FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 641

I belove a G-d who
sings to his children
coos and chortles
challenges them to grow
gives flowers and breaks into love ballads

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–

The fossil record, the geologic record, the astronomical record all say this universe is about 14 billion years old. Some folks doing math on Biblical texts have concluded the true age is 5 or 10 thousand years. This raises the question, How can a God who is faithful, just, loving, and unchanging lie to his children? Would God deliberately mislead? Would God leave a record of the enormity of the depth, breadth and length of his work in time which was wrong? Why would God lie? What’s in it for him to keep his children at a distance?

:- Doug.

I’m a person whose mind is warped by conversation.

:- Doug.

Open Space is about creativity and action.

:- Doug.

Capacities are released together.

:- Doug.

Ask people to work not from their deficiencies but their capacities. Especially when we are in helping mode. We do not want others dependent upon us, clinging: we risk not being able to move from dragging their weight. Moreover, this atrophies their capacities. Exercise capacities. This can challenge us because we think we have all their answers. We don’t. They do. So when we think we are asking them to exercise their capacities, we are exercising our own: the difficult capacity of shutting up, getting out of the way, offering our answers, letting others fall and pick themselves up.

:- Doug.

Be a poet
of invitation
to intimacy

:- Doug.

I am constantly
giving attention to you
I am your lover.
You are the sweet fruit
of my eye’s delight,
the reason for which
I am
there.
You too the beginning and the end
and where we meet
we create each other persons.

:- Doug.

Conversation is the most under-used tool of our generation.

:- Doug.

There is a power among you
a spark between you
do you look
do you see.

:- Doug.

If we are to grow we have to get outside ourselves. If we are to help others grow, we must invite them outside themselves, too.

The real learning takes place on the playground.

One way to invite out is to lecture to them; this is good for facts and relatively static things we need to learn. Another way is to do it for them; good for the totally helpless. Still another is to engage us together; this draws us our to invest our selves.

:- Doug.

It is possible to
join with neighbors to
make a bit of the world good
It is possible those
neighbors are of another
generation.
David dreamed the temple
Solomon built
It is for you to
reach out to
make joining real.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 640

I used to think
–as if I’ve forsworn it!–
that I am something
special in the universe
a beloved of G-d
a possessor of special talents
an unusual good heart,
then I saw
–O that I may continue to see–
that I am one among the mites
populating and working the compost heap
not a mere grain in the warehouse
but truly one of special talents
special in the universe
good heart, and beloved of G-d–
just like billions upon billions:
imagine what is possible if
we sparkle off each other.
What a wonder!
we are

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 our good friends–

This seems to me true this morning: the real ill of this culture is the isolation we have from each other.

We are crazy-making when we spend all day talking to ourselves. Hope comes from sitting with some friends and talking about what’s possible. The very rugged individualism which served this country so well has gone berserk, has fed upon itself, has intermarried its sister and produced monsters and psychological illness. Our biggest problem is our severance from each other. When we get with others, we activate our creativity and caring, our higher possibilities and capacities.

We always have more resources than we knew, and we find these not by continuing to look in the same chest of drawers in our room, and under the same furniture there, but rather by looking outside, for the possibilities we seek are bigger than can be in these places, or else why seek at all?

Many have given up seeking: this is the depression which is common among us, and comes and goes. If we get outside of ourselves, if we find a way to help others, our world grows larger. We become more real, more alive.

What do you think? How can we grow our world?

:- Doug.

This is a way to read
the Bible that opens us:
few answers
many questions

:- Doug.

I don’t see this talk of conversation as philosophy. It is a science describing what is observable.

:- Doug.

Conversation is holy: whole making, it opens us to a larger world. This opening births life in us.

:- Doug.

We not only live in conversation, we are brought to life in conversation: here we are birthed, birthed anew, and birth each other. Here we do the work of life.

:- Doug.

You whose name is We
The all there is says We
Love means We
and creates persons

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 639

You have heard me say Honor your insights. Write them down. Now hear this: Don’t just write them down. In concert with other persons, plant them, grow them, harvest them, eat them, put them to work, let them work you–all of you, nurture their expansion beyond your imaginations. The key is “with.”

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

What issue is getting people excited? Disturbed?

:- Doug.

Is G-d prompting any of your communities to be generous? What are you hearing, you with your ears to the ground? To open out? To do something?

:- Doug.