FootprintsintheWind.com

Because the possible
Is larger than the ordered
We disorganize

:- Doug.

Seek for
The knitting—
Bones broken
Skin torn
Blood from beat of heart drained away
Child of village estranged

:- Doug.

Dangerous is imaginative love
How it transforms people
Sometimes others, sometimes us!

:- Doug.

Where is the need for wholeness?
Ask, be still, play
So Ear and Heart may Hear

:- Doug.

Voice the pain
To glimpse the wholeness

:- Doug.

It is not all decided. You drive.

:- Doug.

We must disorganize because hope is impossible for those who are stuck.

:- Doug.

Whenever a teacher and 20 students gather, there are in the room at least 22 experts.

:- Doug.

When Mom is pulled up by the roots
Replanted in a nursing home
We are ripped apart
There is a hole in the garden
Or we can see the garden wider
Extending to the nursing home
Fertilized by love
What then can be for us
The new life
The new whole
Can we dare think
The new flowering?

:- Doug.

We can make our family experience of nursing home and assisted living whole. We can spiral out and care for others to make their experience whole. Our country will not be made whole by compressing from borders in, but only from hands and hearts reaching out, bringing in.

:- Doug.

Whole-making: is this justice? It is certainly compassion, so yes.

:- Doug.

Love would make the peoples whole if we let it, if we try.

:- Doug.

What of the poor, the frail, the fragile? They have no more strength for anything outside themselves: perhaps. But what can they do? What do they do? They can love: they can turn outwards. Turning outward reverses the flow of disease. Love makes whole.

:- Doug.

Is American society disintegrating, falling to pieces before our eyes? I do not know; I do not wish it; no one does. What could come of this world if the US comes apart between the seams? Can the land alone hold us together? Or can we see ourselves held together across the lands and seas, held together perhaps by spirit? If the US were no more, if the countries had no more borders, what then? No more Russia, no more Ethiopia, no more Guam: simply one people? Can we imagine it?

Shall we plan for it? Is it inevitable that these will fail, collapsing of their own weight? Will money poured after money, tank after fighter plane after bought politician save us? Save our flags? What are these bits of colored fabric? Are they calls to gather or to scatter?

:- Doug.

What new community can we see? Just that: new community. Coming together, seeing ourselves in our hearts as one.

:- Doug.

Compassion, thy name is Justice
Justice, thy name is Compassion
Wedded

:- Doug.

If
Justice

:- Doug.

We can only get to
Compassion
By way of
Conversation

:- Doug.

Pay attention
Give respect
To your digressions
Here may be truer path

:- Doug.

Straight line thinking
—What we experience today will ever be—
Is error
Real life is made of curves

:- Doug.

Life is more. We can make life more. With no super powers except our own hearts, engaging.

:- Doug.

What is the story we need to envision of a future? One more person engaging one more family. Life becomes larger, the family more sacred, more humble, more.

:- Doug.

See the brother and sister from far ends of the country who are dumping their mother in the best nursing home money can buy, easing their consciences by spending her money on her “care,” when she needed their presence.

:- Doug.