Awaken your neighbor’s imagination
Awaken your own imagination
Here is the seed of our power
Heart of the divine image
We are together
See what can be
Taste what ought to be
Put your back into it
Dangers there are, yes
& opportunities to out-weigh our fears
Awaken your neighbor’s imagination
Awaken your own divinity!
Awake! Imagination divine!
You are alive, at work in humankind
When we together envision
Awake! Imagine!
:- Doug.
Having little conversations is doing the work. Who knows? A few of them will do larger work, have larger results. Perhaps I will be part of some.
:- Doug.
We have allowed rugged individualism to tiptoe into Selfhood: thus have we most missed our mark.
:- Doug.
What’s the most important thing you have done in your life? What’s the most important thing you want to do in your life, yet? What holds you back?
:- Doug.
Yes, you cannot fight city hall: but you can, with another, fix the mess city hall made.
:- Doug.
I want to spend time with you, learn about you. My questions this day are of these natures: Who are you? What role do I let you play in my life? What effective role can I play in this world?
:- Doug.
What is the work I want to do in the world? To open the world and the persons in it to each other and the larger new earths and new heavens they can create. To rip the grey cloths over our heads to let the rainbows of light out. This is about working and doing and meeting and loving and creating and imagining and G*dding and connecting and conflicting and embracing and growing and wholeing and fructifying and concrescing and nurturing and planting and hosting and inviting and transforming and dying and living and grieving and celebrating and living and choosing and fluorescing and salting and including and expanding and giving and being more than we are.
With all that, how can we put it into a word?
:- Doug.
Complexity increases as complexity increases. Complexity births complexity. We are inter-plaited.
:- Doug.
Wars in eternity—wars of ideas, wars of imagination—would not be the opposite of peace but the continual fulfilling of it.
:- Doug.
Devils accuse
To get us
Feeling guilty
& Looking at ourselves
G*d questions
To give us
Openings
& To each other
:- Doug.
The overarching issue of our age
We don’t see each other
We don’t hear each other
We don’t touch each other
We don’t taste each other
We don’t smell each other
We don’t know any other
Until we do
All our efforts at
Intercultural understanding
And peacemaking
Or even pounding people into submission
Are chasing after the wind
:- Doug.
Today I just want to get on with things.
This is a Western and Northern hemisphere kind of thinking, this getting on with things. It is seeing time as an arrow not a circle and as one thing at a “time” and not as many things at once. It is dominance thinking, truly, for the notion of getting on with it dominates all other thoughts, saying this is the only way. The idea that we can let things happen as they will, let people be whom they will, let life roll over and around us is clearly non dominating. Either is a choice open to us. Do we need to earn money? Do we need to pay the mortgage? Do we need to be unhappy? No to all of these. Do we need to eat? Do we need to sleep, to play, to love, to touch, to be touched, to be heard? Yes. But there is no writing that says it can only be done one way.
Do the clouds in the sky only take one shape? Do they rigidly stay the same size and form and stand in one place and say they will not be moved? Yet they live and laugh and cry and form and reform, pouring out their bounty in each stage.
So can we live as the clouds, laughing and flying and playing and going and coming another day?
We are more than the clouds, but not less. We can both choose to go with the winds and to shape the winds. We can imagine! And so we can fly higher than the clouds, morph in more ways, love and give in higher ways.
Whether or not this is of the strongest of metaphors, we can learn from it: we can relax and allow while we choose. We can imagine and work as well as let the world and allow others.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 815
I just saw the crane take to the air
from the far end of the pond
I had not seen him till that momentI wonder:
What else do we
not see
even when we look
until it moves?
Please pass it on.
© c 2008, 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
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
Do we try to solve the problem of these two people “at the table” without addressing the systemic and community settings? This is what led to my comment that you cannot fix a system because systems do not exist apart from the people who make them up. One writer suggests the answer is to partner with activists who address the systemic and cultural issues.
This however is not fully satisfying to me. You need to address people as persons, which does not necessarily imply one on one, but it does require that we get out of the mode of thinking of the system as being inhuman and having no face, no heart, no hands. The persons who make up the system or the culture have higher better dreams, and we must engage them through their dreams. I do not know how to do that, but I am one human searching and trying.
This implies that we can somehow find the higher heart in others. One step would be to stop seeing others as other. It will require that we actually meet others. So the more opportunities we can make for people to sit in a circle with diverse persons, the more progress we can make.
Another is that we get people talking. We ask them what they are about, who they are, what their dreams and aspirations are. I am just beginning to learn to do this. One thing that has worked for me is to ask people to tell me the story of their lives as a fairy tale. This certainly gives many hooks and entry points to try to find their dreams. I have not been deliberate in looking for their dreams—so it is here I must turn my attention.
Another is to search out people in conflict, for here is the edge of us. Getting people together across wider areas seems to me the middle ground—the common ground?—between activism and mediation.
That seems to be the common ground I am seeking. We share humanity and we share the places we meet. We should not seek to make everyone clones of each other. We should seek the craggy edges where we can pinch and poke each other. Here there be not demons but—we can hope—and work towards—a future for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.
:- Doug.
Compassion comes in through the butt. If you would know someone, sit.
:- Doug.
We cannot work on a system, a culture, a paradigm, because these do not exist apart from us. The work must ever be with people.
:- Doug.
Moderate voices get drowned out because the dominant culture is dominance.
:- Doug.
When driving on snow, the harder you push on the gas pedal—at the start—the more you just sit there.
:- Doug.
Powered by WordPress
| RSS 2.0
| Comments RSS 2.0
| Based on Quentin
© Copyright 2025, Learning Works, Incorporated 