FootprintsintheWind.com

This has been a deepening time. Lots of good study yesterday, with many insights and ways opening, lyrical and touching to bedrock. A soft, solid turn in the process we call living.

:- Doug.

Life, our life, is rough and ready, never perfect. This is the world, the all there is. We are of it, all of it. This is joy and peace. There may be no other heaven nor hell. This is our life, the life: live it.

:- Doug.

The world, the place where children, old people, all humans walk, play, work, laugh, cry, drink beer, eat, die, this world is small. It exists as a home to humans, and as a home to all manner of beings. Humans exist as outgrowths of that world. It is home and all these are of that home. Our conversations grow out of home, and make home. This is our proper proportion.

:- Doug.

The richness of conversation
the quality without a name
think of it like living

:- Doug.

I also have to realize that a brief encounter is unlikely to, in fact is not designed to, spark much real conversation. It might leave me feeling hollow. On the other hand, every whatever is all of the all, and might touch a spark already embering.

:- Doug.

What qualities do you value most in conversation? This seems to be a rich question, much like What Went Well? The value is in letting the question sit with people after I have left. Will they seek to make their conversation richer? Will they ponder the question? Some might. This is a working question, one which works on those those asked, one which invites a desire to surface.

:- Doug.

There is intimacy of friends, which may never go anywhere near home; there is intimacy of strangers, even holy intimacy of strangers, which may touch the quick and the bone. Do we invite a thread among these friends to go closer to the bone, a thread among strangers to become friends after having reached intimacy? Are members of each group reluctant to cross the line? Do people ever want to be intimate in both ways with the same people?

:- Doug.

There is growing to, and growing here. I set before you death and life: choose life.

:- Doug.

I feel I have come upon something gentle which has brought me to a soft landing place. I want to get my bearings, but it feels solid and lasting. I am not quite ready to explain it to others in any full form, but that will come or not. It is well.

:- Doug.

Growth—imaginative
—Fantastical
—Never comes
—Tugs us away from
Everyday growing

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2192

Humus from humus
water from water
now we arise
now we lay us down
now the microscopic beings
who helped us live and digest
begin to consume us
and turn us
humus back to humus
water back to water
How did we help?

Breath to breath
conversing to conversing
living to living

Nothing comes to rest
even stones disintegrate
all that is happening
reaches farther
than from your
eyes opening to
eyes closing

Food to food
breath to breath
whisper to whisper
flicker to flicker
our meaning everlasting

Every day our living
nudges toward good—maybe
who can you say I am?

Please pass it on.

© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Growth is about living in the future. Missing.

:- Doug.

We are of each other.

:- Doug.

Be the world. Only this.

:- Doug.

Why do I laugh?
Why do I cry?
My body requires it
My living requires it
Only this and nothing
Nothing nothing
More

:- Doug.

Profound has aspects of consciousness of self, and aspirations. Also of something hidden away, maybe we can find it again.

:- Doug.

Installed in each of us, and between us, is a BS detector. Almost unnoticed is the other one, a detector of heart.

:- Doug.

A goal is your ego speaking
I am better
I can control
I fear I am not
I fear I cannot
I am greedy
A goal is unnecessary

:- Doug.

What if conversation were not about growing? Nor life about growing? What does that leave but conversing and living? Only these and fully these? Are these enough? Even depth is excluded as exclusive, for shallow and depth and dry and wet are all needed.

:- Doug.

I seem to have reached a more bottom layer of life just the last few days. Like Buber I might say that one cannot live all of life in profound places, but to never visit them is not real living.

:- Doug.

The thread I have been spinning out this morning goes something like this: Each of us is uniquely different from each other of us, each of us has our own fingerprints. Yet we are each humanity, life, all of life. We put immense and unneeded burdens upon ourselves to make sales quotas, write a perfect power of attorney, get the house paid off, buy a better garden tractor, get the bathroom updated: to reach some goal or other. And then start all over again. Nor is it as I had thought about growing. There is something beneath all that, when we squeeze out the essence of life. It is living. It is engaging each other. It is meeting one another. It is meeting one another’s needs. Nothing else.

:- Doug.

The direction of this imaginative project is toward naming what humans lean into. Its premise is humans stumble between two legs of improving and destroying, with an often negligible advantage to improving. How then shall we choose?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2191

After some years, I went one day to shoot some baskets. The ball fell a foot short of the rim.

Please pass it on.

© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com