FootprintsintheWind.com

We think we matter and that establishes it. I think I matter, therefore I do.

:- Doug.

Why does this work stuff have to keep interrupting life?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1075

I see that G*d is flow. Everything is flow. We are flow. Everything affects the flow and motion of everything else. We can consciously affect this flow.

We is more a collective thing than individual.

We are most individuated with others. The group flow makes special each person, highlights and activates what is most extraordinary about him or her. Each contributes what no one else can, and only through the gathering, seething, generating whole.

The whole births something that none alone could or would even imagine. The parts in whole are more than the sum of the parts, and more than any other mathematical operation on the parts or the whole: we creates from whole and from nothing. This is the world as I see it.

What does this mean to us? 1. Join in. 2. Make an effort to make no effort: ponder, observe, wait. 3. Jump when called to jump. 4. Choose the good direction. 5. Plan less: the world depends less on you than you imagine. 6. Meet more: the world depends more on you than you imagine.

Please pass it on.

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Before the universe was, I am, we are, one.

:- Doug.

Security is a blanket that limits our movement.

:- Doug.

Mystery may be a good thing—in fact it may be the only thing we’ve got.

:- Doug.

Bad news is easier to take than no news.

:- Doug.

Honor your questions. Here is power in the world. Putting questions together is much more valuable than putting answers together. Answers come from history—what worked in the past. What will work now is just as likely to be something new. Answers cannot take you there, but questions can.

:- Doug.

You have come here today with questions. Remember that questions are more pregnant and therefore more powerful than answers. By putting your questions together, letting them ask each other, you will find something new in this world, if you open space in you for it.

:- Doug.

Since we are part of who God is, there is no reason to feel estranged and every call to belong.

:- Doug.

We are part of who God is
therefore we live

:- Doug.

A power of attorney would seem to be a very self-centered document: do this for me at this time. Rather, it declares your interdependency with the rest of the human race and especially your family: it says how others can love you; it says you trust them with your very life. A power of attorney is about love.

:- Doug.

We know that a Will is a conversation
Of course
For what you say and what you give
Communicates
Something you want your children and grandchildren to
Hear
What do
You want yours to hear?
But do we hear them?
What do we
Hear
From our children
Our grandchildren?
From the generations?
What do we need to hear?

:- Doug.

Host circles of heart people, poets and whole-makers: to hear and be heard, to lean into the future and what there can be made good.

:- Doug.

The important thing in all of living is conversing. In your Will, what do you want your children and grandchildren to hear? What of them do you hear?

:- Doug.

Conversation is hearing and being heard, with due attention to the fact that each person is vast inside—and even more vast are the ever-shifting, ever-growing spaces between and among people, and the vastness of the physical and poetic world we all occupy.

:- Doug.

Sometimes we are listening so hard that all we hear sounds like static!

:- Doug.

You tried meditation/contemplation. What makes you think anything is supposed to happen? Do you expect God to dance every time you play a jig?

:- Doug.

God wants to be heard, too.

:- Doug.

I’m a shot of Lutheran with a splash of Quaker.

:- Doug.

The wonder of children is that they obey at any time!

:- Doug.

Hearing and being heard are profound because we are vast on the inside—so these multiply vastness by vastness.

:- Doug.

We have different ways to think. Some of them involve thinking alone, and these have proven fruitful. But there is another whole realm of ways to think when we are thinking together. These we have barely begun to explore. The fact of the matter is that together we go places we would not and could not have gone individually.

Just what ways do we think together? First, there is something that exists only in the group. Second, we have more views on everything and so these lead to more angles which ideas can bounce. Third, we have more experience against which to measure what we are seeing.

That is enough.

But what is this something that exists only in the group? There is something there, but it is a mystery. Perhaps it is a mystery because individually we cannot see it! It is related, I think, to people getting hopeful when they hear each others’ stories—it is in hearing and being heard. It might be in seeing the gaps and possibilities opened by the stories and the others. This hearing takes us beyond our own perceived limits: it stretches us. A group simply is larger than one person. It is also larger than a collection of individuals because of the hearing and seeing and stories. We cannot have stories with one person. There is a mystery to move us in stories, and it is simply the movement back and forth between teller and hearer. It touches something inside each.

So with groups in conversation: hearing and heard touch both.

:- Doug.