FootprintsintheWind.com

What would it look like for you to have compassion for G*d?

:- Doug.

Small groups get to work on large things.

:- Doug.

When people say Open Space will not work chances are they are looking at the wrong end of the tool. The shape of the handle, the grip by which you pick it up is less important than the business end. The business end is working together premised upon a trust that ordinary people can do work that matters. How you pick up the tool—the market place, the wall, the circle—is of less importance.

So open space is not so much circle, bulletin board, market place: it is mainly the last three words that we so often do not hear: get to work.

:- Doug.

I do not believe that the world works primarily by force and power. Some parts of it do. But look about you: there are more kind and gentle people, more giving, willing to help people than people bent the opposite way. Those who are in power and try to run the world by force are fearful people: holding on with their fingernails, forced to use force since it is the only power they have and they know its weakness and their inability to sway people save they use coercion. They know they have no power if the field were equal. The world is primarily existing and continuing by the work of the people of the primary focus of heart.

People respond how they have been trained to other’s tragedies: they send money, they go. We see it every time there is in the news a major tragedy. It is only the loud voices which try to make us into machines and cold shoulders: the elected officials, the corporate chieftains. They have gotten so much into All for me, they feed such wounded encapsulated fattened egos, that the only thing they know is coercion and yelling. The world would work without them…and possibly better. Think we would not have figured way to distribute electricity without CEOs? Invented wheels? Met the needs of others?

The real thing here is that we trust the people. People have good in them and will work toward that. They need no coercion, they need no carrot. There is inbred in each of us a love for others. Sometimes it is not developed. Often it is beaten out of us by the system that others have developed and that we have acquiesced in. But we can in one day throw off these ropes and move to make things better. Then the next day we can choose to go back to business as usual, or go the new way, or at least do more of the one day doings.

:- Doug.

Get busy in some small group or groups—the more the better—the more loosely and fuzzily connected the better—the more wide-spread upon our earth the better. Here, among people who hold each other up, you will grow. You will grow yourself, your companions, and the world. Here, nothing is lost, all finds its highest and best.

Nature mostly puts the flower at the end of the stem.

:- Doug.

An agenda can function like an invitation—opening space for who is possible.

:- Doug.