Our first episode in a different style of podcast that we are calling Letters to the Future, with our inaugural guest, Marcus Bussey.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward and Frank Spencer
Poems & Letters
Send any contributions you want to make to
Transcript
Peter Hayward: Hi, I'm Peter Hayward and welcome to FuturePodX. This is going to be a new type of podcast for FuturePod. for followers of FuturePod, don't worry that the guest interviews aren't going away. We're going to continue with those, but this is a different one, a few things that are different and probably the biggest difference is I have a co pilot on the podcast series who I'd like to say hello to, Frank from TFSX.
How are you, Frank? And welcome back to future pod.
Frank Spencer: Thank you, Peter. I've been a guest here a couple of times and been honored to be that, but now I get to co host the entire podcast series with you. I'm super excited about it, but I'm also excited that this is a very different kind of podcast.
normally, you have your topic laid out. You ask a few questions. You move on and here we're wanting to sort of explore features, thinking and foresight from a very different angle, one that's more open, vulnerable. That's looking about care and love and empathy and transformation, expanding beyond the doing into the being the becoming the community.
So we're very excited about how this will all unfold. It probably won't be perfect on the first podcast, but that's a part of the nature of the podcast itself. It's going to emerge as it goes along.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And we're calling the series. Letters to the future, I'll start Frank with the letters notion, I've always been interested in podcasters dialogue, and I love the conversational style, but I also have been interested in literature by the idea of the continuous letter.
The letter that either a series of authors pass backwards and forwards to be read as a series, or the idea of the letter that is passed on to the next person to add to. that was the thing I was interested in exploring when I pitched the idea to you, the idea of this conversation that is between us, but then It's passed on to the next and the next, because it's kind of a bit of how we imagine the future is created in some ways.
That's right.
Frank Spencer: Yeah, I think this idea of the letter that we always joined by a guest. We'll be writing to the future. And then as the future is writing back to us, we might sort of create some ways for the future to speak back to us in that letter, because I think this like a love letter, I was interviewing Sophie Strand the other day.
Hopefully we can get her to be one of the guests here. Cause she would be fantastic. And, and she was saying that, when we write these, Scenarios and stories that diagnose the environment we miss out on what really impacts humans in the future. And that is love. so we need to write love letters.
That's much more impactful than writing diagnoses of our surroundings. and so I really think that's 1 of the things that we're getting that when we say future pod X letters to the future is how as an ongoing and not episodic, but serial. approach to podcasting one guest builds on the next, are we writing that letter to the future that is much more than doing the methodology, the skills we know when we say the terms foresight and futures thinking, but really understanding this as a biological.
Psychological and a sacred and spiritual dynamic of all living things. And that's what I think that we're really trying to get at here. Peter, I would love for you just to briefly, read to us. There's a piece of a poem that you sent to me from Yates. And I know we mentioned this in the description of future pod X.
Peter Hayward: This is the poem the second coming by William Butler Yates
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dimmed tide is loosened, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
And that's the first stanza of that poem, and when we were talking, Frank, that was rolling around in my head.
Frank Spencer: You can understand why I wanted you to read that to our guests who are just being introduced to this brand new podcast series is because that really speaks to the nature of futures thinking, futuring.
Thinking about the future in any kind of deep are intentional way because we love to think that we can approach this with some kind of certainty, which is an illusion. deep futures thinking is about. Exploring the unknown and being comfortable with that as we write that letter, the lovers write back and forth to one another, they're not fully sure what the next thing is going to be.
But the important part is that they're not speaking systemically to one another. They're speaking through hearts and souls. And that's really what we want to get at in this podcast.
Peter Hayward: So let's. Bring our guest in, but we're going to bring them in through the idea of a spoken eulogy for them.
Frank, do you want to start with what you have as the eulogy for our guest?
Frank Spencer: I certainly can. we ask people outside of just you and I, Peter, to really, Right about, our guests, this idea of the living eulogy, being able to say what's on their heart to somebody while they're still alive.
And I think that's such a beautiful way to introduce our guests. So our first guest for this first episode of future pod X is the amazing Dr. Marcus Bussey. And let me read to you what someone sent to me as a part of that living eulogy for Dr. Bussey. It says, For some, he is known as Marcus. For others, as Mano.
In Portuguese, Mano is a caring short for brother. And that is how Marcus or Mano can be described. A person who embodies a dynamic brotherhood with humanity in its most profound sense. Just like an octopus, he embraces so many projects and interests, while paradoxically able to maintain the space and integrity to play and cultivate his own inner spirit, something quite inspiring and fascinating
Peter Hayward: Mine's a bit shorter. Marcus has a large heart. And a playful energy. I will remember him as a calm presence in my crazy world, a poet and a classical guitarist. I've received wisdom, safety, and comfort by his warm tones and love of bright cotton shirts. I will see him in the leaves.
And flowers. Welcome to FuturePodX, Marcus.
Marcus Bussey: Thank you, it's wonderful to be here.
Frank Spencer: I wonder, Marcus, as we kick off and explore what it means to write these letters to the future, we're trying to be transparent here And I wonder how you felt about, those living eulogies written to you and what way they touch your own heart.
Marcus Bussey: they're beautiful for a start and, it's not often that we get the personal, reflections like that. Most of our lives are lived in a way where we often don't get to speak heart to heart, to just say, I care, or I love you, which are very, you know, British for a start, or maybe un American too, but certainly, for us here in Australia, we don't often get to, Express what's in our hearts and relationship is absolutely key to all of what you're trying to weave here.
It's about loving relationships and, what are we lovers of? To me, that is a really important thing. I'm a lover of love in a sense. I just feel it as, as kind of a. emotion, which leads to emotion, but it is a motion like a wave in my life.
Frank Spencer: Beautiful. Peter, I would throw this back to you and to Marcus we're going to let Marcus cut loose here in just a second, but I love this idea, Marcus, that you mentioned love. And I'm so glad that asked you the question about the living eulogy, because I think I don't know that many people would necessarily, I could be wrong about this, equate the idea of love with the future, thinking about it for so long now and the work we do at TFSX the work Peter has done over the years and the work you've done over the years, it's amazing to have the three of us together on this first podcast.
Love really is an expression of what's yet to unfold and love is not such a thing as it is a verb, how we see how things will be, how they'll become love is always yearning. It's always searching. It's always seeking out. And so I'm glad that you mentioned the idea of love because I think it really sets the tone for the letters to the future.
I know also, Marcus, that you had mentioned to us before that you had a poem that you wanted to start our podcast off with.
Marcus Bussey: It's by a woman who died many years ago now. She was an incredibly brilliant scientist and astrophysicist. Some of you may know her, Rebecca Elson, she died in her late thirties of, of cancer and quite a remarkable career.
But of course, as she, perhaps, particularly after she was diagnosed, she kept a diary in which he wrote a lot of poetry, a lot of reflections on life and death and All that fascinated her all of it's drenched in this wave of love. I'd like to open with this poem from her called Antidotes to Fear of Death.
Which of course is very, poignant because she knew that her time on the planet was limited. So it goes like this. Sometimes, as an antidote to the fear of death, I eat the stars. Those nights, lying on my back, I suck them from the quenching dark. Till they are all, inside me. Pepper hot and charred, sometimes.
Instead I stir myself into a universe still young, still warm as blood. No outer space, just me. Space. The light of all the not yet stars drifting like a bright mist, and all of us and everything already there, but unconstrained by form. And sometimes it's enough to lie down here on earth, beside our long ancestral bones, to walk across the cobbled fields of our discarded skulls, each like a treasure, like a chrysalis, Thinking, whatever left these husks flew off on bright wings.
There's so much there in that poem. And it boggles my mind and I want to write lines into the poem to insert this here or that there, because to me it is a love letter. To us now in the present, but we're in her future. We're 20 odd years after she wrote that poem. So to me, it's an invitation to encounter and dialogue,
Peter Hayward: do we talk about the future as a possible antidote to our own fear of death?
Marcus Bussey: I think that's probably exactly what we're doing. We are temporal beings, often constrained within a present that, in a sense, deletes the concept of death, our own finitude. For me, feeling our own life force as a gift in the present now, and knowing and embracing that it's not going to be with us forever.
actually helps us be more soulful as futurists and also more attuned to the long time, the deep time dimension to futures work, which I think is always in the background, but often, particularly for consultant futurists, it's something that gets pushed aside because of, certain contexts, maybe it's five years, 10 years, something like that.
just like Rebecca Wilson points out there, there's skulls. That are the skulls of past, present, but also the future. And to me, it's all shivery and gooey. It's lovely.
Frank Spencer: Yeah, I absolutely love when I read the poem and you sent it over to us in advance. and I love this idea of writing lines in between,
The ancestors past, the ancestors present and the ancestors future, If you read the poem in a very bland way, you might only catch the ancestors past the skulls, but clearly she's talking about the totality of the dimension of time and space and experience and all of that. This call up in this cosmos when we think about futures, it's also the idea that the cosmos is well aware Futures consciousness, if we want to call it that, or the unfold of the future, that's far outside of this human futures thing that we've constructed in the foresight field when you think about deep futures, as you said, it takes us far beyond, this idea of futures that shrinks the future and the poem she wrote.
The future is expanding and often in our practice, as consultants the future shrinks. I, wonder what both of you think about that
Marcus Bussey: for me, it's about understanding or recognizing and allowing vulnerability, which is what Peter was talking about.
this vulnerability that we are only momentarily here and that This thing called life is endlessly playful and experimenting, if some experiment doesn't work, it throws it out. That's what is called extinction, We are an experiment in terms of the cosmic understanding of things.
Consciousness is testing certain pathways that, are wired into our DNA neurological, but also cultural. this cultural layer in which we are gifted with memory, and of course I'm a historian as well, so memory to me is very much a broad data set of the experiences that inform culture.
But, you know, that memory informs our foresight. And this play of memory and foresight can help us deal with this fear of death, the fear of our own finitude. so much of strategy is about maintaining the present, for instance. But how do we strategize deep time?
How do we develop the intuitional capacity to embrace whatever it is? Because of course, we try to come up with names for this, and this is Elson again trying to swallow the stars, knowing that she is stardust. And as an astrophysicist, she knows that better than any of us here would know that.
Thank you. To me, that creative potential is built into time.
Peter Hayward: Attention for me, Marcus, and it's personal, I wonder whether it's shared or it's just me being different. When we talk about a love for the future, am I just wishing to be remembered by the future? If I love the future, then somehow the future will remember me when I am gone.
Is that the game that I'm playing here? Because I've always felt it's not that important to be remembered as it is for people's memories of you to go forward with them. So the same way the eulogy is people's memories of what you meant to them. Even if they don't identify them with Marcus, they still go with them.
Hmm,
Marcus Bussey: I think of my life as a message in a bottle, tossed into the cosmic sea of time. if I went back ten generations, There are 1024 ancestors behind me that have led to me. I don't know them by name. Mick and Jane and whoever else it might have been, living in 1700 whatever.
I am the result of Their lives, their yearnings, their fears and their hopes, just as we all are. So it becomes personal in an impersonal sort of way, for me. I know that ten generations from now, no one will know about me. it doesn't matter that they know about me or not.
The fact that I lived, as a conscious being, trying to understand myself now in a very complex world, trying to understand why I'm even here, is part of the kind of questioning that we're privileged to engage in. Because I know that 10 generations ago, most of my ancestors would not have been thinking like that.
It was about survival, survival, you know? So we We live in a very privileged world, so acknowledge privilege means then I have a responsibility to work with that privilege, in ways that, may just in little ways, like, If I picked up a Buddhist song sample, I got being, and it sends that resonance out.
My life is a resonance in a sea of vibrations. And to me, that's enough. So it's personal because it's me. I'm here, but it's impersonal because I feel quite happy to gift whoever or whatever it is that I have to a future that will never know me. But that's enough for me.
Frank Spencer: it really redefines then Peter and Marcus what we mean when we talk about the future of love, loving the future, what the cosmos is.
If you were to anthropomorphize it what is it aiming for? and to really, impact greatly, why we would be thinking about the future at all. And yet in this sense, it has. incredible utility I think it was Sophie strand.
I mentioned her earlier and she's famous for saying that stories don't belong to us. We belong to stories and this love story that I mentioned earlier in this cosmic story is the story that we all belong to. So that resonates with me. Marcus that this resonance goes out and it really redefines. What it means to do futuring and our foresight or whatever we want to call it I would love to hear from both of you on that.
Marcus Bussey: you want to dip in first?
Peter Hayward: you go.
Marcus Bussey: to me at the Bottom of everything sits a kind of spiritual worldview that I inhabit. it's something that I've been working with all my conscious life. I can't explain why, you know, some people are in the motorcars. Some people, you know, like hiking.
I, I like soulful reflection. It can be meditation, which I do on a regular basis. But beyond that, there's a soulfulness. when I relate to you, Frank, or you, Peter, or anybody else, it's not just about what we say or, the laughs we have
It's about being present. and the gratitude that comes with that this conversation we're having I'm going to take this away with me your eulogy. I'm going to take away with me and it's going to travel with me into the future as another layer of the harmonic of. My life as it's encountered the harmonics of YouTube of course the listeners to this Podcast are going to be harmonizing in different ways I've got this new book coming out on near humanism, I'm not inviting people like you guys to write a blurb But I preface it to my more academic types and say, look, I know academics are afraid of this word spirituality.
if you don't feel comfortable writing a blurb for a book about spirituality, you don't have to. There's no pressure on you. Because we do have loaded, cultural, Resonances around words like spirituality, it's not something that I would go into, a boardroom and say that guys, you know, I want you to all get spiritual now because you get it will make a better world.
Somehow I do spirituality by stealth. It's about who I am and that's the sort of thing that was picked up in the eulogies you presented with me I could feel whoever wrote those eulogies, had picked up on that aspect of me, which is not in a rush.
I'm not going anywhere fast, and I'm also really open to the encounter of the person in front of me. Or if I'm in a classroom a group or running workshops, but also when I encounter a tree or a wallaby, because I have them running around in the garden here, Frank, you would have deer, I guess, or something like that.
the Australian equivalent of a deer is a wallaby or a kangaroo. it's about. Something intangible I'm just going back to this comment from Elson from Rebecca Alton in her poem, which he says, no outer space, just space. You know, to me, I go, Oh, because that's so much of what it's about for me.
And so my futures work is probing that kind of space saying, well, we've got physical senses, but in my mind, we've got cultural senses and that memory is one memory. What am I? Well, I'm an amoeba basically. And even then an amoeba has memory. It's just cellular. It's built in. what would we be?
If we took away. It's kind of like the fear many of us have of becoming an Alzheimer patient where all that was up there in that frontal cortex is, is life worth living if it's gone? That's a question we could debate for a long time. to me, life is a gift. And at a spiritual level, you don't know what's going on for that person with Alzheimer's.
Where are they? you know, that's a question I think that really. Touches me. Without me being able to become academic or whatever about it, it just touches me.
Peter Hayward: where my thoughts are going Frank and Marcus is, as I hear you both describe it, using our spirituality to become present, to go deeper into relationship, to come to a refined appreciation of where you are.
Do we need the future in order to do that? When we Embrace the future. Are we doing it in a different way? In a heightened way? Or is it really just about us being better in the present?
Frank Spencer: I think that's the million dollar question. And this is something that all of us have been Writing about and working on and dealing with, if I had to guess, it's probably a big part of what, Marcus's new book deals with. I haven't read it yet, because I think this gets at that question of why we felt this podcast was important in the first place.
And I know that it can be so impactful for listeners. And especially as we go on and listeners are more involved in helping to even build the podcast, we'll talk about that some later. the whole idea in some ways of the future, I heard somebody say not too long ago, the future is dead and I know that, the essence of what they were trying to say was this capitalist, empire laden idea of the future and what it will become and how we can build it, is increasingly becoming.
And so then what does it mean to think about the future? And is it as you say, really, to have relationship with not just human, but more than human, the cosmos in the present to understand our place. In the larger, as the poem says, the stars, all the stars are inside the, you know, and I think that's the essence of what the letter to the future, our letter, maybe the first letter we're writing is, Hey, future, I can't wait to get your response back.
Are we thinking about this idea of the future, which is certainly a legitimate concept. I mean, we are able to do it. It's an evolutionary concept. It's a psychological concept. It's a sacred dynamic of all living things. And yet is our approach. A siloed one as both of you, I think, have very much said, you know, there's the future out there and we're trying to deal with it in some way.
Or is it part and parcel of just the cosmos and consciousness itself?
Marcus Bussey: Well, I would have to say that your question is, at the heart of everything, Frank, what is this thing called the future? at one level we could say it's a mirror of the present. it mirrors.
possibilities and potentialities back to us, but also it can distort those elements the future is a place that our culture has evolved to try and control and control goes against the very nature of evolution. we need to acknowledge that Human vulnerability means that, at a social or collective level, we, as a species, want to continue.
That's a species drive. So then we need to be thinking strategically at some level, about, well, what does it mean? we want to survive as a species, but what you're bringing up, Frank, is the question of, well, what kind of species do we want to become? Sometimes I have those flashbacks to a movie called, The Time Machine from about 1956, where you've got the Morlocks and you've got the alloy.
And, you know, that's a future that we don't want, right? But it's a sort of future that you could see is built into the logic of capitalism. I could see them remaking that movie, with Chris Hemsworth or some really handsome, chunky guy and I could see it all playing out.
But you know what we often don't credit is the role that both fear and optimism play in shaping how we approach the future. the future, as, people like, Jim Data has said, and others, doesn't exist. But if I'm thinking historically, it's an archive of possibilities.
Based upon where we've come from as a culture, and we can only think within the cultural data sets that we have available to us. So when we see the growing paranoia and fear globally now, we can see that It's deeply rooted in human experience. It's not irrational in any way to go and vote for a Donald Trump or, to go out there like a Netanyahu and, kill kids in Gaza.
None of that's irrational if you have a certain kind of experience. Paradigm that shapes your future and it's about security. It's about don't worry about those guys over there. It's let's worry just about me and my kids. I want my kids to be safe and that leads to incredibly distorted
understandings of what it means to be human. We limit ourselves because limiting at least helps us feel safe. yearning is always about yearning for more. It might be materialist more. I always think of Imelda Marcos with a thousand pairs of shoes. I don't know whether that's a myth or not, but you know, that sort of thing, you know, and why is it that, a millionaire wants to be a billionaire and so on.
That sort of thing is materially yearning. But to me. this yearning stuff, it's what drives the Elson poem, it's what drives us all. And yet we can't articulate it, and the future is where we project that yearning. We yearn for security, we yearn for continuity, because continuity provides us with meaning.
We yearn to be, present in the future, in some way. Somehow we yearn to displace our own psyches into the future. that's why, in one way, Peter, when you're asking about do I want to be remembered, it'd be flattering to be remembered, but at the same time, I've, ground my ego down enough, and it's been external things grinding my ego down, it's been grounded down enough for me to say, no, what I really want for the future.
Is a future of love, a future that's inclusive, a future that is nurturing, a future that is more balanced, where human social being and social presence is part of an ecosystem, you know? And that ecosystem is What matters and that's not just a global planetary ecosystem. That's within the cosmos there's stuff going on here all the time that we will never understand from our own perspective It's kind of like saying does the cell in my big toe understand that it's part of a human body
No, it doesn't it's a cell in my big toe And that's in a sense what we are that brings some humor to it But it also brings a reality check
Frank Spencer: I saw a meme today online. someone said, the times that we live in, I was born in the wrong era.
I should have been born as a single cell of me, swimming around in a pool of you, you thought that they were going to say Victorian era or something like this. No, it's like I wanted to be a single cell of me, in some ways. That's what we are, but in other ways, we're intimately connected with the rest of the cosmos.
I'm speaking recently with Dr Lila June Johnson. She talked about an inevitable future, and that future was one of irreducible and fundamental love, or else there's nothing. and this is, the ultimate aim. And so, you know, a little bit of a challenge that I will throw out there to people.
Smarter than I am, but I'll still do it because I'm a contrarian. That's where I lie I totally understand the comment, the future doesn't exist, but in the way that both of you have described it and what we've been talking about here in many ways, it does exist and it exists intertwined with the present and the past and the cosmos and All the stars and consciousness and its desire and its yearning to, find those vessels to manifest itself through,
So that last, bit of sharing that you did, Marcus was just so beautifully put and it made me think why you were sharing as did the rest of this, you know, our time together here today. But this last part, how. valuable this future pod X letters to the future can be. I hope that it does become and I was already feeling so inspired by just listening to you share that last piece with us.
Marcus Bussey: Thank you. I just wanted to say that, we often misunderstand what love is. I think love is a self organizing principle. when the amoeba fell in love with another amoeba it became two cells that started to form more complex systems.
I have no doubt that the cell in my big toe loves me but it loves its other cells first. before it has any sense of that greater thing. So love is that kind of self organizing principle that has led to the remarkable playfulness that is evolution. people will often tell me that they think nature is very cruel because they see ants dismembering an insect or something.
But you know, to me, that's not really what it's all about. Behind that, there is a love as well, and that self organizing nature of love is what We are always engaged with exploring. So to me, a love letter to the future is a relational network where we're messaging, my current favorite metaphor is the pheromone, that we are emitting futures pheromones, some can be fearful, when you're in a group of people and stressed and they're fearful, our bodies respond, right?
But if we're around people who are calm, loving, humorous, generous, playful, we respond in a different way. And to me, as futurists, we're emitting futures pheromones that are pheromones of love, that are self organizing, that are inclusive, playful, experimental, and open to what's next, without having to, be prescriptive about what's next.
Peter Hayward: You have heard that first on FuturePodX, the future pheromone. I look forward to a doctoral student. coming up with a research proposal to test the availability, measure for, and create the best conditions for passing futures pheromones.
Frank Spencer: And Peter, do you say that in jest? Because I feel like you're just slingshotting us right back into it.
No,
Peter Hayward: I have seen the futures pheromones. yes, yes. We've all felt it. I think. the very smart person who said the future doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean it's not real.
Frank Spencer: That's right.
Peter Hayward: right. going back to Rebecca's poem, It was in a book called A Responsibility to Awe, I heard you speaking, Marcus, about yearning.
I wonder whether we play with eternity to find awe, in a lot of our life, we can't focus on awe because we have to focus on the here and now, a lot of futures can be focused on futures. Like versions of the here and now, but occasionally the future takes you to awe, like you talked about the thousands of ancestors that all of us have had.
We are, I think as Richard Dawkins called it, the winning lottery
Frank Spencer: tickets
Peter Hayward: to get to this far. And I wonder whether one of the ways we have an emotion towards the future is in our search for it. because it won't know who we were. It certainly won't regard us. Doesn't need us.
Do we hunger for or in our lives?
Frank Spencer: I do. And I do. And I know that. People who are listening to, I know you do too, Peter, and I, I just so glad you brought this up because I've been writing for a long time now. I get stuck on some, some, we all get stuck on phrases, but I, I'm really bad about this. It's like, oh, I'm stuck now on just seeing all in enchantment and wonderment.
And, and then that brings this back around to the fact of whether we're trying to press upon the future or the future. is impressing upon us. Daniel Rushkoff has been on this lately. He said the way out of our poly crisis, our permacrisis or metacrisis isn't through scientism is through magic.
And this is not a rejection of science, but it is a rejection of the rejection of all in wonder, wonderment and enchantment in our lives that has been stripped out.
Marcus Bussey: we often put science over there. Rebecca Elson was a scientist and she oozes all, she just oozes it.
To me, research can't be separated from the spiritual life. the spiritual life is a great inquiry into what it means to be human. In a multi human, multi species world, and it is a form of research. it's process oriented. It has its methodologies. There are theoretical bases for it. You can go to different ones.
Buddhism or Hinduism or Christianism. It doesn't matter. But, it is, an approach to knowledge creation through experience, which is exactly what science is all about.
Peter Hayward: I think I am going to draw this first conversation in the future PODx series to some sort of, it's not a conclusion, it's just an interregnum. So Marcus, there is going to be a person coming after you. the brief was. we have raised lots of questions, there'll be questions in the transcript and for the guests to listen to this podcast, but is there any sense of what you would like to leave as your parting, you know, question, comment, peg in the grounder?
Frank Spencer: It's a sense that this letter, is never ending. Marcus, we're just so happy that you're the one who gets to say the letter is not ending. Here's where the next part starts.
Marcus Bussey: That's right. So the message in the bottle will be another poem, I just wanted to say on letters, they're very important my last edited book is filled with 15 letters from researchers to research students.
And it works really well. I've got this lovely little book called Field Guide to the Haunted Forest. by a young American Jared K. Anderson. I'd like to suggest that, you know, we explore our vulnerabilities. Without having to deny them or disguise them in any way.
Anderson does a great job touching on that with this little poem. It's shorter than the other poem, and it's my gift to your next guest. It's called, Losing. our muscles are prompted to grow by failure, healing from countless micro injuries.
our minds, science and technology are similarly nourished by defeat. We are creatures born to thrive on the borderlands of ruin. Home is a valley between sore toothed peaks of loss. Here we sow failure and harvest miracles.
Peter Hayward: Wow.
Frank Spencer: It reminds me of a quote that I read this week It said, if you're not contradicting yourself on a regular basis, you're not living hard enough. True.
Peter Hayward: it's been a wonderful hour of my life. can I thank you both for being prepared to start this roller coaster?
Marcus Bussey: we've harvested a few miracles, that's for sure.
Frank Spencer: It certainly is a very enriching conversation, and I personally feel that it's a beautiful start to this ongoing series.
I can't wait to see our next guest pick up the letter and respond to the letters of the future. Marcus, thank you so much for kicking us off.
Marcus Bussey: It's been a pleasure, and I think it's an absolutely brilliant way to explore areas that have been generally unexplored by creatures like us, futurists.
Peter Hayward: Thank you.
Thanks to Marcus and my co-host Frank.
If listening to the conversation has inspired you to also contribute to our letter, to the future. Then you can email Frank and I with your thoughts and wishes to FuturePodXMailbag@proton.me and we'll work out a way to include them. That link will also be on the show notes page for this podcast. And Keep listening, because this is a surprise coming, the future sent us a letter in return.
And Frank and I will join you in the next FuturePodX with a new guest to continue the conversation. Bye.
The Future Correspondent: Dear Peter, Frank, and Marcus, Your voices reach me as the air grows still here, dense with heat, a kind of waiting quiet. The horizon shimmers, not with light, but with the subtle pull of something unresolved, like a question forming in the distance. I find myself tracing your words, your laughter, your silences, and wondering, how often do we dare to leave something unfinished, to let it breathe, to let it change us?
Marcus, your presence in this conversation feels like the first note in a song, a resonant open tone that lingers even after the sound fades. I hear it in the way you speak of yearning, of love as something both vast and minute, as the organizing principle of the cosmos and the bond between a cell and its neighbors. Love, in your voice, feels less like a word and more like a field. Something we step into together, sometimes unknowingly.
Peter, you speak of awe, that quiet hunger for the infinite that lives in all of us. And Frank, your invitation to wonderment echoes like a bell in the air here. Faint but steady, a reminder that we are not simply observers of the cosmos, but participants in its unfolding story.
Together, your words feel like a map. Unfinished, yes, but alive with the potential of where it might take us. Marcus, your gift of Rebecca Elson's poetry speaks to me still. Her voice, a fragment from your past and my past's past, carries something I can only describe as luminous defiance. The audacity to look at the stars and take them into oneself, as though the light could become a part of us.
And your parting gift, the poem by Jared Anderson, rests in my mind like a seed, waiting for the next guest to carry it forward. Your conversation leaves me restless. Not in frustration, but in longing. There is a pulse in your words that stirs something old and unspoken. A memory, perhaps, or a vision not yet formed.
I wonder if you feel it, too. That the letter is never just a letter, but an act of reaching. A leap into what we cannot yet name. To the next guest, whose voice I have yet to hear. I imagine you stepping into this dialogue, not as an answer, but as another thread in this unfolding tapestry. What will you bring?
What will you carry forward? Not as a burden, but as a gift. I look to your words as though to the weather on the edge of a storm. Uncertain, but alive. Full of possibility. What I wonder now, for all of you, is this. If love is truly the future's organizing principle, as Marcus suggests, how do we emit its signal, like pheromones that call others to it?
How do we attune ourselves, not to certainty, but to the harmonics of what we might yet become? With something that feels like gratitude and longing both. The future correspondent.
P. S. I find myself collecting postcards that seem to resonate with the moments I share with you. They are fragments of other times and places, like this one I've enclosed. A reminder, perhaps, that even in the vastness of the cosmos, the smallest connections are where meaning takes root.