Generational Flow/an altar

Windgrove visitor, Stewart Brand (see March 6), has written:

“Civilisation is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed — some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where the “long term” is measured at least in centuries.”

His co-authored creation, the Millennial Clock, is a paradigm for the Long Now.

My contribution to this discussion is the altar, ‘Generational Flow’.

Stand before it, move into it. Expand out of a narrowing sense of present time and push its/your boundaries into deep time.

Hold the stone and feel the ancient past. Hold the stone and feel the future grounded and certain. Hold the stone and hold the ova of all that have come and will come. Trace with your fingers the sine wave and hold your place in the continuum of time. Stroke the inside of each vessel and hold on to what they speak.

If I know intimately the stories of the ancestors
(hear here, great great grandparents calling through my bones);
if I know the heartbeat of the future to be
(hear here, great great grandchildren calling back to me);

— and bow in gratitude to the one,
while walking responsibly to the other—

this is appropriate living
in the Long Now.