FootprintsintheWind.com

G*d may be far more subtle and rich than we have figured out.

:- Doug.

There is no resurrection without death
Are we prepared for there to be
no death without resurrection?

:- Doug.

Ours is the banquet hall! Invite! Feast! Host!

:- Doug.

What if we were opening time-space?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 634

We are the ones G*d has been waiting for.

Please pass it on.

© c 2006, 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

To my good friends–

At my church there is the notion going around of calling ourselves a mission outpost. I am not sure what to make of it.

What images does that idea bring up for you?

:- Doug.

Creation is still going on
in us
we are never finished,
fixed
we are set in motion
to grow
become
be

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 633

What I want to create is a world where all people ask each other, “What do we want to create?”

Please pass it on.

© c 2006, 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

Where is the world opening for you today?

:- Doug.

We are fractals of G-d
We are holograms of G*d
We are koosh balls at play
Tendrils, filaments, buds
Play fractal play!

:- Doug.

Flow fractal flow. Self-similar shapes growing ever smaller and larger at the same time, extending the line, extending the shore, reaching out in little ways that are big ways. The tendrils of the koosh ball reaching, touching, reaching: extending, growing the embrace. What holds a koosh ball together is the center. What holds a koosh ball together is what is outside the koosh ball and which wants to be embraced. The waves of light from the sun are pulled out by the gravity of the earth and other planets. Reversal, reversal: is there creativity and truth in you? Beauty? Play, for sure: play can lead to strength and skill and truth and beauty. Play fractal play.

How small can our measuring stick be? The smaller the measuring stick, the larger the interior of what we are measuring. Does the shore line grow larger at the expense of the interior or does the interior expand with the shoreline? What does it matter? It suggests that we too can grow as we take our own measure on the outside. It is now. Our outside is part of us, but not all of us, yet it contains us, or the us contains our outside. Or they are interwoven. What does that matter? Am I stuck in an inlet, not seeing larger?

What does it mean to take our own measure? If we use a finer measure, what would it be? What would be fine enough to pick up our finest features, to see what they are made of and how far they extend? Our finest features are our tendrils reaching, reaching out for each other and for G-d: how to measure them? The distance they cover, the size of the heart they hold, the throbbing, the sobbing, the leaps for joy? The electricity carried along them? Truly, the finer the measure, the farther and further we extend. So if we touch the truly common in us, the very finest in us, we touch each other, the electricity of our lives. This is something people in pioneer societies did not experience in the large quantities of humanity we have available for us today. Yet we are cocooned as much as they, if not more. What about the high society of the 19th century? They certainly had the chance to meet, but did they? Some did, in letters, in speeches, in essays–in individual conversation and in thought. We have a superior opportunity today that our grandmothers and grandfathers did not, to join each other and meet and touch. To expand in ever finer measures. Flow fractal flow. Play fractal play. Touch. Meet.

:- Doug.

Ahh, metaphors!
Do we create you
or simply come to attention when
you slap our faces?
What matters most is that
with you we play.

:- Doug.

What are the questions that ought to try our souls today, here?

:- Doug.

It is now.

:- Doug.

To my good friends–

Spreading our touch more widely: interesting twist on that in reading from Bohm and Peat’s Science, Order, and Creativity. I have jumped ahead and read some stuff about Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry. I am taken with the notion that the growth here comes from adding the same shape at ever smaller scales, so that the same grows in the direction of smaller. Kind of like my notion of peeling the onion from the inside. Here it is additive: as the shape is repeated in smaller parts (for instance, adding a triangle or outward vee shape to each straight line, and then to the sides of the vees in turn), the shape grows outward. If done three-dimensionally (or as these authors point out, someplace between 0 and 3 dimensions, probably in fractions of dimensions, say 2.78 dimensions), on a living, growing basis, pretty soon more and more points outside the shape are drawn within the shape. Add to this picture the notion of tendrils and filaments, and pretty soon the whole world’s gossamer is throbbing with conversation. If the tendrils are seen as fractals as well, they are growing tendrils, too. The tendrils are fed from their roots as well as from their tips where they connect with others. Flow fractal flow.

So that means engaging conversations wherever and whenever I can. It means taking conversations deeper, to more meaningful spaces, and seeing what opens up. It means encouraging others to do the same, whether by simply seeing how good it is and can be, or by asking them to help spread their tendrils of conversation. It means enlisting others. It means enlisting in others’ movements to add fractal dimension for both. It means shaking people up, bringing persons into being. It means connecting through you, tendrils everywhere. It means not moving people, but touching persons. It means touching the living gossamer, weaving it thicker, weaving it more alive. It means opening a living space for the tendrils to meet and grow persons, ever-changing ever-new persons, sparking nodes where tendrils touch.

Sometimes when the tendrils touch, the sparks they produce are arguments and fights, and these produce a different person from when another tendril touches and sparks say a sexual fire or a tenderness. All are valid, for all exist. Flow fractal flow.

:- Doug.

A fractal conversation

We can grow in conversation in
fractal dimensions.
I’m not sure what
this means.
The closer we draw in
the more
the patterns repeats
and grows
we grow with the pattern and
each other.
It does not happen just with
whole numbers
and whole persons
but with fractions
as well
fractions of dimensions
fractions of conversations
the heart grows many
strings
tendrils
from which conversation can
pluck
infinite tunes
fractional dimensions
in conversation
the other person is
not wholly other
not wholly me
we are not one
and
we are not two
someplace in
between
we grow
as we draw our self-same line
more and more are
drawn inside
till an infinity
are within
a smaller and smaller
drawing.
Fractal conversations
a living field
generating persons
of infinite dimensions
interplaying.
Decreasing, finer scale
includes more
You can change your world
you can change this bit
this little bit
perhaps again
hope
small scale change
smaller and smaller.

:- Doug.

Each generation has the task of devising a conviviality for its time. Ours must find a way to relate to each other when the flood of history is toward hiding apart from each other.

:- Doug.

An important step to take is to start seeing ourselves and our activities as with permeable skins, wavering, uncertain, changing boundaries.

For example, consider my friend with the “old church:” perhaps they see church as a Sunday activity filled with ritual and sermons, and Christianity as worship and beliefs, and themselves as Christians as distinct from other people. If instead they saw church as leaking into Monday and Saturday…, and the work of the church as being a flowing into the world…, and themselves as Christians as people doing the work they are able to do around themselves…, their view of their situation would become more flower-like.

So could ours if we took the same view. The world is not just flowing and changing, but it is interacting a little here, not at all there, and a lot with the people in New Orleans or Pakistan. They are causing reactions with persons here to a larger or smaller extent. All is intercourse, flooding or misting or missing others, and all are affecting others near and far. Fuzzy edges… be the wind….

The meaning of this becomes clear in the church setting: find someone to help, however you can help. You may have to ask others to help you. You may even have to ask the ones you think you are helping to help you. There is a clue here, for the ones you think you are helping may be your help. As you get busy, answers appear: sometimes they hit us in the face, sometimes they slip around the corner and we have to be alert to the disappearing shadow. Maybe they decide to help old folks; maybe they decide to start a foster grandparents program. People start coming around to help, activity increases, others hold hope and pray, and soon people are gathered, and things are done. Fuzzy edges, uncertain boundaries, permeable skins.

:- Doug.

Candle the insight
ask the dream itself
for help

:- Doug.

In the world I see the whole acts as a single organism, yet each individual has practically complete freedom. Conversation is a fractal of this: each member of the circle is free, even free to leave the circle, yet the group acts as one. All the individuals are necessary to provide the eyes and vision; the group is necessary for effective choice and action.

:- Doug.

There is more than me. There is more than you. The all which is more is G-d. This is why the mystics say G-d is both imminent and transcendent. Imminent, G-d is part of each and all. Transcendent, G-d is the all which is more than each and all. This is the evidence. A mystery.

:- Doug.

The conversations we have are part of the large conversation, part of G-d. The closer we come to intimacy, the closer we come to the embrace, the center, of the conversation. So when I invite people to a deeper conversation, to ask each other What do we want to create? I am inviting them into the embrace.

The embrace is the center of the Great Conversation.

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

I saw that I am walking within this great conversation and intercourse of waves and particles and filaments forming the gossamer of the world, and from that I saw that G-d not only speaks but is this conversation, G-d is conversation: G-d is what G-d does: there is no separation of particle and wave, be and do, light and dark.

So for a time now I will see all in motion, all in intercourse, all in shimmering filaments of gossamer, waves and particles interacting, and the overall, the thing we call the Cosmos is also called G-d.

:- Doug.