FootprintsintheWind.com

I had long advocated Why Again. Now I see the Why behind the Why—it is pulling back another curtain.

:- Doug.

Why can be received as an attack. Find a way to gentle your why.

:- Doug.

Terms and words give us a place to stand from which we can manipulate—ourselves.

:- Doug.

It may be possible we’re not any “deeper” than this. Or, what amounts to the same effect, our essence becomes so thickened and dense it resists all efforts to push our fingers into it. Or, it is so thin and wind blown there is almost nothing to detect in any given year. Or, the fog never fully dissipates: There may be clearings as in a forest. A spot with grasses, sedges, and fewer (but not no) brush and trees. And, like in a lake, there are observed cool and warmer spots and currents of flow.

:- Doug.

In the gathering
In the loosening
Is the meeting

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2341

What, to you, is holy chance?

Please pass it on.

© c 2024, 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

I don’t have goals. I have life.

:- Doug.

Goals are for projects. Life demands purposes.

:- Doug.

Ask each other why you continue to meet as you do.

:- Doug.

Not underneath: behind the curtain.

:- Doug.

I have been avoiding the complexities, trying to simplify. Rather I should dive in, get overwhelmed and lost—admit it on the page.

:- Doug.

Allow your friend’s humanity to touch you; then allow this touch to be visible to others.

:- Doug.

Conversation sets about opening spaces and possibilities with which neither of us was acquainted.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2340

The work of a conversation cannot be known ahead. We find it as it goes. More precisely it and we find one another. Even more precisely, we find us together in this stew. Still more precisely, we make this stew—out of us. Into us. If we don’t get somehow lost, this stew is not fully made. We expect never to be fully made: We do not understand a word like transformation.

Please pass it on.

© c 2024, 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

Going forth toward meeting is like walking up to a curtain. You see a mere sliver of this one’s life. Perhaps the curtain parts with the breezes and you get more whiffs. You can poke holes to try to catch more, to hear more, to taste. Or you can walk away—those aromas do not call to you, even push you away. The curtain might be fabric, or fog, or forest. The curtain may not move easily. Your timing is off—you look as the curtain closes. Little do either of you know that this is how you appear to your other. Even less obviously, this is how you appear to yourself. I cannot see my own back, whether the hairs there have all turned white. You cannot see your own eyes (for your mirror reverses them); you cannot hear your own voice with fidelity. All we can ever do is poke more holes.

:- Doug.

Where do myth and ritual not overlap? In these places we can learn and grow.

:- Doug.

Revelation takes energy even before the work of it: for, it requires a dive into an essential complexity. All the strands of you are so entangled, to follow one means to move and twist nearly endlessly. Such effort!

:- Doug.

An academic writer used the word “diachronic.” We think this word means “through time.” What we slip by is that it refers to one kind of time—Chronos time—the countable tap, tap, tapping as it flows by. How empty the linear time that separates this from that, parent from child, you from thou! There is another time we inhabit—the time not of seconds but of moments. This is the outside of time Now, the “I forgot myself for hours,” instances. This is the ripe time. This is the ripe time.

:- Doug.

Stretch forth your mind
Wrap it around
Push its feelers into
The complexity
You would know

:- Doug.

Ritual is about to change.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2339

We shrink from intimate because we sense it is of the holy. It is other. Do we remember that holy is other?

Please pass it on.

© c 2024, 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

Ritual is about change.

:- Doug.

How did your father change and develop over the course of his lifetime?

:- Doug.