Future Springs Toward Us

It is the first week of spring. I intended to write during the vernal equinox itself, but life got in the way. Sometimes I fall asleep while writing, which is something I had never done before I began writing these entries. I have a toddler- not yet two years old- who doesn't always sleep well and daylight savings time began recently which disturbed our diurnal rhythms and our harmony with the more grand circadian rhythms of earth and her creatures. Therefore, I fall asleep in the not-so-late hours of the night when I usually write, when my family is asleep, and I can digest the day and my thoughts. It is difficult to look for the future in times like these, when the present is so laden with all that came before, when each day is a race to get ahead of the past, a desperate striving to breathe in the present and a near hopeless lurch to achieve a vantage to peer toward the steam-rolling future. But, it is spring, and the trees are sprouting buds and fruit heralding flowers, the early blooming daffodils and crocus dare to show their petals and children are indomitable in their pursuit of joy and mischief. This is the time when nature does tempt us with visions of the future. We can begin to feel the warmth of summer on our bare skin or imagine again the smell of steam rising off the streets after an August thunderstorm. Autumn shares a similar potential for portent in falling leaves and baring branches. These cycles are eternal. They remind us of the awesome turnings and revolutions of our planet, the immense heat and light that travels nearly 93 million miles from our sun to draw forth life from rock and water. This is a future that lives with us day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. When all else seems bleak and gloomy, this movement of time and warmth and light through space is refreshingly true and dependable. Our relationship to it may change; we, as humans, may not be here to observe its cyclic meanderings. But there is an eternal quality to it- even if earth's revolutions were to collapse and we hurtled into the sun, taking Mercury and Venus with us and disturbing the entire delicate balance of our solar system- the greater cycles would continue. Somewhere heat and light, gravity and levity, and the waltz of space and time would continue to express their creative urges in rhythmic pulses. There is a simple yet profound meditation I find helpful in times like these. As we contemplate the vicissitudes of contemporary life, the socio-political climate or our own more immediate circumstances, we can ask, "What is eternal and what is temporal?" Sometimes it is surprising to see what slips away and what remains- love of child, music that is true, heartbeats, perhaps wind across water.

Flying Kites into Tomorrow

I flew kites today with a group of eight seven-year old children. The wind was blowing out of the southeast, a gentle breeze just strong enough to hold our kites aloft. The children let all the line out and the kites floated at the end of their barely visible tethers hundreds of feet in the air. A certain peace came over the children while we flew. Some wanted to hold the line, some wanted to sit down and play in the dirt, some wanted to run out, following the line of the kite, to where it might crash should the wind shift or wane. We've flown kites together before, but only in winds too strong for both the children and the kites. So today's calm and successful outing was remarkable and earnestly felt healing for all of us. The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner described a total of twelve senses with which the healthy human being perceives the world, instead of the five senses we customarily recognize. Among these is the sense of self movement. This sense can be considered similar to what is termed proprioception: "The ability to sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium." (definition from WebMD) According to Rudolf Steiner, this sense is not only stimulated by the movement of one's own body in space but is also active in the observation of the movement of another body. As we observe something else moving, our awareness enters that moving object, and we are able to sense its movement through our own sense of self movement. This idea is also gaining traction in the main stream through the discovery of mirror neurons. An article on the website of the American Psychological Association states, "Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that respond equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action." Currently, the only tests that have recognized individual neurons with this capacity have been on monkeys, but it is known that humans have general areas of the brain that perform this mirroring function. Without attaching electrodes directly to the brain (which I guess we don't do to humans, only monkeys) we are not able to isolate the individual neurons, but we know the activity is there. This discovery from the 1990's has tremendous ramifications for our understanding of such developmental challenges as autism, for the way people, (especially children) learn through imitation, and, ultimately, for hope in the innate, hard-wired capacity for the human being to empathize with their fellow human beings. It also tells us that when we are flying kites, there is a very good chance, according to the insights of Dr. Steiner and many others more recently through studies of proprioception and neurology, that we are actually experiencing the sensation of flight. Some part of us is up there floating at the end of the barely visible tether, tentatively dancing against the backdrop of the flat blue sky with the winds that ebb and rise. The boys who normally wrestle and tackle one another were excited and engaged but calm. The children less prone to playful aggression and impulse control challenges rode the edge of boredom but sensed a rightness to the kite flying and joined or sat quietly playing with the grasses and dirt. The flight of a kite in a prairie breeze, the soaring of an osprey searching the ocean below for a fish on which to dine, the arm gestures of a toddler rocking their doll to sleep, the roaring lap of a Nascar vehicle around a petrol fumed track, the pain of seeing someone trip and fall on a concrete sidewalk, a Syrian refugee standing outside a tent with their child in their arms--our neurology demands we sense the movement, the intent, even the feelings of that which we observe. We can see it in the children as clearly as a rainbow colored kite against that flat blue mountain sky, in the lightness of their steps, in their focused but distant gaze--they can't help but reach out and feel it, experience it, within. The future may be asking us all to fly more kites, perhaps our mirrors need some polishing.

The Future of the Heart

The heart is composed of its own kind of muscle called cardiac muscle. Cardiac muscle has similarities in its form and function to the other two kinds of muscle in the human body, smooth and striated. Smooth muscle is generally found in organs and is associated with involuntary movements. Striated muscle is also called skeletal muscle because it is the type of muscle that moves your skeleton when you really want to get the ice cream from the carton to your mouth. Striated muscle can be moved voluntarily to eat ice cream. Cardiac muscle is generally not thought of as voluntary, as the heart indeed beats whether or not you are conscious or paying attention or lazy or are running a marathon; however, the cardiac muscles are striated like voluntary muscles. This has led some to wonder if there might be a capacity within the heart that could be accessed by a conscious willing. Perhaps there is a future in which the heart becomes a part of the human body more like a limb and less like a liver or kidney. Furthermore, we know the heart plays a certain role in the feeling life of human beings, has the capacity for sensing and communicates with other parts of the body, including the brain, through nerves and hormones. It seems the heart might play an essential role in our future as an organ that will allow us to sense the humanity in the other and even help us take action in the service of our fellow human beings. Perhaps if we can begin to view the heart as an organ that we can consciously and voluntarily engage in the activity of perceiving the needs, the feelings, the motivations of other individuals, we could be on a path to the more tolerant and productive world we envision. In these times, it seems to be an essential endeavor to do all we can to foster a more compassionate society--active and engaged. Even if the heart is not on a transformative trajectory toward becoming a voluntary organ of profound and energetic empathy, the imagination of this region in your chest as capable of reaching out to your fellow human beings in that act of "brotherly and loving communion"-- this imagination alone will feed our love and caring for one another. And that is really and truly the only salve for the troubles of the world. We have seen the paintings and heard the sayings and songs of the heart as a metaphor, and perhaps it is really more than a metaphor. We have the opportunity to shape now what we will certainly inherit in the future-- our own hearts seems to me to be a good place to start.

A Tree Will Grow into a Forest

There is an Aspen tree in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah that weighs over 6,000 tons, spans 107 acres and consists of some 47,000 trunks. It is one of the world's largest living organisms rivaled by another Aspen grove near Crested Butte, Colorado and a fungus in Oregon that stretches over 1,000 acres. It is also one of the oldest, with estimates ranging from 80,000 to over one million years old. Every one of those thousands of what appear to be trees shares the exact same genetic material--perfect clones. They bloom at the same time and shed leaves at the same time. This phenomenon of Aspen trees sharing the same root system, being of the same organism, having sprouted thousands of years ago from one seedling, explains the unique sensation of standing in an Aspen grove or observing one yellowing on the lower slopes of a mountain in late October, quaking and chattering in the breeze. There is a harmony there, in the movement, in the sounds--as if a gentle conversation is underway in some archaic language, a conversation full of subjects profound and net yet even considered by our burgeoning human intellect. This makes me think of the idea of fractals or the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm. The thought that you can take a small piece of something and it is a representation of something much larger. This is how I understand the healing effects of homeopathic remedies. We are able to ingest an untraceably small dilution of a substance from the natural world; our body, soul, spirit, life force will recognize it as a part of us that is having difficulty, and show our self how to make the appropriate changes that will bring about healing. As with the Aspens, we are perhaps all a piece of the cosmos, hold the entire cosmos within us, the same materials, the same physical forces, gravity, levity, attraction, repulsion, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen. The future calls to us through the struggles of the Aspen groves to send up new shoots, through the dwindling rain forests of the Amazon, through depleted reserves in the Ogallala Aquifer, through our hungry neighbors and the 34,000 people who are forcibly displaced every day, the 65 million people who have been forced from home, the 21 million refugees. The 42,000 trunks of the Trembling Giant, the Pando Aspen grove blossom together, drop their leaves together, share water and minerals; they speak in their archaic language of truths we can hear in the eyes of a stranger, in the laughter of a child, in the trials and sufferings of every human being. The future is able to show us, through this wonderful web of information, homeopathic pictures of our collective pathologies and the remedies available to heal them. Whether in an Aspen grove or the Genographic Project by National Geographic, through Instagram or the UN Refugee Agency, it is becoming ever more challenging to ignore the grand unity of our cosmic situation. Stories, pictures, information--homeopathic doses of remedies for an ailing world are at our fingertips, in the white bark and trembling leaves of a giant, ancient tree.

The Wind, the Future

The wind has been galloping across the plains for the last week, coming down out of the mountains in the west and the north. Trampling my physical body and stealing away with some part of me more subtle, it is cruel and mischievous. Sometimes it comes accompanied by moisture, chilling through layers of wool and down; sometimes it is warmer, sun and blue skies its vessel--poor consolations for the fluids, minerals and sheer life forces with which it is able to abscond. I look for changes when wind blows like this, and there are so many changes to see right now. It is difficult to even assimilate all there is to learn about the civil and political sphere from day to day. Many people I know and listen to on various media outlets say they spend an unfortunate proportion of their time in alternating states of laughter and weeping. Laughing at the sheer absurdity of world events and tears for the lives of the displaced, disrespected and disavowed humans and the exploited planet and her devastatingly drained natural resources. Such mania cannot be healthy. The wind has long been reputed to promote insanity, depression and illness--some say it is the shift in the ratio of positive to negative ions in the air that makes people ill or crazy. It seems like we're in a windy nation right now. The vast differences in pressure in various regions of belief and perspective have caused things to move with great rapidity and little concern for consequence. If these differences are not attended to, we will be leaning into a gale or learning to bend like the tall prairie grasses for a long time. And here is where the future calls to us like the rustling of leaves in a tree a moment before a gust, or the white caps on the windward ocean ripples declaring it is time to adjust the sails. We will only find relief from the dramatic vicissitudes of today if we continually attempt to see, to hear, to understand, to know the other side, the enemy, the neighbor, the one that is different from you--to affect a balance. A breeze is nice for kite flying, but the wind these days has torn through at least three of my kites and two lines and seems to be demanding my sanity as well. I can endure it if I know there is a change coming and calm ahead, and I can mend my kites. I know that calm will come to the prairies eventually. It will take all us of working for it to come to the rest of the world though. The future is telling us to either mend our sails and hold on for an endless romp in a frothing sea or engage in a creative effort to change the very topography and jet streams of our society. This wind metaphor may have gone too far. Forgive me, I've been out in it for days now. It's truly been known to drive people crazy.

The Future of Faith

Tonight, in putting my one and a half year old son to bed, after saying our prayer and singing our song, as I prepared to blow out the candle, I was thanking the boy's guardian angel for guiding and protecting him, as I do each night. However, this night I had a moment of doubt, a questioning in which I said to myself, "I don't know if such a thing exists as an angel, I'm not clairvoyant or some medieval visionary, I've never had an experience of an angel." Just in this moment I heard the faintest fluttering sound. It could have been my heart beat, or the candle flickering, but I had the tangible sensation of the presence of a being, reminding me of all the times the imperceivable activities, the unseeable collection of organized and organizing forces, the majestic harmony of the workings of the cosmos, the dynamic unknowns that have come to be known as the spiritual world have revealed themselves to me and left me humbled and full of immense gratitude. I don't consider myself a person of faith. I don't prescribe to an organized religion. Though through research and experience I have come to allow for the possibility of a God or gods, or "spiritual" beings, or quantum physics, or the laws of The Force as articulated by the early Star Wars movies. Over time, allowing for the such ideas as reincarnation or benevolent and adversarial forces at work in our lives has not led me to a dogmatic belief system or a blind faith or a pretentious show of certainty. Rather, it has added a richness to my experiences and an openness to and tolerance of the beliefs of others and the vast marvel of human existence. Faith is a complex word and far too awesome of a concept to attempt to define or even describe here, but certain phenomena prevalent in our society today seem to derive from a proclamation of faith and are using it to questionable or blatantly malevolent ends. As the cultures of our globe continue to intermingle, the future may be demanding us to deepen our exploration of our beliefs, of our faith. This quest need not be in defiance of the traditions of our ancestors or in the negation of our culture. Experience, openness and serious inquiry will only serve to reveal the truths, the timeless and universal verities that lie within our practices, our sensations, our holy literature. I find it doubtful that intolerance and violence will be amongst the glittering gemstones and shimmering treasures we find as we dig deeper into the teachings of our forebears. The future is dependent on our understanding of faith and seems to be asking us to expand it into a faith in the capacities of our fellow human beings for tremendous deeds of loving communion. We can then listen for the sound of the flutter of wings that may come from our own hearts or the flickering candle flame or the wind through the windows and have faith that it is good.

Light Images of the Future

The foothills that rise out of the dry grassy plains on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains have appeared more crisp lately, their craggy contours in sharp relief against the sheet of pale blue sky. I try to look at those mountains every day; before I do, I try to conjure in my imagination what they looked like the previous day. This exercise is known as light yoga. Instead of the traditional, ancient Indian practice of breath yoga, or pranayama, it is a practice of breathing light, or images- retrieving mental images from their abode in the mysterious realm of memory, taking in new ones, and then consciously erasing them from the mind's eye. According to some streams of thought, the image forming capacity of human beings, otherwise known as imagination, is being compromised in our current culture of screen centered attention. As we spend more time in front of devices that create images for us, such as our phones, tablets, tvs and laptops, we may be losing our ability to freely form images--image-inations of a world and a society that is better, cleaner, more peaceful and harmonious than the one we currently inhabit. Along with these hopeful, future oriented pictures, we may also be losing our ability to form image-inations of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves. The capacity to imagine the thoughts, feelings or ideas of another human being is often referred to as theory of mind. Wikipedia defines theory of mind as "the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own." Theory of mind is widely discussed among those who research autism spectrum disorders because it is an attribute most individuals on the "spectrum" lack. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), the rate of autism among children who were eight years old in 2012 was 1 in 68, up from 1 in 150 in the year 2000. This rate has escalated dramatically in the last thirty or forty years. According to some sources, the rate in the 1980's was about 1 in 10,000. It is true, we must account for growth due to more thorough reporting and diagnoses and a broader definition of the "disorder," but, as an educator, I can attest to the change in children we are seeing in our classrooms today compared to even seven or eight years ago. 

It seems a large portion of our culture is also losing this ability to recognize and accept the humanness, the individuality, the differences in those that are not of the same race, religion, ethnic background, gender orientation or sexual orientation. The rise in the rate of autism spectrum diagnosis may be a harbinger of a future in which tolerance and understanding of the other will become not only a social issue, but also a physiological, a health issue. Are we walking toward a future in which a significant portion of humanity will be empathetically challenged--not due primarily to social conditioning--but due to physiological differences? The future is still ours to shape, but it certainly seems we are being asked to look deeper into our fellow citizens, to develop our capacities for imagination, for true creativity in recognition of the other, for a profound artistry in our humanity and empathy, to reach across the aisle or the classroom or the sidewalk or the neighborhood or the border in courageous acts of understanding and acceptance. You don't need to practice light yoga to notice the mountains are less clear today, a slight rise in moisture in the air blurs the lines of ridges and mingles the rocks and snow and trees. A bit of imagination will reveal to you the dynamic contours in the sandstone, granite and shale and in each and every one of your fellow human beings.

Teaching the Future

 Teaching is a profession with dramatic social implications and relatively drab compensation. One in which we feel like we fail more than we succeed and one in which we are never sure how the future will reveal the efficacy of our labors. One of my heroes, the author Dave Eggers, helped found something called THE TEACHER SALARY PROJECT which "is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to raising awareness around the impact of our national policy of underpaying and under-valuing educators." Here is some information from their website.

The average starting salary for teachers in our country is $39,000; the average ending salary—after 25 years in the profession—is $67,000.  

As of 2015, teachers' weekly wages are 23% lower than those of other college graduates.

99.5% of teachers reported spending their own money on their students or classrooms during the 2012-2013 school year. Of the $3.2 billion spent overall on school materials that year, $1.6 billion came directly from teachers' pockets.

(I live in Colorado, so this is relevant for me. You can look up the data for your state on the Teacher Salary Project website)

Colorado

Annual spending per pupil:

$8,724

Per inmate:

$30,374

Change in average public school teachers' salaries over the past decade:

-5.5%

I work with children for a living, so I stare directly into the faces of the future every day. I wonder what the world will be like for the children before me when they are in their mid-twenties and trying to make sense of themselves, of their ideals, of the society and climate around them. I wonder what I can do or say to help prepare them for the great unknowns that lie ahead. There are the basics of morality and civility, justice, courage, virtue, honesty, kindness, tolerance, patience, persistence-- but will this be enough to give them strength to face an increasingly mechanized world or one with dwindling opportunities for the renewal of one's humanity by the graces of the whisper of a canoe on the Raquette River or the mossy soothing peace of hot sulphury springs in the Elwha Valley? I can only hope there is something timeless and innately good that will transfer from the heart of my will and sincere interest in their well-being directly to them through a medium more subtle and potent than words or numbers. After all, a square is always a square, a triangle has three sides, pi is irrational and beautiful in its mystery and the forces that emanate from an earnest and devoted heart are palpable and lasting. The children will grow, and teachers will continue to try and often feel like failures, and the world will change in ways we can see and ways we cannot imagine and the waves will roll onto the beaches of Pine Island Bay in rhythms of the sea played out in delicate replicas, echoes of a movement immense and distant.

What is the Future Anyway? Is it as Scary as it Seems? And what does it have to do with Me?

It's another day, and I am at the computer again trying to make sense of the world around me and trying again to recognize the heralding of the future-- the warnings, admonitions,  recommendations and demands of a time not yet manifest but potently present in all our dreams and fears, anxiety and hope, intuitions and subtle thoughts. That is what this is about, the Future We Follow. In his 1905 The LIfe of Reason, the American philosopher George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I had to look that up because I know the saying but never knew where it came from. Apparently, Winston Churchill paraphrased it in a 1948 speech to the House of Commons. According to the National Churchill Museum Blog, Churchill also seems to have been interested in our ability to look toward the future: “When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”—House of Commons, 2 May 1935. You can imagine what was happening in the world in 1935. I certainly hope what we face today is not comparable to the activity in 1935, but I would consider it irresponsible to ignore the shifts in the global structure of society in which we find ourselves today and the dangers they might bring. This is why I've begun to write these often discardable essays to a still non-existent audience. With hope that we are not "want of foresight," that we are not unwilling to act, that we will not wait "until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong," I try to look at what is in an effort to see what will be. This is a little something I can do. A drop in the bucket, as they say. But the ocean is made of so many drops. I intentionally avoided all things political, all things civic and socio-economic that extended beyond what I felt to be the reach of my own direct action, for many years. The situation has changed now. Or I have changed. The future exists now in tremendous potential, potential to manifest in many ways, some of them scary. If Churchill could have seen into the future, I wonder if his words would have been stronger. We live in glimpses of time molded by what was and what is yet to be. As we study the patterns of the past, we must also keep an eye on the horizon. Two different capacities, both based on keen observation. One more imaginative, but both essential. We must all be Janus, gods of two faces.

The Challenge of Gratitude

There is something to this idea of thanking the evil in the world for providing us the opportunity to grow. This is particularly valid if one takes seriously the idea of reincarnation, of a self that continually experiences incarnation, comes to earth time and time again, so as to develop greater and greater capacities on a journey toward an archetype of being, a holiness or divinity. Though, even if one is agnostic, atheistic, anarchistic or completely lacking in any structure of belief or morality, it would seem to hold true that anything that challenges us forces us to grow if we decide to look it in the eye, to square up and take its punches. The capacity to love, though, stands to gain the most through such adversity. To wrestle with that which is different, perhaps even harmful, to grapple it to the ground in the ring of your consciousness, and, when you have it pinned, when the shoulders of its actions or beliefs or accusations are flat against the mat, you relent and ask, "Can you help me understand you?" and "What is it that ails you?" This is not an easy task and truly laughable to most human beings. But this seems to be an essential task in our times. We simply cannot survive very long in a state of anger or hate. And it's not a case of "loving the evil good" as the saying goes. The love and interest we cultivate for the most deplorable aspects of our culture must come without expectation. It simply must come because it is moral and good and our children, the humans who will populate this earth when we have gone--when the future of today has descended upon us--because the children are watching us. And they will imitate us even if they know deep in their timeless hearts that it is wrong. They will imitate us because they love us. They love us with all our fallibility, with all the mistakes we are constantly making, with the neglect and cursing, and absence and violence. They love us though much of what we do can be seen as evil. "Lest you become like children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven." The future is written in the faces of those children and the present is defined by our actions, our humility, forgiveness and gratitude.

Breaking News: Benevolent Deeds Reshape Future

"Muslim Americans have helped raise more than $91,000 to repair vandalized headstones at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, according to an online fundraising page, amid attacks and threats against Jewish institutions." -Reuters

My wife told me about this story tonight as I was stirring the sauce into the farfalle pasta I was preparing for dinner. She had just put our eighteen month old baby to bed and emerged from his room squinting and exhausted into the lights of the kitchen, checked her phone and read the headline to me. Something like, "A Muslim American group raised over $70,000 to repair vandalized headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Missouri." My wife and I have been experiencing greater than usual fatigue as of late due to the heightened tensions in the socio-political atmosphere, the consistent concern over either an injustice being committed or an international calamity erupting upon civilization, but also due to our baby not sleeping, depleted immune systems and too much driving in rush hour traffic. In this state, the news of this story washed over me, and, as I made my wife repeat the headline to me, thought-like images arose in my consciousness. I saw a face that has appeared on various media outlets quite frequently as of late, and I felt the presence of what I can only call a divine intelligence. Against all my self-willed intellectualized logic and informed feelings, I entertained the idea of the current social situation as a divinely ordained, last-ditch, far out attempt by a ruling will to stimulate humanity toward goodness. As though, noticing we were unable to summon the drive to demonstrate adequate empathy and enact tangible, benevolent and productive deeds, certain forces were set into motion to raise humanity to the level at which we should have found ourselves in the year 2017. 

"'Muslim Americans stand in solidarity with the Jewish-American community to condemn this horrific act of desecration,' the fundraisers said on their website." -Reuters

"More than 3,000 people had donated $91,583 by late Wednesday afternoon." -Reuters

This was an impulse that rewrites the future. As I heard this news and sublime thoughts and pictures moved across my inner vision like a silent film, I sensed the future shift. In the dread of or interest in or hope for the world in which my son will live, a small flower bloomed in a desert landscape that hadn't seen rain in ages, whose sandy soil can barely hold water anyway, whose arid air and scorching sun demand cactus and lizards that only come out at night. Yellow petaled and thin green stemmed with roots like short and fragile hairs daring to reach down into the earth, the flower flutters in a tentative breeze.

The Future of Truth

There is a veil between human beings and truth that is quite daunting. Truth, though, has many faces, and perhaps, when we peel back the semi-opaque fabric we will find something unexpected- ugly, stunning, beautiful or perhaps something different each time we look. I listened to a speaker today at a conference, and he spoke of certain things being true for us as individuals and other, perhaps larger truths, that are valid outside of our own limited consciousnesses, true not just for we as individuals. Today we are engaged in truth warfare. Each individual has their version of the truth or perhaps their social or political faction's version of the truth, and there is very little room for or willingness to listen to- or more importantly-truly hear the truth of the other. The speaker claimed we cannot access these larger truths with mere thinking. We have to develop different capacities to recognize and acknowledge truth. This made me think there might be hope, there might be a face behind the veil that we all can recognize and agree it is just the face we were longing to see.

And this brings us to the future- to the future as it is presenting itself to us today, asking us to shift a bit to meet it as it streams toward us from the not-so-distant horizon. Our senses, at least those upon which we currently depend to make judgements, are no longer able to provide valid information for us as observers. Aside from the rare opportunities to gaze out upon a blue and gently frothing sea, or to peer up the damp and caverned wall-like trunk of a tree so tall that the top is unattainable, or to stare blankly at the reddening sandy rock of a desert sunset, the horizon a flat line as far as the periphery of your vision is able to absorb- aside from these opportunities so much of what we hear and see is illusory, partial truth or utterly and intentionally deceiving. Facts are comically yet realistically referred to as alternative. The future is asking that we reach into ourselves in an effort to develop the capacity to grasp truths that do not come through sight or sound, news-bites or tweets, facebook posts or your uncle after a few too many beers. Truth may be embattled, but it is invincible. It just may not be the face you thought you were looking for. You may draw back the veil and see nothing but a windswept landscape, mountain peaks, crashing waves, but you may feel something in the region of your heart, warm, familiar and comforting but still distant and barely discernible. The future may be asking you to follow it into a region of truth and understanding more like a warbling brook or a slowly falling oak leaf and less like right or wrong.

A Moving Future

I think a lot about movement and about the future. I think of new capacities we might be developing as humans, and the possibility that each challenge we face has the potential to make us more human--human in ways we can only begin to imagine. I wonder if the way we walk, the way we stand, the way we sit in our cars or on the subway or on the bus can change us and change the way we treat one another. We see people who are tired, tired of the world, tired of the cards they have been dealt. They wear it on their shoulders often, rounded and downward, hunched and protected from all that assails them. This too is the easiest position from which to view our phones and our computers, shoulders sloped into a bubbled concavity where we and our screens can commune alone, able to interact with the global population in utter isolation. How strange, this seeming paradox of vulnerability within solitary confinement. But if we are able to move through this, to stand tall as we tweet and roll our shoulders back while we type, we might start to notice the world around us, the living breathing laughing crying dirty dazzling world through which we parade. If our chest is just a bit more broad, I don't mean like soldier or state trooper puffed up and wide-stanced, but just a bit more upright and open, our heads allowed to rest just a bit more gently upon our poor over-worked vertebrae, perhaps our hearts would beat with a bit more ease and efficiency, our lungs open to allow more oxygenated air to enter our blood stream, our bowels and intestines better able to process the depleted foods we consume, our livers and kidneys more free to clean our used up blood of all the toxins we ingest. And then, perhaps, we would not be so burdened by our bodies or our machines, and we might be able to see one another as a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, a fellow human who holds the same failing organs, the same bile and hemoglobin and iron and tears. Then, we could be like super-humans with super-powers such as compassion and empathy for all beings. It's true, we face a great many challenges to our humanity these days, but we have so many opportunities to recognize a human-being in the villain with whom we so often disagree. Like Jay-Z says, "Go on, brush your shoulders off", roll them back and down then relax, open up the torso just a bit, see what you notice around you. Then maybe we can move past the disgust and anger and truly see into the heart of the other. It beats in fits and starts pleading for you to become a super-human and see them.

The Future of Fear

One hundred years ago, the Austrian born philosopher Rudolf Steiner spoke of the evil we would have to face in the future. He said that we must strengthen the highest, most noble and profound aspects of ourselves so that we could sustain the rush of blood to the heart that accompanies anxiety. Sustain this flood of blood to the heart without fear. Some years ago, as I swam in the depths of a year-long panic attack in which I regularly fell prey to the symptom of fear caused by my anxiety over so many aspects of the future, I read this from Steiner. In my memory, he also claimed that this feeling of anxiety is the natural state of the modern human. We are living in a world that leaves us continually unsure of the stability of our surroundings or even of our very perceptions. This gave me the permission to explore my anxiety in a new way, to observe it as it approached, like a train appearing on the horizon around a distant corner as I stood waiting at the station hearing the bells chiming, then hearing the engine of the train and its rattling upon the tracks- watching it coming but without being afraid of it-knowing it would stay on the tracks and not run me over. This was also helped by several trips to doctor's offices for fear I was dying, feeling my heart certainly was malfunctioning and could not sustain much more of its aberrations and excessive beating, and being sent home time and time again assured I was indeed in quite fine health--physically. So, between the doctors and dear nurses and Steiner I began to watch the attacks as they approached out of the future- watch them each time with lessening fear. Here was the future alive and kicking in the present. I do not think it is possible to have anxiety about something that is currently happening. It seems to me to be a state of being precipitated by the looming of the future, by the presence of the future impressing itself on the present. This is another gift from Rudolf Steiner: the idea that we can recognize not only the past as a shaping force in our present consciousness, our present joys and pathologies, but the future as well. As the past is a river pouring its silt into the delta of our today, so too is the ocean of the future crashing its waves upon the slowly shaping beach of this moment. Fearless sandcastles, a Tibetan mandala, meticulously crafted in a windstorm.

The First Blog of the Future

I have to begin this blog by saying that the word blog may perhaps be my least favorite word-especially for anything related to creativity, imagination or anything of any aesthetic value. Perhaps that shouldn't be the first line of my new BLOG, but there it is.

The Future We Follow began as a podcast, and it may become one again. For now though, it will be a place where I share some thoughts on the future, thoughts on the present and thoughts on the ever merging streams which form the confluence of memory, now and that which is yet to manifest.

Speaking of time, I have been in a slow moving, dark pool of molasses since mid January, with my attention continually drawn to and co-opted by the daily news relating the confounding and disorienting twists and turns of the political landscape. I am caught in a mire of disbelief which is really only rivaled by the delusions of grandeur and messianic complex of my early and mid twenties. Not since then have I experienced such a chasm between my perception of reality and that which was purported by the media and furthered by the general populace. The differences in my state of mind-particularly the sobriety of my present lifestyle and relative sobriety of my present worldview-make this fantastic parade of social upheaval simultaneously dizzying and joyfully thrilling. I am stimulated daily with the knowing that I have the capacity to exist in a wholly distinct paradigm of consciousness, of attention, of intention from nearly half of my contemporaries and cohorts in this social experiment. Sad, truly, a bit. But there is a comfort in knowing that the future is being painted by many artists and can be viewed from many angles and is guided by many angels.