yours?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2057

A weighty log
releases its heat and light
and our flame-staring reverie
becoming fertilizing ash
lightness to float away in morning

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2056

No insights overnight. Things are marinating. Pickling. Sitting in the brine. Seasoning. Ripening. Ripen is old English. I like this word: it suggests another dimension to becoming more human. Ripe is of another place: a place we want to be unreachable.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2055

If I close my eyes you do not exist: a fate of grandchildren. Especially those five or more generations on.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2054

Beware the
Geese
We call
Their fleece
Burma-poop!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2053

Saturday morning
lingers abed
poems writing me

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2052

The only thing fair to leave the grandchildren is a task too large for your lifetime and theirs.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2058

Why do we need papers to prove we are whom we say we are? Why is it even important that we are consistent in the expression? By nature don’t we have the right to be whomever? Must we be just one person? Does a name own us?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2051

Our right to privacy is at base our right to be mysterious. We want others to leave us free to explore the mysteries we find in ourselves each day. To discover fascination.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2050

She sometimes came to Quaker Meeting
One day she made the coffee after
Now she’s central to our group
Give your grandchildren a task
To meet their grandchildren
To find their grandchildren
To invite their grandchildren to find theirs

Why do we meet and seek to find one another? In what direction does it bend the arc but towards one another? For then it attains to the truth and justice we seek, the beauty, and goodness. What do we get then? Unfathomable us.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2049

Yesterday, F encouraged me in my pursuit of curiosity for the 11th generation, even though he did not understand it. That felt good. There is no perfect understanding among people, we have to make good of what we get from them. We work from what we manage to hear.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2048

The void seems absolutely required in human spheres. We need a hole in our lives to have a whole in our lives. Mystery, question, story all partake of a quality of opening, possibility, fill in for yourself, find out more. The void pulls us to peer over the edge, maybe to leap. . . across or into. The void is pregnant. . . but we know not with what; ahh, but we know with whom—ourselves, plural. Without this mystery, we would be bored to death, literally. The possibility that something might be outside the plan, not what we feared, can give a flash of a future that may well be. It keeps us on our toes, alert, sensors alive, and thus brings us alive. Let’s invite more void, and see.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2047

Our efforts had no effect
yet how would we know?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2045

Sunrise convinces
the quest is right
sing new poems

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2044

I need I need to work intensively
upon this untold sacred project called ancestor-y
autumn’s leaf upon this stream has fallen

This leaf of many colors has a journey yet to round out, and is becoming but is not yet fully part of the stream of ancestors. Be not sad, for it is just beginning, and it brings at least what it means to bring. And you can receive the gift as you open.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2043

It is a profound Work, a holy work, to give attention to those who come behind us. It is to add our part, perhaps a better definition, to the task of becoming human. Can future generations become more human? Can this generation?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2042

It matters what one asks a book.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2041

Your great grandchildren make it possible for you to be alive. You are rooted in these. For where and who you issue from is less important than where you’re headed, what kind of curiosity you have, and how you use it.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2040

Here is what I have to say in the witness of my fellow grandchildren:

Do you hear the trickle? Like the wind you do not notice till you notice, once I heard it I heard it beneath and flowing through many things. It is the flowing stream of the ancients, the grandchildren, we ancestors forgotten, to be forgotten, and those not yet known—who will soon also be forgotten.

This stream now I experience as an underground river, a torrent, watering the lives of all who walk the ground.

You, grandchild, will be, are, and were those walking and with the same kick you are also part of the great river.

So all you taste and touch takes on a new cast in this light: all is everlasting and what you—you little spray—do and say and learn makes a difference in the life of those living in this stream.

We do communicate with those in the stream with us—ahead, behind, beside, above, below. We are in conversation with all of us, often without words, silent as the trickle, ongoing.

This is the task impossible I have set myself—to unearth this conversation, community, and communion of the grandchildren, to consciously jump into the stream, and splash around. To make fun. Together.

Now I’d like to hear what you hear:

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