FootprintsintheWind.com

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, neither Tea Partiers nor Occupiers, nor any one of us has the one right answer. The world is too diverse for that. To scream at each other because the other does not adopt our solution would be laughable if it were not so sad.

What is needed is to hear one another as to our needs. We fear that if the other is in the ascendancy, then we will not get what we need, and therein lies our need to scream. For if we do not get what we need, we are at risk for dying.

Yet there are myriad solutions: many get a job, some choose to start a business, or just get to work; some cook, some tend wounds, some weld steel; some engage heart, some head, some muscle and sinew. All have dreams and a direction and a need to be heard. When we are heard, when we are able to engage our creativity and strengths, the world improves by just that much.

What we don’t need is any “side” requiring everybody to acquiesce to their program. There are many ways. Let’s allow others.

:- Doug.

Politicians are fundamentally at odds with us—because they think there is only one answer, one way. Business people as well, because they reduce life to Dollars and numbers. Neither is true because life and the us that is the world have many ways, many values beyond. A beating heart, a child’s laugh, the sheer immensity of the cosmos: all of this testifies to a cornucopia of responses, ways, answers, questions, stories, lives.

:- Doug.

Attend to the holiness—the wholeness, the interwoven character—of our world, to the end that all work together for one outcome: the fulfilling of each and all.

:- Doug.

I’m not old enough to be 65—nor do I intend to be.

:- Doug.

Consuming is our chief role in the economy and the economy, after all, is in this culture our raison d’être. We are told over and over, and from a young age, we are consumers. No wonder we are fat!

:- Doug.

Conversation forces us to become producers rather than consumers, which means we discover our own qualities and strengths, with (herein, magic!) the world.

:- Doug.

How must we appear to the ant?
Perhaps like clouds appear to us—
Something we look up to see
Dream upon
But do not notice its daily round
Here this moment gone the next
On some errand that matters not
Some day disaster might rain down on us
And we will scatter for shelter
But how little humans matter
In the grand scheme of things!

:- Doug.

Revolutionary it is to give away something valuable, the most valuable thing I have. Yet that is what I have been doing, inviting people to become producers of life, to find their qualities and strengths, to share them in community. So perhaps rather than seek to convert this larger to money, I do well to subvert. Giving is subverting. Subverting what cannot last. Giving lasts. It is the radical act of relating: giving the anonymous a face and a story. Its name is love.

:- Doug.

We need conversation so much
& we have so little
about which to converse!

:- Doug.

Conversation gives us opportunity to:

1. bring out or reveal to us our own truest qualities, our own deepest strengths
2. move from being consumers to producers of our lives
3. open the door to a fuller us
4. create magic by bringing together
5. enlarge individual and world

Conversation creates the space for these things to take place. Which of these things do you not want?

:- Doug.

All fear resolves
to the fear of death
and then we come to know
death is no stranger
and will visit me
or I will visit death
and stay
this we fear the more
or the less

:- Doug.

Is entrepreneuring about money—anonymous pieces of paper or bits in someone’s computer?

:- Doug.

Let us invent the next step, beyond learning from one another, to what?

:- Doug.

Depersonalization is implicit in mass scale. It is for this reason that taking conversational methods to large scale is rowing up a rushing stream.

:- Doug.

Forget living a life that matters
—live a day that matters

For that matters
—live a moment that matters
—this moment

:- Doug.

Shh. Go slowly for now,
notice
in moments particular—
walking
chewing
telephoning
playing with your mate—
a bit of the
larger unknown

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1197

Drop
all the nonsense
time now
to live

Please pass it on.

© c 2011, 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

We are in the soup—the soup of divinity. When I said this is the insides of God I realize now that was literally true. All is divine, all is divinity, divinity is all. Not merely in all but its essence. Everything—the totality—is holy. It is a mystery for us to meet anything holy—not as we meet another, nor yet as we meet ourselves, but as we explore new wonders. Open we must be, silent, receptive. Hearing we can. Hearing we are. It is in this soup, in this weave that we exist & become whole, complete, fecund.

:- Doug.

If competition and survival of the fittest is the rule of nature, why do humans continue to have poverty?

:- Doug.

Voice before voice
voice before words
comes out to play
in poetry

:- Doug.

When we listen to the clouds
the ageless
ever-moving
mystery
of which they speak
we can hear
if we will
we can know we are
                                     what we hear

:- Doug.

There is room in me
and in all of us
for immeasurable life
more than intertwining
more than interdepending
there is room in us
for us
for all life
now and yet to be
for life immeasurable

:- Doug.

Would you like to have a way to get your family talking about emergency medical decisions?

:- Doug.