To our 8.2 grandchildren:
 
Dear Little Ones,
 
God, how we love you all!
 
I'm sitting here this morning at the computer, looking at your photographs and all the art work you send us (it's plastered all over my office wall) and you're smiling back at me, like you do every morning.
 
This particular morning I decided to send you post card from the future.

 
Dearest Little Ones,
 
Your grandpa and grandma are gone now, part of everything that comes and goes and I wonder how you are doing, how you are making a go of it in the world we left to  you.
 
We knew something was wrong with the way things were going, your parents, our children, working so hard to make ends meet, struggling to pay for gas and groceries and life. We watched them struggle to simply exist but did nothing except tell them, "It'll be OK. Times will change."
 
And my, how times are changed!
 
We knew back then, when you were still little, before you had children of your own we never got to know, that we lived in and supported a house-of-cards, a life style built on hype and hypocrisy, an economy built on perceived need and greed, a country teetering on the brink of surrender to a darker way.
 
Oh, we talked a lot about change. We made small tokens to wisdom and bought cars that got better mileage but still drove 20,000 miles a year. We built our homes with more insulation only to realize we were even more separated from nature. We patted each other on the backs thinking our new energy efficient technologies would bring everything back into balance but we were wrong. We were focusing on the symptoms not the disease of "the abundant life in America".
 
We could have moved you all out here to the water, out to Marble Falls. We could have created a community of family and friends with gardens in each yard large enough to feed each family, community gardens for our elderly. We could have collected the rain water, could have gained power from the sun. We could have worked and played and stayed together, everybody helping everybody else, live a little lighter, exist a little higher. We could have found community.
 
Maybe even now, from your future perspective, what I'm sharing is naïve, this vision of a better way of living. I can't help wondering though, what would the world be like for you today if more of us would have acted out our naïve dreams. Naïveté free of formulaic greed, multiplied a thousand times, is what built every good thing we know.
 
Now you are living with what we didn't do.
 
I pray you have the power to turn things around and get back to the basics of living. Make community. Make it a spiritual path, an adventure not a venture. Watch out to not make it religious though. A blended path will last longer. Bend and accommodate and openly accept from yourselves and from others what might seem like naïve dreams. Build on these if they come to you clean and without motive like when you played as little ones in the sand box.
 
I pray it's not to late little ones to make of this world a better place as your grandpa should have done.
 
Loving each of you always through time,
 
 
Grandpa Marley