FootprintsintheWind.com

Dangerous prayer: What’s your question?
What if God in response asks
What’s your question?
In that I heard
What’s so important you will give your life?

:- Doug.

Our job is to hear you.

:- Doug.

You can let it go; but first you gotta get it out there.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 714

What does conscious evolution lead to? Since we are all part of the one, group work is explicate, unfolded, a central part. Our little open space, any open space, shows us 1. there is a larger world 2. we affect it. We did cause a swirl, a stirring. Something shifted in the world, in us.

Please pass it on.

© c 2007, 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

Ever notice that after a play or a good seminar, when we go home we want to talk about it? We want to assimilate it, re-enjoy, extend it. What if we could harness that energy at the event itself? Get the people there to assimilate, re-enjoy and especially extend it, starting right there? What if?

:- Doug.

Proximity: notice what can happen when we bring people who care near each other. Ideas bounce and blend and reproduce. Passions infuse. Keep us in tightly sealed containers and nothing new happens. Juxtapose us and there is possibility. For fire.

:- Doug.

If we express a person we come to know that person and share that person. Share with that person him or herself, share with us, share us, for in expressing another person’s truth, beauty and goodness we express all humanity’s. To express is to share.

:- Doug.

Overheard during the election campaign: “A country without borders is not a country.” Now, what assumptions underlie that statement? That who we keep out defines who we include? Is it possible that who we include defines who we are as well or better? A different assumption has ruled history: the person who has the largest boundaries is the strongest, most important. Ultimately then the goal would be to have everything—no boundaries, no limits.

:- Doug.

How low do we want people’s involvement? Head, chest or gut?

:- Doug.

We’re not opening space but opening people.

:- Doug.

Why do we want to close down the people?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 713

Sometimes we are best served to think upside out.

Please pass it on.

© c 2007, 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

Do we really want to close the down their contributions, to choke their enthusiasm before it is born? There is a continuum from Invitation to give their best on one end to Telling how it will be on the other. Closing down the people to opening them up. Yet there are ways to gain their heart and soul involvement and aim it: by the questions we ask, the places we direct attention.

:- Doug.

Why meet? To gain money, efforts, volunteers? Signing on to decisions already made? Ideas, imagination, energy? Do we want half hearted participation or participation with abandon?

:- Doug.

If you want participation
overcome your fear of participation
allow others’ participation
even to the point of killing your
pet ideas

:- Doug.

Conversation is changing
changing people’s minds
changing people’s hearts
changing the world

:-Doug.

Negative space
empty
open
shaped to embrace
malleable
time’s wide oceans
what’s not happening
what’s not said
what’s full
who’s not here
who’s not here who is here
where’s another direction
another
what takes energy away
when
how again
quiet
now
surprise

:- Doug.

The first snow
freshens
brings smiles

:- Doug.

Empty me
that I might be filled with you
Empty me
that I might be open
Empty us
that we might be

:- Doug.

The space we open
seems negative
is supple
so we meet all together

:- Doug.

After you ask
What is happening
in our conversation?
pause
then, lightly,
What is not happening?

:- Doug.

We are
here to hear

:- Doug.

Do I have the courage to be silent? If I just sit there, empty…. If I simply attract the reflection, the questions, the conversation…. Silence producing conversation….

:- Doug.