If time is a river, then the generations are like bends in that river, topography like ages. So if the great debates of our day are part of a conversation stretching across the generations, then ours is a dialogue which includes our ancestors and the dreams of future generations. Why do we so often treat it as less?

This post and the countless others, throbbing through the blogosphere; exploring challenging, grasping - for truth, beauty, goodness, and the integration of our overwhelming worlds; these conversations, echoing all conversations, dragging out the cacophony of the babel we are building; these conversations, where nothing is taken for granted, and yet the worlds we quibble over have been given; these conversations throw us into the river of time.

And yet, in the moment of this age and this place, if we allow ourselves to open to the multiplicity of concerns; if we allow ourselves to experience a taste of the infinite perspectives that make up this moment; we find ourselves speaking the voices of the past and listening to the needs of the future. These timely posts seem to me but an echo, degraded by our tiny and temporal worlds. And yet these atoms contain multitudes, transtemporal and vast.

Our posts and comments are part of an ongoing debate, encompassing the integration of all that we consider. Each of us is thrown into this conversation. We did not begin the debate about liberty and equality, community and the individual. And we will not finish it. 

But we cannot ignore it. The great dialogue of our civilization, and the clash and concord of all civilizations, permeates our every thought and choice and action. It is there in every conversation. And yet something strange and wonderful and terribly ugly is happening in the blogosphere: each of these conversations are linked as one; each piece of information is being woven in the whole.

What draws us into this dialogue? And how much do we see of it? Must we see it in all its glory and grandeur for our voices to count in that wider river? Or is enough for the petty and the partisan to draw us in as we parse through the pieces of some puzzling whole? All too often the smallness of so many blogs leaves me empty. And I want to rebel with poetry, philosophy, some vision of something more vast and inevitable. Is this just some sense of self seeking permanence in a world of wonders which engulfs me? And does it matter if my narcissism is what’s necessary to transmutate this microcosmic mess into that vast and surging flood of humanity seeking and grasping for the way?