FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2029

Your long range is way too short.

Please pass it on.

© c 2021, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Who will be
of your conversations
the grandchildren?

:- Doug.

Conversation changes things people.

:- Doug.

To see what has yet to be seen
To reach far afield
To accept with joy the tragic

:- Doug.

Thinking bigger.

:- Doug.

I am closing this stage of my career: I turn now to harder work, work for which the prior began to prepare me: I will think and have to stay with it, even when it refuses to yield.

:- Doug.

Grandmother, my child: I would hear you.

:- Doug.

Here is a huge range for my thinking, and some repetition to ponder. Will we humans bounce up and down, end our civilization and come back after millions of decades? It is perhaps as likely as continuing to grow and improve forever. We do not want to think about decline or extinction, yet we know these things happen. What about consciousness and reason, intelligence and their ilk? Will this go as quickly as it arrived, will nature tire of this plaything? What has been its value in the long scheme? As flowers and bees change each for the other, is thinking and its development merely a toy for the oversized heads of humans? Can nature develop and thrive without calling upon brains?

:- Doug.

The problem is it is goal-thinking to say we work to have a humanity more loving, peaceful, intelligent, or whatever attribute, which of course we could not agree upon and have it serve for all time. Instead we need purpose-thinking. We need not a final destination, rather a heading, a direction. It is the stuff of life for good to change, and it is death to arrive.

:- Doug.

The work may be to turn the attention to the worthy and the long term.

:- Doug.

They are going to be different, think differently, value differently. It is not our task to convince them, but to converse with them: to let us be changed as much as or more than we influence them.

:- Doug.

All life is change
and hold

:- Doug.

What then? Is my effort for naught? Probably not, for I am keeping alive one thread of life.

:- Doug.

What do we agree about? Continuing to live; Continuity of the species; Change?

Once we have some of these things, where do they take us? They take us to disagreement on the How. Perhaps. And the When. And the priority? And the meaning?

:- Doug.

Some flavors don’t do well boiled down—

:- Doug.

At play and at work in the community of ancients am I.

:- Doug.

About what do we and the 300-year grandchild elders disagree?

:- Doug.

Open ancient space.

:- Doug.

My country and community, and yours, is bigger than any of us thought, for it includes people, people of the ages. Here, we are whole.

:- Doug.

Law is work upon human spirit
To organize it make it fit
The work of ages is to free and grow

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2028

The tracks we make upon our times
are faint, faint
Did our parents take us to Washington
in 1962 or 1963 or 1964?
There are no longer any records
And who can open those computer files
from a decade ago?

Please pass it on.

© c 2021, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

This impossible
imperceptible
work
pulls
me

:- Doug.

Nuances &
wholeness:
dance!

:- Doug.