FootprintsintheWind.com

Ritual is a crutch to help us into relationship, into remembering and finding and making meaning. The day will come when we will not need reminding.

:- Doug.

If I take away all the little things, the labels, the I ams, then G*d is. And I am in G*d. Is that not enough and more?

:- Doug.

My mind could go away, as in Alzheimer’s for instance. My ability to write, to think, to pray, to meditate. And then would I not be meditating all day, just being present to what was happening inside and out?

:- Doug.

Maybe I will disappear as a drop in the ocean, and the ocean dry up, and yet, the salt from the tear drop will remain. God will cry it. I cannot know this, yet it warms me.

:- Doug.

Definitions limit us, as much as they liberate.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1042

We are in danger of no one getting heard, whether it is the majority or a minority. We are thumping on each other’s skulls and screaming into their broken eardrums so much that we are not heard, nor can we hear much any longer. We are in danger of falling apart for want of hearing.

Please pass it on.

© c 2010, 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

Today I am sitting alongside while God hears me.

:- Doug.

Moving beneath all moving
Community beneath all community
Verb not noun
Holomoving, personal, intentional,
conscious, loving, living
G*d hears

:- Doug.

Get your ears out there
Be hear-some

:- Doug.

Where are there people who are doing the same things in ones and twos who maybe don’t even see their need, don’t see that there are others who might have pieces of the puzzling next steps?

Of course they are all around us, but what noises do they make, what actions do they take?

:- Doug.

Get your ears out there
For people needing each other

:- Doug.

In conversation is hope
In conversation is responsibility
In conversation we live

:- Doug.

Conversation is community’s promising journey.

:- Doug.

We have pictures of perfection, Heaven, or the Kingdom of God, which are all sweet, loving, involved and good. This is unrealistic for any world, not just this. There is too much variety in any possible universe for such. Accept our richness. Accept falling short. Love from there.

:- Doug.

For our grandchildren: can we choose life? Will they have clean health-giving air to breathe, sunlight to enjoy? Will they have wholesome foods? Will they be strong and joyous or weakened by racking coughs and deleterious foods? Will their throats burn from the air and their skins from the sun? Will they have lesions or smooth skins and shiny hair? Will their grandchildren survive?

:- Doug.

The problem with these wordings is perhaps that I am trying to both flood out into the spacious openness of the all there is and at the same time to speak precisely. Can one speak precisely about something expanding beyond our grasp?

:- Doug.

Once we can leave our little egos behind and move into the arena where borders and skins and edges dissolve, our identity becomes just that: one and our.

The one and our.

It is not even a mere collective. We are greater than a potful of people, thrashing about. We are one organism, working synchronistically.

:- Doug.

For our grandchildren
Choose life
We cringe to read of cultures
Who sacrifice their children
To gods of their harvest
Yet do we sacrifice our grandchildren
For filling our gas tanks and bank accounts?
Let us choose life
For them
It is a joyous thing
To do for our grandchildren
& we can choose life

:- Doug.

Larger, larger, larger
I am
Expansive, open, extending
Beyond the ends of the
Known universe
Beyond holding in
Any sack of skin
Edges melting shading into
All there is
Larger, larger, larger

:- Doug.

If we don’t do it together, it won’t get done.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1041

We stand in need of, more than holy communion, holy communitying. G*d is the community of the all there is; let no one pull asunder what G*d has made together. Yet we are in a culture that continually fractures us apart—with each other and within families and even within our own souls. We compete even to get first to the next stop light, we fight for our rights, we take sides in elections and between elections, we scream at politicians and “those” people who support other politicians, we divorce each other, children ignore their parents, we take pills to right our thinking, we anguish over our own thought processes thinking ourselves sick. We are pulling ourselves apart at the seams and rending the fabric in between. There is hope, and promise, but only those in communitying and conversing: there are no guarantees. We have to work to make the promise real, to put muscle and sinew on the bones of the hope.

Please pass it on.

© c 2010, 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

Will your grandchildren survive to 2055?

:- Doug.

Conversation moves us to effective action.

:- Doug.