Who Will Remember You?

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

This week, I’m back in Utah performing Utopian Hotline. Utah holds a special place in my heart, as I’ve been coming here off and on for the past twenty years with the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

Utopian Hotline, as you may know, focuses heavily on the future. During the pandemic, we set up a phone line and asked people to leave messages in response to the question: “How do you imagine a more perfect future?”

We also interviewed remarkable individuals, including NASA’s astrophysicist Lika Guhathakurta, who pioneered the field of heliophysics—the study of the sun’s behavior and its impact on Earth.

When I asked her the same question, she responded:

“Two things: music and love. Music is more mathematical, but it touches us differently, deeply. Love is an endless mystery because there’s no reasonable cause that could explain it, and it’s not captured in our DNA as we know it.”

I’m finding myself in a transitional moment, and I too am contemplating these questions.

There’s one particular moment in the piece where we pose questions to the audience:

What do you want to communicate? What do you want to offer this small, momentary world we are building? If you could send a message to the future, what would it say?

And once you’re gone, whom would they be for?

I’m not sure if I can answer these questions yet, but I know they are shaping my life in this moment. Perhaps these newsletters are my way of responding to that message.

What message would you want to leave for the future, and how do you hope it will shape the world after you're gone?

A CREATIVE TOOL

At its annual developer conference, Zoom announced a new feature in development: AI-animated, photorealistic avatars users can create to send messages or, potentially, attend meetings.

While exciting, the feature raises concerns about deepfakes and misinformation. Will these digital avatars eventually replace you in long work meetings? Only time will tell.

A PIECE OF ART

“Farewell Letter” by David Whyte

(For All the Mothers Who Have Passed Away)

She wrote me a letter after her death,
and I remember a kind of happy light
as I sat by the rose tree on her old bench by the back door
so surprised to receive it
wondering what she would say
looking up before I could open it
and laughing to myself in silent expectation.

Dear son
it is time for me to leave you
the words you are used to hearing, are no longer mine to give.
You can only hear those words of motherly affection now from your own mouth and only for those who stand motherless before you.

As for me
I must forsake adulthood
and be bound gladly to a new childhood.
You must understand this apprenticeship demands of me an elemental innocence from everything I have ever held in my hands.
I know your generous soul is well able to let me go
You will in the end be happy to know my God was true and that after so many years of loving you so long
I find myself in the wide, infinite mercy of being mothered myself.

P.S. All of your intuitions were true.

Grateful,

Michael