Conversation creates
Conversation creates
New settings
New persons
New reality
New conversations
:- Doug.
relive encrusted
What stories do we tell ourselves and one another about the generations? Perhaps more importantly, what stories retell? Our rituals, daily weekly annually are retellings. Here we relive these stories—rich or devoid or encrusted over as they are.
:- Doug.
Generational lens
Can generations be a lens thro’ which we “see” our lives & how they matter, & don’t matter, & how they are fuller than we thought?
:- Doug.
Center in the stream
We now center our lives in our day to day, minute to minute, even, forgetting all else. What would it take—and what would result—if we centered our lives in the stream of which we are part? Or at least regularly tuned into this larger conversation?
:- Doug.
Shuttle, thread, pattern
Generations are like a shuttle carrying thread on a loom
Again like the thread
Again like the pattern forming itself
:- Doug.
Generations poking us
The images of the generations can be near, flowing thro’ us, conversing with us, touching our lives, willing wholeness of life upon us, both as children growing and as mothers and fathers nurturing, protecting, sending forth. We have this relationship; can we live our days conscious of it, as mother dove always knows in which direction are chicks and nest?
:- Doug.
Stir one another
We have the ability to stir one another. Consider the play “The Diary of Anne Frank,” when the audience sits in silence at the fall of the curtain. Somehow the audience was so affected that this response was more appropriate than applause. To stir thus is miracle.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2534–To thing-ify
Footprints in the Windsm # 2534
To thing-ify something is to seek to possess it. Nouns in English point to our Western overwhelming desire to conquer new lands, plant a flag on the moon or Mars, to own slaves, to name things after ourselves. But in our truer nature we desire not to be possessed rather to be understood, met, heard, accompanied, allowed to be larger, each important in our own way.
Please pass it on.
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shadowy to baffling
Barely aware are they, barely know how they are fathers and mothers of generations. They move from vaguely shadowy to acutely subtle, elusive, faint, baffling.
:- Doug.
One generation invites
One generation invites the next. It persuades, offers, co-imagines, lures: thro’ to beyond.
:- Doug.
Alive in us
We are the crux of all generations going before us from which we issue, and the possible and unseen events coming behind us which arise in our wake, smoke from the pyre. We are Schrödinger’s box of possibilities! In us, in some actual way, those future persons, generations of them, live and move and have their being. So they can be alive in us if we wish.
:- Doug.
eddies in the flow
Of what does forming consist? In-forming of lives, of generations? It must be more subtle than school lessons, more in the salts and silts and trickles of tributaries than in the rush of rapids. Is it in comparisons of our lives to theirs, in “What would Mom do?,” even unawares. What do they add not to you and to me but to the flow of we—knowing we are eddies?
:- Doug.
Song of generations
If I write a song of generations, what would the lyrics be, the rhythm, the melody?
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2533–Stirring heat
Footprints in the Windsm # 2533
I stand at the fire
Stirring
Heat into food
Please pass it on.
© c 2026, 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
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
