FootprintsintheWind.com

A heart-word is a hard word.

:- Doug.

One effect of conversation is to change the speed of our thinking, especially when compared to thinking alone. It slows and speeds. Also it extends thinking in breadth and direction, so it encompasses more. We can morph these effects into purposes and practices.

:- Doug.

We can tell a pre-story about the eleventh generation: they are not predictable but are understandable.

:- Doug.

Lengthen our imagination.

:- Doug.

How do we put good quality into ancestoring except by the goodness of our efforts as descendants to our ancestors?

:- Doug.

After all this
do not
pass
become story
embellish

:- Doug.

He tried to BURY us,
But we are SEEDS

:- Doug.

Without ears we can have no vision.

:- Doug.

Our ascendants are not in our control, barely in their own from day to day. They do not need to be controlled. What then? Our role may be to accompany, to hear, to befriend. Together, we and the generations can discover more aspects of ourselves, this other-gathering-to species, and of this mysterious being, life.

We now are about this gathering-to. It is easy to mistake it as hoarding, keeping, accumulating. These are perverse, for true gathering-to is itself a giving and receiving, a free conversation. It may be more accurate to say we are gathering-about, -among, or to take this -to as meaning embrace, a giving-to of ourselves.

:- Doug.

Eldering especially seems a state we can consciously enter. We fall off it less consciously.

:- Doug.

Remember
We
Breathe

:- Doug

Open your hand
Open your arms

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2487

Fight back: Be friendly.

Please pass it on.

© c 2025, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

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.

What is outward? It is extending acts of love to those we don’t think can return it. But do they not? When I read the work of Tolstoy, Whitman, Rúmí, do I not converse with them, argue with them, carry their being into mine and into my world, returning it to the earth from which it came? That is the circle that conversation describes, yes?

:- Doug.

An ancestor is one for whom unknowing going is the name of life. What people will do with what he or she left them cannot be imagined. It is the way of trusting folks unmet. It is saying human nature—life’s nature—can be depended upon. Will it be for good or ill? That simply names the shape of your mind, O ancestor.

:- 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.