I stumbled across an article about the Bauhaus, and how its founder Walter Gropius and members defied the Nazi regime for more than a decade. As a graduate of the School of Architecture and Environmental Design, the Bauhaus was core to our curriculum. I recall vividly images of profound shapes, stark contrasts, and bold lines that defined the artists of that era.

The one line of this article that stood out for me was this, “Gropius’s aim was to introduce soul into the age of the machine. The Nazis’ was to introduce the machine into the soul.” I was immediately moved to ask, are we not now in the age of the machine, far more than the second decade of the last century? And what has become of our soul now?”

Those international designers, musicians, potters, painters, and architects risked not only their standing in the local communities, which often rejected them for their expressions, but their lives under the increasing intolerance of the Nazi regime.

According to the Wikipedia article, “… —the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.”

I look at where we stand now, the machines we have designed, built, and integrated at every level of our lives—between us, communicating for us, in our hands, our back pockets, even embedded in our ears. We hear voices and see faces and receive written communications—digital representation of what was once a face-to-face norm. Each of us is now endowed with the capacity for personal expression, every message moved across a medium in which the entire world can view, reject or enjoy.

Is this what Gropius has in mind? Are we the very souls entered into the machines? Or have we become so intertwined, so dependent, so anxiety ridden when we are no longer connected by means of our digital companions that in fact the totalitarian machines have entered into our souls?

Tonight, I am deeply troubled by the fact that Hershey’s Syrup with Genuine Chocolate Flavor contains no chocolate. And we wonder how and when the world became prone to believing alternative facts? I say it started a long time ago, when we were first fed chocolate syrup, that is not.

This weekend we celebrated my grandmother’s 100th birthday in Glidden, Iowa. Leta Kruse was born January 6, 1919 she has lived a full century, always living within seven miles of where she was brought into this world. From horse ‘n buggy to self-driving cars, Leta Sophia Jennie Bushman married as Leta Kruse has seen one hundred incredible years of change.

In her life time has been the invention of the band aid, hearing aid, pop-up toaster, vacuum cleaner, penicillin, television, cellophane tape, Nylon, ball point pen, automatic clothes washer, color TV, nuclear weapons, microwave oven, cake mixes, automated coffee maker, polio vaccine, video tape recorder, jet liner, seat belts, smoke alarm, pop-top cans, pocket calculator, electronic mail, bar codes, personal computer, communications satellite and GPS, mobile phones, world wide web, text messages, DVD, smart phones, and hybrid and self-driving cars.

In sitting beside her I observe tireless, capable hands and fingers that have worked in fields, harvested from gardens, cooked, canned, and served countless meals to family, farm hands, neighbors, and friends. She has sewn, crocheted, and mended; raised three children and welcomed seven grand children and four great grand children into their home; and written more words than we ever could count, including her life’s story The Dash. At one hundred years Leta yet conducts her own accounting, writes her own checks, beats contestants on the Wheel of Fortune, and flies through word puzzles at the rate of a book every other day.

To look into her eyes and know what she has seen is to enter a portal to a century of invention, war, discovery, and transformation. A year after her birth women were given the right to vote and at age eight Lindberg flew across the Atlantic ocean. The Great Depression of the 1930s would have a lasting effect on her entire generation, and upon her children and grandchildren. I too am a product of that era, careful with my money, buying only what I can afford, and keeping old things running like new for as long as possible.

World War II, the Korean, Vietnam, and two Gulf wars filled the air waves and television screens. Seventeen U.S. presidents have sat in the oval office. Leta has witnessed humans walking on the Moon, the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity explorers and images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

As Leta has said time and time again, “What will the future hold?”

More than what she has seen or experienced, her extended family enjoys what she and her husband Raymond have given. The Pride of the Valley family farm continues to provide each of her children, grand children, and great grand children the comfort of knowing they will always have a place to call home. No matter the financial state of the nation or condition of our families, we have more than four hundred acres of rich, productive farm land and beautiful, viable timber along the winding Racoon River.

For the third year in a row I have returned to our family farm in Iowa for the week of Thanksgiving. My grandmother of 99.9 years lives in town, at an assisted living center. Time with her is cherished, for while she will soon move into the start of a second century on this planet, we know intuitively that years past 100 are limited.

With each visit my mother and I engage my grandmother in story telling, recording each memory on our cell phones, camera, or audio recorder. She shares with us a blend of bitter, sweet, dismay, and wonder at all she has seen and experienced. In the century that has passed she has moved from moving between rented farm houses by means of horse and sled to the automobile, the first commercial airlines, jet engines, and Moon landings. She has seen communications evolve from installation of the first telephone lines to mobile phones, satellite, and the Internet.

Just yesterday afternoon, while decorating her apartment for Christmas I played a Putumayo album ‘Folk Playground’ which started with a fun version of ‘This Old Man’. My grandmother leaning just a bit forward on her walker, swung her hips left and right, tapped her feet, and rolled her shoulders to the lyrics and the beat. My mother quickly came ’round to my grandmother’s front and danced with her, both of them laughing.

The moment was just that, a few bars of a familiar song and a reminder of the countless thousands of evenings that my grandparents danced in Texas, Florida, and Arizona during their thirty years as Iowa Snowbirds. And then my grandmother asked, “Where is that music coming from?”

“From my little black box,” which is how she refers to my cell phone.

“Oh my,” shaking her head as she found her seat, “I just don’t understand how all of that works. All of that,” referring to phone calls, text messages, photographs and music, “in that little box?”

Once seated she concluded, “As I always say, what does the future hold? What … does … the future hold?”

She asks this with a certain degree of longing to know, and at the same time a need to let go. She seems content to know that it produced a song familiar to her, and in that moment she found joy. Moments are what matter most to her now, not the past nor the future. In some ways, she is living exactly how the wise have advised for millennia—in the moment.