FootprintsintheWind.com

Petals on the flower we are
Beautiful
Each one
More beauty
Together
We live
Connected
We work
Only engaged
When we breathe upon each other
We live
Flowers live
Petals on many flowers

:- Doug.

Community is primary because it is here that we are brought forth, here where we find our being, here where we make action. Here is where we make whole the world. Here is G*d: here we stand in the face…and make faces!

:- Doug.

Is the human substance dominated or dominating? Or something else again? For this we must hope—and work.

:- Doug.

Is it whole yet? Is the world whole? Then we have work to do!

:- Doug.

I’m with the Conspiracy for a Better World.

:- Doug.

We are community disorganizers, inviting people to take responsibility for what they would love to see in the world.

:- Doug.

Much “worship” these days seems intent on drowning out the still small voice. Be still and know that I AM God. G*d as community gives us the I can to say I am G*d.

We need—if I am any indication—to have time to ponder, to go deeper, to see what is in us deeply, to hear how G*d is listening to us, needs us.

:- Doug.

I don’t always agree with myself.

:- Doug.

Will you listen with me? Will you converse with me?

:- Doug.

Why is it important to hear one another?

:- Doug.

What does it mean to devote the here and hear to the there? What does it mean to have the now authenticate the then? It means to live the then now, it means to hear here if we want to hear there.

What can we try? Hearing.

What can we try? Being vulnerably present.

What can we try? Saying our peace.

Saying our peace, our fullness. Honoring our insights by speaking them. Honoring our insights by hearing them, giving them time and space in conversation to take to wing, and then letting them cut the airy way.

What can we try? Hearing the person on the next phone call.

What can we try? Silence after the person speaks, asking for silence to consider his or her contribution.

What can we try? Asking for time to complete our contribution.

What can we try? Asking for us to accept that what the other person has said is their reaching toward truth, and that we are all on the same quest for the real, the whole, the good.

What can we try? Listening not just to words but to emotions and for the more beyond both.

What can we try? Meeting others as persons who matter.

What can we try? We can ask for others’ ideas. We can play off their ideas. We can hear. We can take in.

What can we try?

Friend, this is challenge. This is not easy stuff. It takes courage to speak up and ask for silence. It takes courage to meet in a new way, however old that way actually is. It takes courage to drop masks which we think are shields to protect us from the world, when in reality they are gloves which prevent us from touching.

It takes time, but saves us the decades of dancing around the real into which “getting on with it” leads us.

What can we try?

:- Doug.

There is a first day of next month following the last day of this, so we will still be living then, providing we do not hold our breath!

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 848

We are here not to convert but to converse.

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

We can get into rhythm with one another. Now. Conversation, deeply engaged, is our way—point & counterpoint, wind & fury, rhythm, rhythm.

:- Doug.

Otherness affects us two ways in our hour. One is where we see others as alien, things, not like us. Two is where we see others as the ones to undertake to change things, not us. Both hurt.

:- Doug.

We are Community Disorganizers, engaging people in their community.

:- Doug.

How may we conversify the world?

Please help me refine and mold this concept of conversifying.

People are busy. It will take work to find the right people. We will need to explain and search all over. People have their own projects, and so we need to work with them within those projects.

So what is the hook that will get people conversing about conversing?

Perhaps we need to find the activists, see what needs doing, talk about the need of conversing, and lead into the need of conversifying.

The way to get people engaged is to engage them one on one. You do not have time to do that all. I do not have time. Instead, we need to engage others who will engage others. We need to learn from each other how to do this, we need to make up new ways to fit the new situations we meet every day in a changing worldscape. So we need each other, across projects. We need to talk up talking up, we need to conversify across boundaries, we need to learn and apply and cross-pollinate.

Then too, if we get our volunteers working on more than one project, they can see efficiencies and ways to work together, to make effectivities.

The key is finding ways to engage others, and spread the engaging. The conversifying is about spreading the engaging.

:- Doug.

We must grasp life with both hands or we do not have it. One hand only, right brain or left alone, is not enough. We must plunge in, not wading but swimming, nothing held back. But we want to hold back. Why? Fear? Something more to the bone? Fear and greed are other sides of the same coin. Yet we can never hold anything. We can only become, grow, transform. It is the thread that is the real us, not the knots. More truly, it is the pattern of the threads when they touch and move to touch elsewhere that is us: the melody and harmony and rhythm, not notes written on the page nor individual notes struck plucked or blown. The continuity of us is only past; the real us is is-ing.

:- Doug.

It is my duty to call attention to these things. Others may or may not be moved, changed, transformed, metanoiaed by it, but they have no chance to be if I do nothing.

:- Doug.

We bring forth what has never before existed.

:- Doug.

There is something in us which is both unique and desires others. We desire to be met by others, confirmed by them, known of them, and to know them. We go too far if we want to be them, to be homogeneous with them, to be bland sameness. It is the mix we seek, not the dissolving. We make it our business to mix. Playing savoring weaving: mystics.

:- Doug.

It is our business here to engage living process. It is our business to evoke and provoke and elocute living process. We cannot hope to be catalyst—changing others but remaining unchanged: this steals us from the living process.

What we do here touches all of life and is touched by all of life. Perhaps it is this web we also rip: we rip and it can grow in new directions and colors and notes and rhythms.

:- Doug.

We limit each other
& In this we open one another

:- Doug.