FootprintsintheWind.com

History echoes.

:- Doug.

It is still now.

:- Doug.

It is good conversation goes a different place from where we imagined.

:- Doug.

There is a god
within all that
whom we can rescue

:- Doug.

Such a small god
Who does for you
Magic tricks

Such a small god
Who keeps you
Feeling Guilty

Such a small god
Who invites you to heaven
After this life only

And yet you see:
We are among God;
We are called to invest ourselves in others’ lives;
There is a heaven we are called to work toward which is not here yet

:- Doug.

Contest: Complete this bumper sticker: Help stamp out stupidity, ….

:- Doug.

The gold standard in much of our life in this culture, especially in the care of those approaching death, is the individual. What does that individual want? Yet each of us is made up of many of us: our parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, work mates, speakers, strangers, and even our children and grandchildren—all who have been touched by us and all by whom we have been touched. The true individual is this web of life. This is what we cannot divide, that from which we cannot ourselves cut off.

:- Doug.

See how empty is this space between us. See how, because it is empty, it is full of possibility, like these clean sheets of paper. Any future can be written here. You can hold back and lose that future. Or you can venture to sit with another and nurture. Or you can be vulnerable enough to be nurtured. How empty this space for fullness! How full of emptiness! Energy and stillness swirling together, call forth each other. You are invited into this emptiness, eyes first, later feet.

:- Doug.

There is an empty open space here in the midst of us and I am inviting your eyes across it now. In a bit I’ll invite your feet to step into the open space at once full of possibility and emptiness to create your futures, individual and combined.

:- Doug.

Hold them in the light of open space.

:- Doug.

Open Space is the Inviting to a new world, the Freeing to do the work, the Calling Home to the one whole.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1327

In those days
We feel most flat
Lacking being
Start conversing
For each person
Adds to us
A dimension

Each a new dimension
But do we allow
Only more flatness
Or that which runs across
Our grain
Or which produces a new & different
Light note?

Please pass it on.

© c 2013, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/321-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Fire engines going past: hold them in the light of Christ, that is the light of the good, the true, the beautiful, the whole: to be safe, to be good, to be loving. I feel like I just gained some understanding of that phrase, hearing “Christ” as the larger pulsing heart of the one all there is.

:- Doug.

The meta-conversation problem is approached by hearing on a different level. Sometimes subtle are the sounds—voices calling to us “friend,” “enemy,” “global warming,” “liberal crap,” “you can’t fight that, it’s human nature.” Sometimes far from subtle, the politicians and advertisers scream at us. All of these are meta-conversation. Rather pseudo meta-conversation, for the words travel one direction only, or we are not allowed to see any other possibility. Then there is the Internet where we do join with others in meta-conversation, but usually about inconsequentials—the price of gasoline, how to wash vinyl siding, the latest urban legend or truth. Above and through all this a buzz, a hum. Herein the promise, the whisper of meta-conversation.

:- Doug.

Can conversations even converse with one another? Do they have an existence of their own? If we examine the betweens, then it is possible that without any intention betweens do pass, cross, and touch, becoming cause of other betweens. If we see conversations as betweens then of course there would be betweens of conversations. The boundary of water and oil. The aisle in the Senate and the one in the House of Representatives. The news media.

:- Doug.

How to describe, to understand, meta-conversing? How do we meta-converse? How do we invite our conversations to converse?

For instance, the liberal camp and the conservative camp each converse within themselves and complain about the other, and occasionally stop to hurl verbal IEDs at the other camp. It is camp against camp, not so much with a particular person (unless that person exemplifies the camp). But there is no engagement.

So one question is how to get conversations to take one another in. This does not necessarily require individuals to even hear other individuals. When the two flows find a common stream, then they intermix. Perhaps. Oil and water do occupy the same stream banks. They do not have to like each other.

:- Doug.

Maybe our callings are not to grand projects but to loving in the moment—doing what we see to do each here & each now. Something larger will determine if they become something larger.

:- Doug.

Callings might be much more mundane, much more daily, than we have been wont to think.

:- Doug.

We do not so much have callings but are called: called to do the love and kindness and good we can, to bring about the beloved community: daily, this day, this minute.

:- Doug.

We are becoming more autonomous and more connected at the same time. No more officially organized connection but finding of the connections already organic to us.

:- Doug.

My writing ought more and more to state present tense what is real becoming real: love and conversation, unity with diversity. Prophesy: speak forth!

:- Doug.

No longer shall we plan: we dialogue our world our future into being. This is as it is, as it should be, as it is becoming: profound. Planning is not the way to the future, it is the way to the past, a past mired in ineffective I will tell you and you will obey. And so we are in a dance of winds, conversing our conversations.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1326

We’re here to do the good we can while we can—& part of the good we do is accepting the good others do for us.

Please pass it on.

© c 2013, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/321-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com