FootprintsintheWind.com

People can be heard, people can make their place work for everybody. Humbly, really.

:- Doug.

Finally a deep breath
finally we are home
finally someone heard us
finally we matter
this is what it means to
disorganize your community

:- Doug.

the ego-filled notion in the saying, We will leave traces; but humbly we do leave traces that in the hint of a smile, or the sweat of a brow, endure. What traces we leave in hearts endure; ego has no admission there.

:- Doug.

Equally unreal
our hopes our fears
straight line
we fear the bad continues
we hope our good extends
undulating syncopated
is our real living

:- Doug.

When our community is rightly disorganized, we start breathing again.

:- Doug.

Traces
Traces of our human spirit
In the skies, in our buildings,
Our gardens, our ventures
Traces of our lives
Traces of the life, the love
Traces which come to our feet as we walk
Traces we leave for others to make their way
Yet more wonderful
Traces
Unfolding
Another trace we make
Today
What are the traces
We are drawing?

:- Doug.

Come and be yourself: your largest, most generous, loving, living.

:- Doug.

Can we make this world a better space?

:- Doug.

The necessities of human beings are food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and meeting.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 990

How do we infuse joy and love into nursing homes? Into humanly declining abilities?

We have a distaste for seeing people losing abilities after a lifetime of being more. Perhaps it stems from fear of, and therefore a wish to put out of view, our own decline. This might frighten us more than death.

Had an email exchange last night with a friend about this question. She said “I think the letting go of who our family members are while they are still present with us may be more challenging than letting them go after death.”

She spoke of the absence of rituals for this kind of a loss. Might there be some value in developing some rituals for this?

It is a reversal of the development process of babies, and perhaps not so much a reversal but a completion of the bell shaped curve of life.

What rituals can we devise to celebrate the graduation of a fully-functioning adult into loss of those functions?

Please pass it on.

© c 2009, 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

Buber says (I and Thou, p 10) that the work of an artist, my work!, my life!, involves sacrifice and risk: sacrifice of the endless possibilities for just this one now; risk of my whole being—if I do not do my art aright, it is broken, or it breaks me. Heed this.

:- Doug.

They call me an artist with small groups: because they can do something wonderful!

:- Doug.

We are not separate
Something about us that is together—
We are not fully ourselves
When we separate ourselves from others
We are one
There is one life
& that life is sometimes called God

What do I mean? What do I see?
Salvation is no individual thing:
It has to do with all of us

If there is one of us left behind
We are all left behind
When one clod is cut off from the continent
The continents are impoverished
We must take up our role as part of each other,
Others as part of us.
For if we say it matters little to us if
Some bum or criminal is left outside
We have not love
We have not life
If we will not meet, we are not met
If we meet not, we are not

Salvation is no individual thing,
It has to do with all of us.
The world is larger than
The horizon we cast with our physical eyes
There is one universe, many tunes, many
Rhythms, many palettes
Each tone and shading is necessary for the
Whole work to be
A broken bowl holds no nourishment
A lap gone away nurtures no babe
If the world does not work for one person
The world does not work
Heaven is what we do here
For all of us

:- Doug.

Touch one another.

:- Doug.

If we think of living questions and story fields as words to describe the neighborhood in which we move and live, and look for how those questions and fields can be good neighbors, we can increase the life of our world. If we see the urban or natural neighborhoods as metaphors for these question and field neighborhoods, what then? We begin to see that inserting our own questions and touching the fields by building them up, we are enlivening, we are part of what exists. We meet. We meet the fields, the questions. In this relation we both exist.

What I am looking for words to say is that there is something larger in which we exist. Our being comes forth out of this something larger. It needs us and we need it. It needs us for the life we bring to it by strengthening its life, by teeming within it. So our role is to meet, to live, to add life to all the others and this larger.

This something larger meets us as a field, as questions: faces us, draws us, sends us, asks us.

We are not the centers so much as touching the centers, affecting them. We can bend the forces of the fields, we can concentrate or dissipate them.

:- Doug.

How do we shape the space in Open Space? Circles; living questions; invitations; masking latent spaces; posting topics; setting chairs; setting up a board; space-time grid; paths from any seat to paper; paths from center to wall; paths among groups; food paths; paths between anonymity and intimacy; paths between large groups and small: respiration.

Physical geometric spaces; mental spaces; spiritual space; individual space. All these spaces can be shaped.

Who is responsible? The Open Space answer: everyone. You are in charge. What do you want to do? Why don’t you see to it? Yet the inviters have some responsibility to shape the space enough to allow people to ask for what they want. So we set the circle, start the marketplace wall, lay out the markers, paper, tape.

What do we open space into? Other space, the world, hearts, minds, the future, the past, now, meeting!, centers, the third being between and among.

How do we shape the space? How do we garden first? Garden first says Life first: life and sun and warmth and green and breeze and rain on your cheek. We shape the space in Open Space by opening a green space, a rain on your cheek place, where we can smell the humus and the freshening. We shape the space by attending to this freshening in people: always breezes and mist, always green and sun; always opening out to larger vistas. It is most successful when the shaping is not seen, when it most resembles nothingness. And yet it is shaped, pointing us toward wholeness.

:- Doug.

What we call sentimental might actually be remembering what it felt like, what it was like, to be in relation, fully present.

:- Doug.

Can we about turning the human spirit loose upon earth?

:- Doug.

Is your life so horrible that living it requires you to have your eyes somewhere else?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 989

The itsy-bitsy group climbed up the water spout
Down came the rains but didn’t wash them out
‘Cause they had built a series of aqueducts all round
That watered all our crops and fed the folks all ’bout

Please pass it on.

© c 2009, 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

I open space for small groups to change the world.

:- Doug.

What makes us fear we will get nothing unless we go into the meeting and push for everything? Let us figure out how to listen, how to hear, how to truly meet.

:- Doug.

We want so much to grasp something that we will grasp any passing thought, and then jump to the next passing thought, endlessly throughout the whole millisecond.

:- Doug.