FootprintsintheWind.com

This is the turning you want, Lord, yes?–to turn the heart. It is not a simple matter, or at least not easy. But it is what metanoia is, it is what love is. It is not the simplistic matter that the fundamentalists tout, this being born again: for it requires a death before the resurrection, it requires us to give up something we held on to before, and want, still. Repent, return: what is it? To return to our beginning time? I started to read Genesis in this meditative way and got delightfully lost in the first verse. Now the second verse needs some wandering around within, some turning, some returning to you. The separation of light from dark, the things that are good, and the all that is good. If we live in this beginningness, then we see much of the Bible differently. Perhaps the idea of examen or lectio divina stems from here, or can be informed from here. This is the turning: to return time and again and allow G-d to rebirth you.

:- Doug.

G-d is beginning
us
each now

:-Doug.

Is life here to support business or the other way around?

:- Doug.

Prayer is not all about you sharing with G-d: it is listening for what G-d wants to share with you–including being together in silence.

:- Doug.

Where are the wonderful people? All around.

:- Doug.

This is the turning: to return time and again and allow G-d to rebirth you.

:- Doug.

If I am turning looking for G-d somewhere
else, behind my back, on the other side of
the mountain or on its top, or in
something spiritual,
I will not find.
But if I look
right where my eyes are looking,
in the nitty-gritty of this day, this task,
this thing that is taking my attention,
that is where G-d is.
G-d is here with me.
Do not turn: G-d is here.
Simply turn my heart to align with my eyes.
You are here. I am where you are.

:- Doug.

Let us stretch ourselves
all the way to each other
all the way to include G-d.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 604

Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living in Los Angeles. He works in a government munitions plant and shares a condo with Elvis.

Please pass it on.

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To my good friends–

This morning a glimpse that my work is a conversation. It is intercourse between my client and I and other parties involved. It is my living and working in flow and Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow is in fact conversation. It is entering into a place between, a broad river less than a narrow ridge, yet the persons are brought in and brought forth, and it is a grace. It is love at work, dynamics, relationship, meeting, being met, being consumed, sacrifice, dying and being brought forth–and in all this I am describing conversation. So I can be in conversation without words, or even when I am malleating words. It is not just the intention with which I approach the work, but entering in, being vulnerable, being met by the other. This is like Buber’s teacher, intending both sides, entering into each side, engaging both sides.

Do we allow ourselves to be engaged? It is a mutual thing to be sure, for both have to break through the shell of fear surrounding our vulnerability to being met. If they do manage this, or are cracked open from outside and something of them leaks out into the space in between, then conversation is possible, and this is a grace. Yet it still has to happen, this meeting, and that too is a grace. We can open the space for it, prepare the opening, invite the guests–and no one shows up. We need to remember that we can meet in chemistry that is dissonant–explodes, as well as that which is consonant–flows together or foams and spills over. Either one is a grace, and in each we are forced to grow, to take in nutrients, to give up some of our very identity in order that we might become new. We may welcome the new or be drowned by it, and still it is a grace. All about are beings seeking conversation, this too is a grace. If we seek, we can invite. If conversation is necessary, then we can invite, encourage, announce, open, welcome, seek, and then wait for the grace.

The next question might just be How: How do we move from standing in each other’s orbit to engagement? How do we reach out? Let me count the ways…? Likely the ways are endless. How do we meet you? True: endless. What is important is the reaching forth of the hand.

:- Doug.

This turning is not easy. It takes work and sweat and thought and spirit. There is no How, only Do.

:- Doug.

We must float. We must allow G-d. We must allow life. Flow will happen if we allow, or if we do not, but easier, further, if we do. We must float and paddle with the flow.

:- Doug.

Your sky is deep blue, inviting me to explore. I turn.

:- Doug.

Let me tell you the stories
of my life and truth
in your hearing you will grow
me
and you.
Speak your heart to me
so we may together grow,
be

:- Doug.

Some of my writings have been
for others; in them I have
been grown: the giver receives
a new soul and sometimes a new
spirit from giving up his old,
yet usually unawares

:- Doug.

Conversation does not require words
many a conversation consists in work
done for another
we get lost in the flow
of giving and receiving:
read this again for
there are many gifts few words

:- Doug.

Knock, knock!
“Who’s there?”
“Are you born again?”
“Yes, a couple of times today so far.
And you?”

:- Doug.

You do not live until you take into your
gut that these people are
real, not just
like you, but they are necessary to
complete you, and you are necessary to
complete them; and yet this is not sufficient,
for you will always be completing.

:- Doug.

There is a stage of faith beyond becoming one: faith is lived out. James’s works are not opposed to Paul’s justification by faith alone, but rather are the next step. Here faith comes alive. Faith has us. We must serve.

:- Doug.

Let us become a conversation
so our selves will become
yes, we will each be birthed
and yet this entity called
us will be birthed
to in turn give birth to each
we get there by turning toward one another
still that falls short
there is a hand that reaches for ours
in the dark just before dawn
in that meeting we can become a conversation
and become by a conversation.

:- Doug.

We don’t have, we become, conversations. This may be the answer to grace and ivitation: we don’t and can’t own conversations: we can only be in them, become in them.

:- Doug.

Martin Buber, p 11 of I and Thou: “The Thou meets me through grace–it is not found by seeking.” Does he mean we cannot, should not, seek it? There is nothing we can do but let it happen? But no, he says it is both suffering and action, both being chosen and choosing. So there is something we do when we look out upon the world of beings, each exclusive. It is a mutual role, it is a meeting. Even Buber speaks of degrees of meeting, as in the teacher-student relationship: the teacher takes both sides, the student only the student’s own side.

“Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me.” Both are necessary, but there is something more in his words here: he goes on to say “I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou.” Then the next paragraph is only 5 words: “All real living is meeting.”

So the central thing here is meeting. Do we not have opportunity to invite meeting? Perhaps that is the grace: we invite, but the grace is in when it actually happens. “No aim, no lust, and no anticipation intervene between I and Thou.” On the next page: “Only when every means has collapsed does the meeting come about.”

It is not about my wanting the meeting: that gets in the way. It is about actually meeting. Directly. No intervention. Get out of the way. Step in the way and invite, then allow the other to accept or decline. Get in the middle of life. Get yourself and your aims, desires, and means out of the way. Even perhaps your invitations? At least to allow the other to decline. It is the Thou which is found in grace, the invitation can come about through action. This is a mystery, this action and grace business. Is there another way to see it?

Maybe Buber answers it on p 15: “Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe…. but look! round about you beings live their life, and to whatever point you turn you come upon being.” So perhaps we do not need even to invite, but to turn. Turn and open ourselves to the meeting. That is the action.

We do need service in the universe: this is the hard hat of love, and its work boots, hammer and tongs. This is also life, for the way to have the real and the life in this world is to plunge.

Persons are seeking entrance to our lives. Whether they realize it or not. We need merely turn.

Or so it seems this morning.

:- Doug.

Is it true that conversation includes a whole continuum of interactions among people and other beings, from idle chit-chat which says It to dialogue which says Thou? Over all, the thread that runs through all, the stream that flows under the ground of all, is Thou. The Eternal Thou to be sure, but also the individual Thou which wants to come out.

It was perhaps necessary for Buber to oppose these two primary words, but they may not be so much two as infinite, and Thou dawns on us and we slip and slide from one to the other without realizing our movement until we find ourselves upon waking in the presence. So we need ever to be aware and to tug ourselves more to the Thou side and away from the It. Still we need to recognize where we are, and that life includes both.

Does this reduce the value of Buber’s understanding? I think it actually makes it more tasty, more colorful, more melodious. For the calling is to live in the really real. What is more real than G-d? Conversation is of G-d to be sure, so being real in conversation is a movement toward meeting, real to real. It seems more real to me to say It and Thou are on the same continuum of Thou. We can experience in here, or we can be in the presence of Thou, moving out, facing the fierce. When we go out of our house, we are not always either in or out, but we can be in the threshold, and where exactly is away from our house–out the drive, a mile away, the next town, state, country, continent, planet, star system, galaxy, universe? Continuum has some possibilities….

:- Doug.