FootprintsintheWind.com

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.

The task of our times is to find our oneness despite our different ways. Ways are simply ways, yet the destination, the destiny, is one.

:- Doug.

The prophets of Israel had it easy: they could speak directly to a religious people of God. Our people form a plural society, with different meanings of God, indeed different words for God, and some are religious without any God, and some are not or even anti-religious, with or without a God. How do we bring these people together, help them see themselves as one? Help us see ourselves as one?

:- Doug.

Our original roots and our original shoots point us in the direction of seeing each person as a source of imagination and good.

:- Doug.

How can we be whole
without creating?

:- Doug.

Hear! When machines squeak and screech
When a baby coughs and wheezes
You know to attend what’s amiss
So now: when people march and shout
—This they do not when life is just—
When old and frail people are warehoused
Divinity Moans. We must speak forth;
Life must live larger: We must interrupt
We must bring the fire, bring the green shoots
We have a prophetic mission:
Reconstitute the earth
Its peoples make whole

:- Doug.

We speak through our inaction
—What does it voice?

:- Doug.

There is a conversation
That stitches together
The many voices
Who make up my person

:- Doug.

Let us reconstitute the earth
Around its true center
Spiraling conversation
Takes us here

:- Doug.

How could you be whole, ripped away from others?

:- Doug.

Is this the kind of earth that you as a creator would have made? Would you have created couch potato people? Would you have been happy to have people bored with their surroundings and their lives?Would you have created people to be put in warehouses to wait to die? Or would you expect something of them and their families?

:- Doug.

We want for all wholeness to create, construct, wonder and venture, wholeness to teach wisdom and dignity, wholeness to stir the blood of those who come near, to stir us our of our easy chairs, wholeness to call to our bones: jangle!

:- Doug.

Whom do you serve?
Really?
God must be proud of you!

:- Doug.

How much we hate
So much of what we do
Could this be making us
So sick we scream?

:- Doug.

With no extraordinary power
We reconstitute the earth
Our only tool—conversation
It’s extraordinary solely
Because we use it

:- Doug.

I am in the heart of G*d
Rivers there are
Of flaming love
Shooting and Flowing
I must, I must
Reach out, reach out

:- Doug.

How can you possibly assent to being unemployed? Look at the shape of the world—all there is to do!

:- Doug.

In the 1960s we faced annihilation in the shape of a mushroom cloud. Now we face annihilation in the sound of angry, anguished, screaming voices of the Other. Can we turn from this brink?

:- Doug.

This work is about what is sacred among us.

Can we recognize the sacred among us? Even in law, in our own family, in nursing homes, in declining elders?

What is that sacred? Is it not the love? Is it not the encouragement of one another? Is it not the very engagement of one another?

:- Doug.

Sound of the sun? Near:
Roar; Entering: humming; In
Its lap: lullaby

:- Doug.

Fireball around us!
Inside, we too, exploding!
Receive G*d’s embrace!

:- Doug.

Ahh, your rays are shining in my face, and even with my eyes closed I feel your touch, see your light.

:- Doug.

I am inside the sun
Rays about me
Swirling
Come through me
Even come from me
As I sit or stand or move toward you
The All There Is is radiating pulsing

:- Doug.