FootprintsintheWind.com

It is not about remembering where I was a week or two ago, but going where I need to go today, this moment. Friend, you are where I need to go. You seek my flesh and my flash. Why? For loving, for meeting, for living. We touch. This is the meaning of each by the other. What kind of world do we dare enact? One in which our breath on the gossamer is felt.

This touch changes all.

:- Doug.

What if G*d were the fluid in which we find ourselves, touching us all, and also needing us all—body and spirit, flesh and flash?

:- Doug.

Let live, and live!

:- Doug.

Greediness for life:
The more life the more love
The more life the more there is to love
G*d must be greedy for life
Craving each one of us
& together
The fluid between
Desiring the touch of bodies
As they find each other
The splash

:- Doug.

Our world now seems to be made of particles and waves, depending upon how we look at it in any moment, but given the increase in the rate of change, waves are where to place our bets and attention for the future.

If we see the world as waves in flux, actions rather than things, then we are more able to act within it. We do not control but we do touch.

Then Buber’s Thou is seen as verb in action: no It that is defined once for all and acted upon; rather one to meet who can also meet us, and we become not Its, but Thous acting upon and enacting the world.

What we are after is to make sense of the world, so that we might make sense of our role and our desire to make the world better, so that we do make the world better.

We create the stream by paddling in it.

:- Doug.

The things which are solid—walls and stadiums and trees—are made of atoms, atoms which are shown to be of little whirling incomprehensibles and lots and lots of space. So what we walk upon is like a lattice work, where the lattices are constantly moving, moving like the waves in fluorescent bulbs—too fast for us to catch it.

:- Doug.

Mind acts not so much upon representations of the outside world as upon itself. The work of the brain is to work on the brain. The work of the mind uses mind as the raw material and as product, so it is constantly changing itself. So also: conversation’s raw material and product is conversation; meeting’s is meeting; persons are persons. We are self-organizing systems all, it seems.

So we are not describing worlds as they exist, but creating them as we look. The paths in a college campus are best laid out not by the architects but by the students and professors by using them. So too, the village grows by people putting up buildings, opening marketplaces, inviting people, and the people coming and putting up buildings, opening marketplaces, inviting people, ad infinitum.

Can we then see our task in this?

Can we then see the things we are already doing—insights, glimpses and inklings—less as descriptions and more as invitations?

Could this also apply to all the other things we are doing—taking a shower, getting the mail from the mailbox, chatting about the latest bizarre news?

What are you doing? We are creating new worlds. We are creating new people. How so? The world and its people are less immovable objects and more irresistible forces, and we are all setting those forces into motion each moment. How so? Conversation is the action, the raw material, and the product of this conversation and all the others. When we see what is possible and that we are responsible for what is possible, then we can. Then, hopefully, we do.

:- Doug.

The wind is today moving through the leaves without stirring them awake.

:- Doug.

What if conversation were how we enacted new worlds and new peoples?

:- Doug.

Clarity from groundlessness proposes:
Insights glimpses inklings are not
The world as it is
Rather
The world as it becomes
My insights glimpses inklings
Ours as well
Might be proposing
A world of our enacting

:- Doug.

Skipping stones
My glimpses are
Touching the water
Now here & now farther out
At last falling
Into the depths
Sight into shining darkness

:- Doug.

Neither one of two persons
Is able alone to open
The space between
No one alone may meet
More is only found in more

:- Doug.

Brains make themselves
Societies make themselves
Brains generate neural cells
Societies generate persons
Products and materials are one
Themselves for ever
Results of processes are processes

:- Doug.

Only that. I do not believe only that. Whatever you say about your religion, it is only part of the whole. Only that and nothing more. I do not know all there is. I know there is more. I believe more. Only that.

:- Doug.

We are in space, no up, no down, no right nor left, just there! Just there! Just here!

:- Doug.

If we are all connected to G*d
G*d being the next door to us
the one substance in between and
flowing among all of us
when we pray
we touch what touches us and
what touches the other
our prayer is effective as touch

If G*d is our groundlessness
our shifting flowing
then we can be effective as touch
We touch life, life touches all, we touch all:
lightly gently whisperingly
but touch all the same

:- Doug.

Who is “saved?” There is no self, there is only aggregates. The community gets saved. Saved for what? For the community to live.

:- Doug.

If groundlessness underlies our being, then we are free agents. We float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, go where the flowers can be found. We no longer have to prove us right and you wrong. Causes of wars might decline. We meet who and what is there as real and as ones we can mold ourselves to fit. We can fit ourselves to the world, and more importantly, we might choose to mold the world into a new shape, one more human.

:- Doug.

So much depends
upon
so much else
that depends
upon the first
so much

:- Doug.

I do not say we are birthed only in conversation. You were commenced when your father and mother met, birthed bodily from your mother’s body. As a person you got your beginning from your mother’s eyes, and still get it from others’ ears.

:- Doug.

Hear:
The groundlessness
Of our being

:- Doug.

So much despair
Is graffiti on the walls
Newspapers blown
Around our street
Imagination lacking
Paint and picking up

:- Doug.

People are afraid the world is too large for them to act upon. We can talk with three friends. We can pick up a paper towel from the restroom floor. We can nail up a new piece of trim.

:- Doug.