FootprintsintheWind.com

G*d is a single plane,
droning through the crisp
wintry sky
and you hear below
or maybe you don’t

:- Doug.

When you meet G*d, how are your meetings?

:- Doug.

With what communities are you most actively involved? What conversations need to, want to, happen there? There is always a conversation to be held, a desire to move, to live, to breathe.

:- Doug.

Let us be opening so far that we suffuse with the “other” and “they” saturate “us.”

:- Doug.

There is something of G*d alive and active
in me, but it is not a saccharine Jesus, nor
a little faith within my heart, but something
flowing out and springing up from the whole.
There is life and movement in persons
–in persons–here and growing, inviting
us to be adult, real, responsible,
active and alive.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 644

I picked up a book which once belonged to my mother, now gone, to see how I could meet her and know how she thought. I found her there in love teaching me. Even your act of marking a book can instruct later generations. Take care you do it with love and joy.

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

G*d is B-ing:
Beyonding
Betweening
Birthing
Beginning
Bewildering

:- Doug.

Does G*d call on you to be generous….

:- Doug.

G*d is ever the same unchanging. That is true when we are in one frame of mind. It is utterly untrue when in another. And in still a third, both are ever true: we cannot understand but only embrace that G*d is both unchanging and ever changing.

:- Doug.

G*d is more. There is always more to G*d.
G*d is a light who keeps growing
a group hug who all keep bringing more in.

:- Doug.

Tolstoy took the sole purpose of his life as to be better. This is the role of imperfections within us. They are absolutely necessary. They show us we can be better. Ever.

:- Doug.

Whom do we want to become?

:- Doug.

When we quantify our aim, we set out for frustration. Numbers were designed by humans to count as many as there are of anything: there is always a next number. So there is always a next goal, we can never never reach the end, we must always settle for less than whole.

Life however consists in wholes: wholes within wholes; wholes connected to wholes; wholes making up and creating larger wholes. In life we can be complete.

These are parallel paths to more, yet one leads to separation and frustration, the other to completion, fullness, connection, and wholeness.

Do we choose More, more, or All us?

Each time you measure what you treasure, it grows smaller. What is the measure of love, of the infinite? Wealthier far than the miser in the counting house is the tribe together wandering the wilderness testing their resources.

:- Doug.

What if spirituality were something we are together? Not just do, not experience, not just are, either, but interweave and thereby create, together? A grace that happens on this playing field in the center? Something new, something apart from the old rituals and definitely something apart from sitting on your prayer cushion in your closet alone? What if it were something “done” in committee meetings and chance meetings, too? What if we grew because of we? What if we were the core of us?

:- Doug.

This will take some work, some pushing, some toil, moil, effort, craft, sweat. Did you expect ease?

:- Doug.

O, give dreams unto G-d for G-d is good with them.

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

Rumi says When mind is gone every tip of every hair has a new intelligence. This hit me hard and so these started out as notes. Peter Block says we need to attend to capacities not needs (hey! Notice that capacity!), and that we can anytime and anywhere choose to look deeper, grow intimate, seek the ideal. Buber says intimacy, meeting, is a grace, yet it is all around us waiting, waiting. So Block is saying, or rather I am hearing him to say, make room: be roomy, Rumi!

Notice those capacities, anywhere, anytime; seek intimacy, ideals (what else should we expend our lives seeking?); be foolish enough to seek the ideal, the meeting, the intimacy and bewildered when you do find. Make room, not space. Make home.

There is a risk in doing this. You might actually die. People might not take kindly to being disturbed by what is intimate and ideal. They might see how they have wasted their lives and challenge themselves. They might think the prophet is the problem not themselves. They might strike back. Most people however are too asleep, have too thick a skin to even notice and when they go away they go away. Some few will be awakened, some few awakened will perhaps make a difference or at least agree. Among these the dangerous ones that agree and then go back to sleep, thus encouraging others to slumber as well. Some have been killed by such as these, or lulled into their own sleep. Some have met and found themselves so changed that their old selves have died. But the opportunity for better for all is what matters, and it is larger than the evil, larger than the sadness.

:- Doug.

Conversations: we can ever invite. Every one is an unseen butterfly in the chrysalis. Some may come out now, some later. It is a grace to happen upon them when the time is right. Yet if we do not look, we do not see, we miss the meeting.

:- Doug.

We can only invite; little can we direct and nothing there is that we can control. So stand in bewilderment and awe; be willing to be the fool, the lost; throw yourself into what lifts your heart: this is how life grows. Flowers still bloom in the meadow even if there is no one to see or sniff; there is a chance, a chance, that a wayward bee or butterfly will happen by. Flowers can’t hold on to their bud; eaglets learn to fly; babies ever progress to walking. Hold not back, run, soar, dive into this.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 643

We need–I need–books of the Spirit and people of the Spirit because when we are far away from the flame, we grow cold and lifeless. But when we are called back to our fire, we are thawed. The fire is at our center, the center of a sphere made up of all of us, and it is about melting our being into action and our action into being.

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

G*d of the ducks and ducklings,
G*d of the rain and trees,
G*d of the cities and the open spaces:
You we embrace.

:- Doug.

What questions tug?

:- Doug.

If you will just
set out to do amazing things–
like meet
and have a conversation

:- Doug.