FootprintsintheWind.com

The field of the all there is
is love
it has to mean us

:- Doug.

For G*d so loved
that the world came into existence
lover and beloved
the unnoticed Bigger Bang beneath

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 747

The question for all time is Do we wish to work toward a world of machine shape or one of human shape?

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

The picture of God we carry does not decide whether we can have a personal relationship. Old man, young man, woman, attributes or none, Spirit, force, field, or any other image: all are inaccurate. Yet none precludes saying my Intimate One.

:- Doug.

Last night I read a piece by Jeff Aitken about how as a Jew who had a first nations background, he felt like an outsider. This was pointed to by Chris Corrigan, a person who feels like an outsider because of Ojibway plus Irish and Scottish backgrounds. And I felt it even though I am white and protestant if not Anglo-Saxon, but was fat at least through grade school and have been through high school and puberty. We all feel like outsiders and we all long to be insiders: loved, accepted, even argued with.

We have an opportunity: include one another.

:- Doug.

Turning to one another. Peace. I really have in mind the Hebrew shalom: safety, prosperity.

Turning to one another: What can it mean? Literally, we face each other. We trust each other. We contend with one another. But we are together, for that is where our growth comes—in the between. That is where our health and wholeness exists.

So “we” are not so much about “together” as meeting in between. We face each other, for whatever comes of it. There is a shared event, a common fruitfulness, which leads to our individual fruitfulness and back again.

Is that not what we want is to be fruitful? Is that not what we seek when we are included, and what we miss when excluded?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 746

What we need in this old world that God so loves is more turning to one another. Peace means wholeness, fullness, completeness, a place beyond space-time where everything is possible. We all feel as if we are outsiders: this then is our chance! We can include.

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

A real relationship takes reciprocal acts of compassion. Now then when you act to help someone suffering from poverty, do either of you expect compassion to flow from the one who has “less?” Actually, you do: for when your help is met with indifference rather than heart-felt thanks, you feel hurt, impoverished. So when you seek to help, seek also to be helped; give the person the dignity of being met as whole and human. You can in the least ask for his or her blessing, or to be met.

:- Doug.

What is the system but the betweens, and then the betweens the betweens? It is little wonder, and a little wonder, that the system has more capacities and more surprises, than the individuals constituting it. We say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, yet how little we act upon this! Its name? Emergence.

Is this not precisely why we bring a speaker into a group or send folks off to workshops: to get us unstuck we say, but really it is to introduce a new element, and especially a new set of betweens? The betweens may irritate or inoculate or innovate—it does not matter which—we are looking for the spark that the betweens bring. Yet there are ample betweens in any group, if we would put them to work.

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

Dissatisfactions are both good and bad, I am beginning to think. They are bad when they become to a culture, as they have in ours, the drivers of who we think we are. We define ourselves more by what we don’t have than by what we have, and certainly more than by who we are. Someone else has a BMW while we have a Mercury: we decide someday that is what we want to have. We live in a 3 bedroom house and we see a huge house at the end of a long driveway and define our selves by that “someday.” We see an ad on TV and say “I have to have that (to be whole).” We define our businesses by their goals, which is a not too subtle way of saying “we are not where—nor who—we want to be.” This is illness.

But health is in dissatisfactions, too: we see a need in our society—poverty, injustice, peace—and we set out on a mission. We see a way we can come together and we look for openings.

Is it possible that the difference is in what the dissatisfactions are based upon: one person, me-centered as compared to other and outward centered?

Are goals and dissatisfactions related? What are our goals about—us or the larger world?

In Buber’s terms: if our goals and dissatisfactions have to do with Its, then we are not (usually) healthy, but if about Thous, then we are healthy. More precisely, Its to the exclusion of Thous are not healthy. Or perhaps turned-in, gathering and getting, rather than outward facing, what good can we do?

This gives us a stronger base in our group work: “What good can we do?” is more life-giving than “How can we get more members, dues, money?”

:- Doug.

The pattern is love. The pattern is the gossamer web. The pattern is conversation, love and God. The pattern means us. The pattern addresses us. That is what the conversation needs to be about: addressing persons to offer an opening in the pattern, to offer curiosity and color.

:- Doug.

The next stage of evolution is 1. conscious and 2. together. The second keeps the first from being hubris. The second takes the first further.

:- Doug.

Conversation is con, with, and verse, turn: to turn with. An image of dancing. There is an attraction here: movement and together, drawing closer, holding on to one another laughing. Conversation is love lived out. We know that God is love so now we know too that God is conversation.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 745

When we don’t know what to do, it is good to do something; it is also good to do nothing. When we know not what to do, try something or try nothing.

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

Conversations float around us among us like these snowflakes dance—fly, fly, float, float, bump, connect, gather together and make the world new.

:- Doug.

Let’s give meeting a chance.

:- Doug.

When we say God is unchanging it is because we want our ideas of God—that is, our minds—to be unchanging, unperturbed. We want the easy way out—we want a handle on our god—and a leash. The easy way out of what? Meeting. G*d is unknowable in a fixed, rigid way.

:- Doug.

The only thing that has ever changed the world is conversation. If you think conversation is only words, you have mistaken the skin for the heart. For conversation is intercourse between two or more beings. The least visible most important part is between. Conversation is that in which we live…and it means us.

:- Doug.

The work is inviting persons into the world as we see it—and helping them change us and it.

When I invite you, I invite me as well. This is opening. This is opening both of us.

Us and it: as in Thou and It. Both are necessary. Engage our world.

:- Doug.

How do we get people talking more about how to improve our world?

:- Doug.