Embracing & exhausting
Embracing & exhausting—those are our life’s tasks, drinking full even the last hot chocolate.
:- Doug.
Destruction
Destruction
In forest is pruning
Making room
Making nourishment
Allowing in air & birds & food from the sun.
:- Doug.
Easy
In re-learning to fall (why “fall?”) asleep
I find the trick’s not so much blanking my mind
as blurring it
The re-verse of daytime
When focus is the unexamined value;
Now to let wash over me by immersing and pulling back a distance
Both and at once
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2532–Involved
Footprints in the Windsm # 2532
Out your front window, you saw the old woman fall at the street’s edge, & you saw me come to help her. You came over to look. I asked
If you would let me use your phone to call for help, or if you could drive us to the hospital, & you said “My phone. . .” as your voice trailed off, and you
Turned and returned to your house;
It may have been my imagination: Did you mutter you did not
Want to get involved?You are human
You are involved
Please pass it on.
© c 2026, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com
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Not interchangeable
It is not the purpose of humanity to be interchangeable pieces, one with the other—like in hospitals.
:- Doug.
that touches that
Have you considered the more that touches that (whatever your subject is)?
:- Doug.
Make a living?
How does a conversation make a living? Especially how does it beget our sense of wonder in certain moments?
:- Doug.
ensouling
Talking thro’ our conversation—what would that look like? Thro’ the ensouling we get.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2531–In the name
Footprints in the Windsm # 2531
In the name of the conversing, & of the meeting, & of the soul-making.
Please pass it on.
© c 2026, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
To thing-fy
To thing-ify something is to seek to possess it. Nouns in English point to our Western overwhelming desire to conquer new lands, plant a flag on the moon or Mars, to own slaves, to name things after ourselves. But in our truer nature we desire not to be possessed rather to be understood, met, heard, accompanied, allowed to be larger, each important in our own way.
:- Doug.
Soul-stitching
Thoreau wrote in his journal entry January 22, 1852: “To set down such choice experiences that my own writings may inspire me, and at last I may make wholes of parts.” —This we may seek to do as well in conversation, in meeting, in soul-making. There is of course no final whole beyond the one that wraps its arms around the universe and all stars and what or who holds that. Soul-stitching makes the wholes thro’ which we do nothing but open.
:- Doug.
this leavening
Get in touch with the leavening that infuses, permeates, ferments each other.
:- Doug.
Tame and ordinary
It (The Last Hot Chocolate) sounds tame and ordinary, but you will not agree with all we discover, and you will fear to try some of the experiments.
:- Doug.
Three boxes of books
I have three boxes of books: one marked “Give Away;” one “Maybe;” and one “Keep.” Books in the middle box have sticky edges—they will pull away books from the “Give Away” box.
:- Doug.
mean by satisfying
What kinds of conversation are most satisfying? What do you mean by satisfying and why is that satisfying?
:- Doug.
