FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation is community’s promising journey.

:- Doug.

We have pictures of perfection, Heaven, or the Kingdom of God, which are all sweet, loving, involved and good. This is unrealistic for any world, not just this. There is too much variety in any possible universe for such. Accept our richness. Accept falling short. Love from there.

:- Doug.

For our grandchildren: can we choose life? Will they have clean health-giving air to breathe, sunlight to enjoy? Will they have wholesome foods? Will they be strong and joyous or weakened by racking coughs and deleterious foods? Will their throats burn from the air and their skins from the sun? Will they have lesions or smooth skins and shiny hair? Will their grandchildren survive?

:- Doug.

The problem with these wordings is perhaps that I am trying to both flood out into the spacious openness of the all there is and at the same time to speak precisely. Can one speak precisely about something expanding beyond our grasp?

:- Doug.

Once we can leave our little egos behind and move into the arena where borders and skins and edges dissolve, our identity becomes just that: one and our.

The one and our.

It is not even a mere collective. We are greater than a potful of people, thrashing about. We are one organism, working synchronistically.

:- Doug.

For our grandchildren
Choose life
We cringe to read of cultures
Who sacrifice their children
To gods of their harvest
Yet do we sacrifice our grandchildren
For filling our gas tanks and bank accounts?
Let us choose life
For them
It is a joyous thing
To do for our grandchildren
& we can choose life

:- Doug.

Larger, larger, larger
I am
Expansive, open, extending
Beyond the ends of the
Known universe
Beyond holding in
Any sack of skin
Edges melting shading into
All there is
Larger, larger, larger

:- Doug.

If we don’t do it together, it won’t get done.

:- Doug.

Will your grandchildren survive to 2055?

:- Doug.

Conversation moves us to effective action.

:- Doug.

I’m a PhD of ecology: I know things you don’t. I’m a carpenter: I see things you don’t. Conversation gets us beyond fearing that what we know is not enough.

:- Doug.

What are the strengths of conversation? Until you go deeply into each other, you don’t get these.
1. diverse experiences—which allows us to address issues more completely
2. many angles of view—nothing escapes us
3. manifold connections with other people—our actions are effective
4. more physical resources—many hands get the job done
5. multiplied computing power—no one person can address all the complexity
6. expanded memory banks—better histories inform better futures
7. creativity playing off creativity—many minds make light

:- Doug.

We are made of each other
We already are community
Before I was born, We
Before my mother and my father
came together, We

:- Doug.

Picture a next-generation Cray supercomputer in a brightly lit university laboratory somewhere. Now picture 37 of these supercomputers networked, working on a complex interwoven problem. That’s the power of conversation—a power we have yet to develop the technology to fully use.

:- Doug.

In our times we have a picture of conversation as a weakling beside the single brain in a control tower. We need to see it with the strength it has—strength of many backgrounds and skills, strength of larger purpose, strength of story and hearth, of factory and plains and woodlands, strength of brawn and heart and book. The truth is that there is power in collected minds and hearts, power which we can consciously tap. We must choose, and choose the stronger, life, if we are to survive.

:- Doug.

If you’re sitting there
and not hearing G*d
try sitting there
while G*d is hearing you

:- Doug.

Open space: Thinking out together our future.

:- Doug.

He would not play their game
did not matter to him their power over
his separate ego was to him no object
’twas good being enfolded back into all in all
in that no-logic he showed real fulfilling
If you fear merging back into the sea
becoming nothing ever more
reflect on what he did, take into you
him who would not play their game

:- Doug.

The eye through which I look for G*d is the eye through which G*d looks for me.

:- Doug.

Sometimes—
The sight you see is that
through which G*d sees you
The sound you hear is that
through which G*d hears you

:- Doug.

Sometimes embraced
satisfies more
than grasping

:- Doug.

How many arms does it take
to reach around the world?
How many minds to make sense of it all?
How many hearts to embrace us all?

:- Doug.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: what does that mean to me? What does that mean to You?

The generator; the living one like us, always with us; the breath, the life, the spirit of the all there is. Generating, mothering; living and loving and being with; challenging creation to live and love and be with.

In the vibrations, in the light, in the sound, in the love, in the embracing.

:- Doug.