FootprintsintheWind.com

Are you whole?
Are we whole?

:- Doug.

If our friends experiment and grow, are we not thereby grown?

:- Doug.

It’s broken but it’s still whole

:- Doug.

What is it about our way of living, the way we have organized ourselves that pushes us apart? I saw a broken piece from the back of a car lying beside the road. Why did the person it belongs to not pick it up? If injured, I understand. If not, why did he or she feel no community with the rest of us to pick it up? Because an anonymous other has that job!

If we see ourselves as an economic community, then we relate with each other primarily through money: we pay this one to do this, that one to do that. They are things: “givin’ you a number and takin’ ‘way your name.”

These are but distractions. How can we see all this as part of one whole? How did we organize ourselves as an economic community, and how can we disorganize this into human community? All—the whisper, the broken tail light—are part of one movement. What is its center, its heart? Heart is—ear, hear, meeting.

Ask what state of mind the maker of this building you are seeing held while making: nervous, anxious, trying to stand out, packing as many people in as possible for the Dollar, enhancing the living of life. What frame of mind were you in while making today?

Did the wholeness of this floor exist before the boards were laid, or did the boards form it? I hold with the first, since it existed first in the mind of the builder and before that was birthed in her heart.

Live by the money
die by the money
as our culture is

Our culture is organizing itself about money. It is our highest and most worthy criterion of a life well lived. We ask, with an edge to our thought if not voice, Why would he want to have X office, if he is already making more than it pays? Seldom do we ascribe to another altruism. It is strange to us when a person gives up a high paying job to live a simple life. And yet we yearn, and we sigh when one of our number “leaves it all behind” for that simple life.

Money is how we think. We know ourselves to be “consumers,” not people with a higher something in us. We know ourselves to be separate from others because we exchange cash for services and goods from the others. We lay out what we have little of, for something we need: food, shelter, transportation. What we value most is that cash. Just look at our calendars which tell the tale of how we spend our lives.

And yet if we escape those calendars for some days and hours to reflect, this is not what life is about for us. How do we come home?

:- Doug.

This universe is intimate
our universe seeks intimacy

:- Doug.

Community work is making whole
Bringing together is bringing to whole
Bringing home

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1029

“Everything terrifying is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants our help.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I wonder how that applies to our current hand wringing over “Terrorism.” Adding the “ism” to it gives it a dignity and personification it has not earned. It is in fact the actions of people who are no more than hoodlums, international criminals. It is not a way of life, not a belief system such as Lutheranism or Buddhism—or even atheism. It is actually helplessness and despair on one end of the scale or psychoses and pathological criminality on the other.

The use of religious framing and fundamentalism is actually a hiding place for those who have diseases and issues on this continuum. Other voices from these same religions condemn the sickened use of their faith and scriptures for such ungodly ends.

So how do we “help” the person who is suffering from such a disease? Perhaps fighting back does not solve the underlying problem of the person who is frustrated from lack of food or work or the ability to be heard. Perhaps bombing the psychotic does not calm him or her.

Could hearing help? Could earnestly seeking a way to address perceived and actual wrongs? Would it be more costly in lives and body parts and governmental expenditures and the taxes they necessitate? Could providing food and medical help and jobs help tone down the voices that are inflaming the mentally ill? Could gathering and making friends in turn gather police and medical people to find and treat the psychotics and thus reduce the risk to our world’s peoples?

What is the pay off criminals get from spreading terror? Could imagination be employed to seek a way to reduce that pay off? Beyond what we are doing now—using brute force—and letting ourselves be victims, could there a third way?

Please pass it on.

© c 2010, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Life flows in the world
There and here, swirling wind
When we stop it we arrest
Our own life & those we touch
Open! Increase! Bring forth!

:- Doug.

Wholeness is not made out of anything:
Everything is made out of wholeness

:- Doug.

Making life enlarges us
We touch universes
We stride from Heaven to Heaven
Everything changes
Giving wholeness gives to the giver
Giving wholeness gives the giver
Does it make you feel whole?
Intimately?
Making wholeness is beginning and completion
Only make whole

:- Doug.

The point is, we are about wholeness. Out of the wholeness everything arises; into the wholeness we are homing again, not as to a past but as to a future. This is the Queendom!

So our work is wholeness: pointing it out, inviting to the party, out onto the throbbing dance floor!

:- Doug.

The biggest work is wholeness. We are not making it so much as birthing it. Wholeness is perhaps the system of meeting and conversing: each calls forth the other, brings forth the other, in a kind of ever moving circle:

:- Doug.

To make us disappear
To live toward our death
This is what we are about
Every day & month & year
Not fearing but courting
When we seek to be part
To fit in, to have faith
& esprit de corps
To contribute the best of us
To distinguish ourselves
In our death is fulfillment not rest
Meaning death bestows on life
We touch our impending death
And cry for the blossoms of spring
Yet they too die & each year
Cry for yourself then
& live the more for life
This life of all

:- Doug.

Our individual views of the world are special—and different—because we are seeing G*d from inside the exploding fireball.

:- Doug.

The inner is experienced as inner because we are with it, through and through, woven.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1028

We are the terrorists
We have done this to ourselves
Our police
Our captains, presidents, experts
Our metal detectors and electronic stripping machines
Our airlines, blankets, pillows and policies
Engender and nurse the terror among us
Terror we can see is not in bombs
But is a virus we ourselves give each other

I was reflecting on the decision to ban tailgating at the Super Bowl. I imagine the reason is that it makes it easier for the police to scan the area, patrol it, walk with explosive detecting dogs. But this also makes their job harder: the bombers, if they are there, are forced to be more circumspect. Their actions are more hidden. If they had the relaxation of moving about more freely, they might more easily give themselves away by their actions. Profiling might be easier for the police. Clearing the aisles only makes it easier to do the patrolling that will not catch nor concern those intent on doing harm. It serves most to increase the feeling of terror among us.

And of course there are those who profit by the terror—those who make the metal detectors, train the dogs, plan ways to keep people in orderly lines between the velvet covered chains.

Please pass it on.

© c 2010, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Wholing means bringing us forth out of the whole.

:- Doug.

When we are in the womb growing our arms and legs they come out of the whole, and are not assembled together and made into us. This is indeed how we see the world, and indeed how it is. We are not like mechanical robots where you pull an arm off the shelf and bolt it on a body, and then insert a computer. Biological process starts with a whole, then develops.

So these structure-preserving changes are how we develop physically, and how we do socially: little pieces of each other help us all grow, and we are community before we are individuals. We develop, like images on a photographic paper—already there, becoming more and more distinct as we grow.

:- Doug.

Conversational deepener: What is the mystery of life?

:- Doug.

How can we have structure-preserving transformations in people?

:- Doug.

It’s the other way round: you’re building the elements from the whole.

:- Doug.

The way of the universe is simple, homely.

:- Doug.

Our larger work is about imagining the immediate uses of all that meets us, and then getting to work on making it happen. Imagining work.

:- Doug.