Heinrich Winter and Irene Tomas, Heini and Ini, as they called one another, my father and mother, began their life's journey together in Vienna, Austria, in 1933, a decade and a half after the end of World War I, the year Hitler came to power in Germany. Their ancestors originated primarily in Bohemia. I was born in 1939, a month before World War II, and emigrated to the United States in 1960. My daughter Irene and her two sons live in Vermont. My son Henry commutes between Berkeley and Paris. All of us live in cyberspace as well as physical space. Their children, Victor, Louis, Aidan, and Oliver, will be citzens of the world. Ours has been an era of peace as well as war, a testament to the possibility of overcoming ancient hatreds and building a new world in which people of all ethnic groups, ideologies, and nationalities can live together, communicate across vast distances, cherish the challenges of cultural chasms, and collaborate to build our shared home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Against the backdrop of cosmic chronology, a human lifetime is a mere temporary waystation for the genes that first evolved eons ago as bacteria came to exchange genetic information and formed the original World Wide Web. And yet, these incarnate moments are of infinite value, precisely because they are so brief, and because they are also but not only matter in motion. "Living things reach out to each other," writes Allen Wheeli, "spirit leaps between. Tropism becomes scent, becomes fascination, becomes lust, becomes love. Lizard to fox to monkey to man, in a look, in a word, we come together, touch, die, serve spirit without knowing, carry it forward, pass it on. Ever more winged the spirit, ever greater its leaps. We love someone far away, someone who died long ago."

This site is dedicated to those who died long ago, to those who are alive, and to those who are not yet born who will be temporary homes for the immortal genes that have given all of us life and that are charged with the potential for learning and for loving.

Ingrid Shafer
Christmas 2000