FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1530

So yesterday I wrote a poem about the fun life invents for us, paths forking without end for us to try today, and yesterday I found the F. David Peat Website postings about Gentle Action, and this morning I am seeing a correlation between them. It is fun to try our forks, to invent new ones, and that indeed is how we are invited. So this is a call to small groups and gentle action around the edges, realizing that we are nudging more than controlling. We can tell a child No and of course it does not stick, or we can redirect to something else bright and shiny and intriguing, and that does work. And the child’s creativity (what the child was about from the beginning) is not stifled, it is nourished.

Please pass it on.

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Gentle our collaboration.

:- Doug.

Life is a family affair. Death must be too.

:- Doug.

Fragile is our weather. Our weather may not be broken but it is breakable. All the control we sought over it is coming to fruition—but weather rejects our desired ends with vengeance.

:- Doug.

“They know that I love them,” and “They know what I want if I get sick” are code for “I am afraid to talk about it.”

:- Doug.

I dive through the popping
trickling babbling of my tiny fountain
into the larger of the universe
and am never to be seen
seein’ scene the same again

:- Doug.

Nudge the world in the good direction.

:- Doug.

My qualifications? I am a human being. My credentials? My birth certificate and my face.

:- Doug.

You have heard it said You must be born again. In our times we begin to hear You must be born again and again and….

:- Doug.

Something tips to art from science when it becomes so interwoven and nuanced that the knowing part of the brain must give up and let the non-knowing part act—or stand in awe, which is itself a valuable action.

:- Doug.

Swirling!
All about me is swirling!
Wind water atoms electrons quarks
Oceans rain debris leaves furniture!
These things through me around me
I too am moving swirling swirling
I am a particle in the storms
Again I comprise the waves of the storms
I do not hold together
Swirling like all about me
Only: I see ahead I prefer I choose
Like other humans—congregations of swirls
I dare a few swirls of my own
I invite swirling swirling
—From my neighbors, from you!
We each part of the swirling
We each causing part of the swirling

:- Doug.

Imagine a balloon blowing air into itself from the inside. The big bang.

:- Doug.

Imagine a giant ball, clear, large enough for you to stand inside. You walk, you run, you fall, you figure out how to direct it just about where you want it to go. Now imagine the ball is many times larger and there are a dozen of you running around inside. Now imagine another increase, and this time there are 7 billion of you inside this ball. Behold, the earth.

:- Doug.

The universe and I
you nudge me
I nudge you

gently rocking floating
in each other’s lap

:- Doug.

We cannot control a thing. We can nudge. Why work so hard at the first when the second is so much more fun?

:- Doug.

The more we fragment and box off our problems, the more problems we create because our problems stem from our very thinking to cut things off from one another.

:- Doug.

The problem with not conversing is that we miss each other—not just our meanings.

:- Doug.

Squeeze the frog into your harness and you get less hop.

:- Doug.

Think of the law books yet to be written. These are the microcosmic histories of the interactions within the human race, as political histories are the macrocosmic. How will we interact with our selves and other species and the world? See the invisible hand—our hand—writing even today.

:- Doug.

The world is more
subtle nuanced interwoven
than we knew
I cannot draw a box around it
that’s why each day new poetry

:- Doug.

Our family knows more than they think they know about the direction of our health.

:- Doug.

Haunted: I suspected
I could be going further
Then my vision expanded
It is the fun life invents for us
Paths ahead forking without end
To explore to try today
We are invited

:- Doug.

We are connected by miles and miles of giving, the strands of which are nourished by tears.

:- Doug.