FootprintsintheWind.com

We grieve the loss of a life. We need to grieve the loss of our own: daily all so daily as we elect not to meet life in the streets about us.

:- Doug.

We are not alone and God is expressed in this world in part in others, and not just in the others, but in the betweens. God has to do with the touch of one heart and mind and hand on another, and even more in the reaching to touch.

:- Doug.

The strange thing is that we think it takes brains to run a big company. Even most the people who run them have fallen in that trap.

:- Doug.

Heads Hearts Hands Here

:- Doug.

Cultural traps: that’s where we are too when it comes to the death a couple days ago of the police officer and his canine partner. We have so much told ourselves that we have to get the person, that we have to chase him, that we induce higher and more dangerous speeds. If we want to catch a cat, we do not run after him, for he will only run away. Instead, we entice the cat with food, we outsmart him. Why can we not let the speeder go and block the road ahead, safely? Why can we not have an unmanned drone aircraft overhead safely piloted by a person in front of a console miles away? Why can we not find a technology that would disable a vehicle’s engine at a distance? Why do we need high speed chases? Our own thinking is to blame in these officers’ deaths shared at least to some extent with the person they were chasing.

:- Doug.

Ω 1Our task is not to create new centers, to build up larger out of smaller. Just the opposite: to intensify what is already there. The person in front of you—lost, confused, over-busy, worried, controlling, doing evil or good, victimized: in whatever state we find him or her—asks of us to intensify, intensify the life of which he or she is part and bringing into the world. When we work here, the world grows by at least the amount of the touch of our hand. It grows in the direction of unifying, gathering, meeting: it grows not in separation but in love. It intensifies what was already there and what will endure. Little pieces will always be little pieces, but the whole grows more whole.

:- Doug.

Is evil personal as G*d is? Has evil a me aspect? Yes it is something I can picture myself doing; indeed it is a capability of all humans. Has it a we aspect? Here is more question: Do we act in concert with it, or does it more possess us? Has evil an aim, does it mean me? No, it does not. Evil means you, the victim, even as it burns me with its fire. Evil therefore is not something which has personality and is not properly personified; it is something a person does, not the person’s essence. Evil is not a force with a mission. Evil is more a bent, a twisting of conduct and mind—hand and head and often heart. We should then punish the deed, lift up the person.

:- Doug.

I bow to the G*d arising up in you.

:- Doug.

We are G*d, but we are not magicians (any more than G*d is) nor puppet masters. We do not walk on water, we do not feed five thousands. Still, we participate. We touch hearts like glasses lifted in celebration, and in that we participate in the heart of G*d. We are of the nature of G*d, spirit, wind, not defined—not limited—by any particular body. Still: quietly. Like a skin laid on the grasses, with and without dew, responding to the breath. We touch the one heart. We embrace. We is G*d. And not all there is of G*d. We participate, we are integral. We are not separate; we are part of the flowing, and even that misses the fact that the flowing is not noun but verb and adjective.

Adjective is to throw to. An adjective gives a picture of a game of toss—throwing to each other to see if we can catch. Also applies to tossing the conversational ball back and forth, seeing where it takes us. The picture is a good one, at least evocative: an adjective throws something new to the noun or other word, adding something to it, affecting it, changing its trajectory! So we participate in G*d by adding or changing the course and the inter-course of the personal: we, me, aimed.

Is this going anywhere new? The all as enfolded wholeness. We participate. We unfold and enfold, flow and particle like splashes in the waves. We clink hearts with one another, and in this is G*d: the we, me, meaning us.

:- Doug.

We are G*d: still we do not control nor possess nor even grasp; instead we participate.

:- Doug.

We become the light beams carrying the infinite images from one jewel to the next on Indra’s net. No longer are we static, or even flashing on and off, but we are full, we are plenum. We carry all, lightly: all are images and breath; all are light because brothers and sisters we are. We are full flow. We are valuable in ourselves and in all we reflect and carry and unfold into the world. We are particle, we are wave. We touch and swirl, finding what has heart and depth, releasing true beings into each other. Who we are is in between, flowing, capable not of being captured but only pursued. We are light speed. We hold everything, we are everything. We hold no power, except the power to open—to open ourselves, others, the all there is. And the power is not to hold but to release, to evoke, to invite in and then out: see and become all.

:- Doug.

Heart: this is key to our forward progress precisely because in our culture we do not particularly value it. Head we value first; hands a lot less. But heart hardly gets a mention, except in some sports (read: unessential) contexts.

:- Doug.

People who seek an answer to every question…raise to me the question of goals. To life, there is no answer, simply the question. It is like the Cheshire cat’s smile, this question that hangs there in the air. There is simply more to be discovered at all times, for ever. Sometimes we are called upon to show up and be present. Nothing more. There often are no goals. The question, the shot, the journey—these are the whole of it.

:- Doug.

Those who expect an answer to every question, a goal to every shot, are bound to be unfulfilled. Life is otherwise.

:- Doug.

We are G*d and yet G*d is more.

:- Doug.

You seek to define spirituality, but how can the defined define the definer?

:- Doug.

Invite people to play together.

:- Doug.

We shall when we see into one another know that we are, and always were, one. Then it is that we rip the grey cloth that covers us, and see that one rainbow light from which we arise.

:- Doug.

We have more in common than we thought.

:- Doug.

A beautiful red cardinal has joined the littler birds pecking at the seeds on the snow. I have noticed that birds leave each other alone for the most part. The ones that attack another are of the same species as the one they are chasing off. They do not actually come into contact, most often they only run at each other.

:- Doug.

There are three reasons we bring people together in meetings: to convince them; to gain their passion; to ask for their action: heads, hearts, hands.

:- Doug.

Open space for what is essential in life together.

I must invite people to open space for the essential life together.

:- Doug.