Disputable: we can
Disputable proposition: We can get worthy at doing human.
:- Doug.
How can we be worthy of the invitation we extend?
:- Doug.
Archive for December, 2021
Good for all life
Sarah is my descendant, born 300 years to the day after me. So she is precisely my age. I met her on a canoe trip. Since then, we have been working to become worthy of one another, so that the human race might be good for all life for generations running on and on.
:- Doug.
Focus on Sarah wrenches
To focus on particular people facilitates the growth of life. To say we grow life is noble, and of no pull. To say I grow Sarah wrenches me.
:- Doug.
Spin will begin to center
Maybe if I start digging, start talking (at least aloud to myself), the spin will begin to center. It is said that centering the clay on the wheel is the most difficult part of the art of pottery. And finding the center of the mystery is definitionally impossible. Yet it is a question of how we and these grandchildren make ourselves worthy of one another. We become worthy, yes. And we become worthy, sacred, by holding one another sacred. That is the first thing, then other ways will stem from these roots and hyphae.
:- Doug.
Circle before trek?
Much of what I have written above serves the twin purposes of putting a conveying, understandable, perhaps disputable language to what I now am about so others will understand, and providing me with a center of spin. It does not take me on the trek. Yet I need to know what I am circling before I start to explore, Yes? Maybe No.
:- Doug.
Grandchildren of our age
When I speak of our grandchildren, I mean the grandchildren of our age, of our generation.
:- Doug.
Shared grandchildren
To give of our thinking toward our shared grandchildren is a sacred act.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2093–At my funeral
Footprints in the Windsm # 2093
At my funeral, I do not want, or think I do not want, pictures of me from graduation, wedding, birthday parties. How could we ever get a picture of me at my client conferences, or fishing with my father in law, or fighting with my wife, or especially at critical junctures of my life: when I got fired; when I had my dream the night Mom and Dad died; when I got sent to watch Johnny Carson instead of being in the delivery room when my first son was born; when I made critical decisions about my life course in the high school gym and in the lobby of a hotel in Portland, OR some fifty years later. Perhaps I should have my years of journals for people to dig into. What would show your life and quandaries and themes?
Please pass it on.
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Wing and belly
Wisdom is not an achievement—even between people. It arises and disperses in the meetings of beings, instant by instant, a beastie with one wing and the belly of a worm.
:- Doug.
Oddities and surprises
In solitude we can empty ourselves not of everything—we’d not want to drain our generosity, for instance—but the things which are standing in the way of first our better natures and second our ability to receive the mystery human—the oddities and surprises we have presented each day.
:- Doug.
A degree or two rarer
Our work has aspects of hot air balloons—we only need to get the air a degree or two warmer, rarer than that around us.
:- Doug.
Flame, ascent, battle…smell, hold, held
Kazantzakis sees flame, ascent, battle. I see rainbow waters, rainbow people, grey cloths, a door and slice of light, old labyrinthine houses. I see the stream of ancients—all dive or fall in—some toward the ends of their days—some earlier—and these few swim upstream! Some see flames, some mountains, all work to turn the others upstream—or themselves. I smell…I hold…I hear…I taste…. I am held in a world of conversation, by a world of conversation.
:- Doug.
