FootprintsintheWind.com

Let’s not play at the edges, but turn the soil under our feet: we might not notice the soil, but it is that on which we stand, and this is changing how we see each other, relate to each other and the conversations in which we walk.

:- Doug.

Problem solving is using engineering talent to choose the deck chairs rather than design a better Titanic.

:- Doug.

People are not broken and they do not need to be fixed. Jesus taught us to be fishers of men and women, not fixers.

:- Doug.

Is a teacher at the front of a room of students the only model of learning there can be? Could there be better ways of calling people forth, giving information, applying wisdom, taking truth and equity into our lives, and whatever else learning is?

:- Doug.

Problem solving tells us that we have all there will ever be, and the best we can have is to arrange the pieces differently. There can be no present discontinuous with the past. There can be no hope. How can that possibly be reality?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 873

We can listen for G*d
In the very atmosphere
—Atmosphere beyond air’s molecules—
In which we move
If G*d is not a person
Our antennae alert
To being, living, loving
—Ours and mine and G*d’s—
Swirling, rustling so gently
By ears almost heard

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

This is not community—your doing for others. This is you feeling better about yourself, salving you guilt. If they cannot do for themselves and this is your best guess of what this one needs, then you have come nearer. Community flows in all directions.

:- Doug.

How is what I am doing “the dismantling of the empire in its social practices and in its mythic pretensions?” (Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, p 9)

:- Doug.

There is an alternative to the culture which enmeshes us.

:- Doug.

The pictures and stories of our culture
Saying this is the only way life can be
And the ones of possibility
Are both forms of imagination
Saying We have a choice

:- Doug.

“Been there, done that,” “Here is what those people need to know,” “There is no hope” are all forms of imagination—just the eyes dimmed kind.

:- Doug.

You and I are not the only ones with imagination. If we bring to the center those on the edge our world gets bigger. Immensely bigger.

:- Doug.

What is the possibility conversation for this community?

:- Doug.

Test
Where you are
Is this the best
We can do?
Can we imagine
Anything better?

:- Doug.

Perhaps
People are not broken
Even the ones we think are
Even the ones who say they are
Perhaps
We are not the answers for other people
Perhaps
They need to find other questions
Or we do

:- Doug.

This conversation will change lives. This conversation will change our community. Will you adopt that as your intention for the next 60 minutes?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 872

People cause the world
You’re a people
Cause something

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

Conversation is meeting G*d.

:- Doug.

Standing in the face of an other expands.

:- Doug.

I am insufficient to change our community—a community is more than one so it will take more than one.

:- Doug.

I am inviting you to use your imagination in service to our community.

:- Doug.

I am offering to my world an alternative now, the way to love: through the new conversation.

:- Doug.

The world can only be changed by acting together. The world is more than one individual and so it takes more than one to shift its course. The time of the great leader, if it ever was, is now passed. We have seen too much to follow one person’s ideas blindly. We need to be convinced. We need more than that to be part, to have the ideas and causes belong to us and us to them. Community change, community action; world growth, world action.

:- Doug.