FootprintsintheWind.com

Like the boy with his hand stuck in the cookie jar, what you grasp has you.

:- Doug.

It is not about the meaning of the words; it is about how we live life.

:- Doug.

Goals are a grasping, purposes a leaning forward. Which attitude is better in life as we know it, in the fullness in which we know it?

:- Doug.

What we are after is to stir, to quicken the heart and hand, to find something which draws us ever on, not stopping, only resting as we need and as part of the ever onward going.

:- Doug.

Here is where the business concept of sustainability and the philosophical one meet: we both recoil at the word as a wish to stand still, to mark time, to grasp what we have and make it forever ours in just this form. This is contrary to life. Instead, we must look to invigorating life, to making it stronger, stirring.

:- Doug.

When it comes to goals, life does not permit of ends but only of continuing. There is a cycle to life: birth, aging, dying, decaying, feeding life, seeding, birth….

:- Doug.

If truth is a thing, then nothing cannot exist for it would not be true. Or is it possible that both exist, say as two sides of the same coin, two contraries that hold each other up?

:- Doug.

When we meet, worlds open out. This is emergence.

:- Doug.

“By virtue of this privilege [of pure relation] formative power belongs to the world of Thou: spirit can penetrate and transform the world of It.” (Martin Buber, I and Thou, p 100) Something emerges from relation: power which forms persons. It is this meeting which gives us the magic and non-magic of emergence. I use Meeting in a precise way: to mean that meeting of which Buber speaks: being to being, I to Thou. Intimacy is involved. Therefore, action is involved: at least acting upon each other: neither is left unchanged. But perhaps the action is upon the world: and the world is met. The world is seen as the whole of being (“the unbroken world of Thou…a life of world solidarity” Buber, same page).

Emergence then looks like magic to the world of It; but to the world of Thou it is not magic because it is what space is made for when relational space is opened.

:- Doug.

Meeting is where all the significant work gets done.

:- Doug.

What you mean when you say something is the “soft” stuff is precisely that it is difficult to do, impossible to get an easy handle for. You cannot manage it because it is not an “It:” this very event happens outside the world of use and control. So you nervously assign it an pejorative label, when you are the one who feels inadequate.

:- Doug.

Poetry is the language of meeting.

:- Doug.

What of emergence? Emergence is simply the work of meeting. We meet. You give up something (shields and holding back, mainly) of yourself, I something of me. We each are enlivened by meeting: that is, we are each changed and there arises something which is beyond us: a being if you will between, and this seems magic. It was inchoate in each of us, as if we had meeting tentacles with pods on the ends, and they became whole only when connected with another person’s pods. So it is something we almost bring to the meeting. It is something we find, create, face in meeting: it is a third entity between. So it is something which carries us out on the wings of that relating. There is something there, something going on. It is not so much noun as verb, not so much thing as movement.

:- Doug.

Life is expensive: in the end it demands all we’ve got.

:- Doug.

Can we carry all being that is in the world? “He who goes out with his whole being to meet his Thou and carries to it all being that is in the world, finds Him who cannot be sought.” (Martin Buber, I and Thou, p 79, italics in original.) When we strip away all desires to see Its and carry only the light-heavy burden of Thou, we meet transformation, life becomes for us alive. Around us those we meet risk coming alive.

:- Doug.

Aging does not need to be a negative word. Life for sure is the direction: intensifying life.

:- Doug.

Aging alive is our masterwork.

:- Doug.

Two and Three make Five; Two times Three makes Six. In the same way there is magic and no magic in Twos and Threes working together in community: emergence.

This magic is interesting, arising here: same numbers, different operations. Do we have to do something different to make community? Yes. We have to meet. So people math works its wonderfuls even with two people.

What is the result we get? Merely that we have more centers, all strengthening the whole. There is something going on.

:- Doug.

And in the meeting, waiting.

:- Doug.

When we say a purpose is a goal, or this or that is, we are showing our own lack of clearness of what a goal can and cannot do.

:- Doug.

We have all the resources we have and they need to be used for the ultimate purpose. The question is, what is your ultimate purpose?

:- Doug.

How could Mom lead from her Alzheimer’s ward?

:- Doug.

Life meets.

:- Doug.