FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 881

We are throwing life away—in the cornstalks, in the landfills, in the food grains we are putting into ethanol—and in the way we label and shut down people. It is a matter of scale, not of essential difference: whether it is genocide or refusing to hear another. The latter is only less visible, more subtle, but it removes the good that could come from these people just as effectively.

So if we change our images to growing people and producing more with what we have and throw away, to generating more from less, to increasing what we do with what we have, to the opportunities in front of us, then we generate, then we live, then we love.

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

Dollars and Numbers stand helpless before groaning.

:- Doug.

Poetry is unanswerable. That’s why we need it.

:- Doug.

It’s important to get community active. Not again.

:- Doug.

Let us be about working with people who see that a new now is possible—at their hands.

:- Doug.

Converse: When we speak and hear, peace is possible, even between nations. When we speak and hear, new is possible, even in a faltering economy. When we speak and hear, life is possible, even here.

:- Doug.

There is hope in plenty of people engaging one another. You talk to me. I hear you. We do something for the world. Others talk with us. We hear each other. We all do something for the world. Others talk with others. We hear about what others are doing for the world. We all do something for the world. Hope yearns for hope. Hope brings forth hope. We can.

:- Doug.

People often write God as empty, while I see G*d as exploding, reaching out.

:- Doug

G*d is imagination.

:- Doug.

Hear me
Voices plea
Hearing births hope
In us both
Hear me

:- Doug.

My mouth has been closed for several years. Is it time to speak up?

:- Doug.

Some problems we do not solve—they just get replaced with larger or different ones. What does that say about our problem solving as an occupier of our times?

:- Doug.

The satiety
Of our society
Steals our energy
For alternity

:- Doug.

This is the ministry of imagination.

:- Doug.

The past is provisional. We need not continue to live there.

:- Doug.

Seek to create micro communities—places where people together give unauthorized small acts to improve the world.

:- Doug.

The earliest recorded math lesson was in Genesis 1, where God said “Be fruitful and…multiply….”

:- Doug.

The underlying crisis is not the particular crisis but the crisis of conversation—we need to invent a way to work together, because we are being thrown together by global population compression. If we don’t we will solve that crisis through extinction—by war or disease or pestilence, what difference does it make?

:- Doug.

When we make arguments like that, now we’re into angels in pinheads!

:- Doug.

The missing conversations are all tied together in one: conversation.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 880

What is the work that needs doing in the world?
Do that
What is the work you can do in the world?
Do that

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 about the issues of our day, and the issue of the issues, the crisis of the crises, the cord that runs through them all that makes it so hard to get a handle on what we should do.

We should do. That is the simple and complex answer. It is difficult. Our problems are interlaced. We have told ourselves that other people are in charge, they will solve it. The problem is, all we have is ourselves. There is nobody else. We are the ones for whom we have been waiting. This is not just the fine sounding statement of our aboriginal elders for our time, this is the crux of all times: we are the ones.

What are we to do? Do. Who are we to do it with? Each of us who will. How? Conversing. Collaborating. We are the ones. Now is the time. Hear is the way.

Global population compression threatens us: war, anger, starvation, pandemics, poverty, disease. If we do not converse—and converse deeply, widely, intricately, causally, and committedly—our grandchildren are at risk.

We have never had to talk like this before. We have never had the planet at stake. We have never had our species at stake. We have never had the opportunities to lift us all.

Now is the time. Hear is the way.

So what we are about is working in the foundation beneath the individual issues. We are connecting people across issues. We are inventing ways to work on all the issues, creating pathways and neural connections to a larger mind, a larger collaboration, a conscious evolution.

This means getting people together to work on individual issues with an eye always on what we are doing—the ways are the underlying issue. Process is what we must invent. Meeting is what we need to grow organically.

:- Doug.

Have we become fat and unsassy? Do we miss our chance at happiness because of all the things which have us? Deadened and dull do we miss the liveliness of risking?

:- Doug.