FootprintsintheWind.com

Where did we humans get the idea of straight lines, rectangles and triangles? Surely there are none of these in nature: they seem to be human constructs.

:- Doug.

Here is what was missing in the angry screaming sessions they called town hall meetings this summer: people did not think things could be better. They did not work toward that. They merely clung, screaming, to their little twig. This is probably not even good conservative philosophy. But if we start from the premise that we can make things better, there is hope, and we are already starting up the hill and out of the slough.

:- Doug.

We can make things better.

:- Doug.

Open Space: The luxury of people who really care and time to work on something that matters to you.

Can a need be a luxury? This is something we don’t get often, but truly need. We need it if we want the world to be better.

:- Doug.

The pond seems glassy, the few leaves on the little maple are still hanging on, little air is moving. Cool, damp and grey. A loan bird lands in the far ask tree, then moves off to the West.

:- Doug.

Come to me, life
pass me by or
carry me in your current of
the all there is
I wish to strain not
to find thee
babies smiles, traffic loud
allow, allow
float with

:- Doug.

Fifteen words
Where is life in this?
What most needs intensifying?
Who is here?
Will you?
Now?

:- Doug.

Of what are we conscious if we are no longer burdened by memory or even mind? Is there more to see? Have we asked people who have gone before us?

:- Doug.

Listen to see: fullness.

:- Doug.

Get busy with what is most deeply in our hearts and go from there.

What is most deeply in your heart? What would you like for our world?

:- Doug.

We are this One. Our task is to live this One into more personal-ness, more fullness.

:- Doug.

What is most deeply in our hearts is what adds fullness to the world, fullness to life.

:- Doug.

Move into the moment—move toward the plenum.

:- Doug.

Open space is committee work with some differences: it is done intensively, in compressed time; the people there are the ones doing the committing.

:- Doug.

Trying to get ahead of another, say in traffic, and much competition is anti-one and therefore anti-life.

:- Doug.

What difference does this plenum offer? It invites us to place hands upon the larger and steer the world.

It offers us to touch each other and to meet as beings.

The plenum offers us the necessity of acting upon what is most deeply in our hearts. We thought we were here to make money and support our family financially when in fact we were here to be family and touch each other and the world, opening it to the fullness.

:- Doug.

Maybe all this does not open a window on the original substance but on the substance toward which we are headed—intermediate or completion.

:- Doug.

We are not here to care for people with a disease, we are here to meet. Seeing the face of a disease and not the person is an issue for our society.

:- Doug.

Last night I saw Jesus’s temptation scene in a new light—get about what you’re about, forget the stuff you “could” do, and get busy. You are not giving up anything but gaining clarity and power.

:- Doug.

I need to figure out how to get back to my feeling, which I used to wear more closely to the surface (probably the wrong side out, though): I put it away after being told many times to get a thicker skin. This is a valuable insight—for there are the feelings that get hurt easily, the ones which turn in on yourself, and then there is feeling and sensitivity to what is there and valuable, but subtle.

:- Doug.

I’m looking for evidence of life in elder law.

:- Doug.

Light, sound, conversations, meeting are vibrations of space. Life itself, in its very interaction with its environment is vibration. Space itself vibrates, moves, touches. G*d is vibrating. If we are to do life well, we vibrate the space ready to vibrate, with the centers of space already vibrating. In reality, good vibrations. Verb, vibration, movement, rhythm, resonance, touch, wave.

What life is there? In what ways might we preserve and extend?

:- Doug.