FootprintsintheWind.com

Life is a matter of opening to the world. Opening to its offers, openly inviting.

:- Doug.

Give yourself away. Clearly see what you invite—the clearer the more inviting is your inviting.

:- Doug.

This is meeting—meet life full tilt. See what it is about, let it see you, too. “I see you,” you say, “I hear you.” And life sees and hears you.

:- Doug.

Life is about flow—jumping in, not just a toe, but body and soul and spirit, self-forgetting, absorbed as a child in play, abandoned as a player diving after a ball.

:- Doug.

Energy we are; energy is never lost; energy is imparted; energy held back becomes flotsam and jetsam and somebody else’s energy; energy we expend and the more completely the more we are ourselves.

:- Doug.

Meet life: not to control and not to let it control me, but to meet as one does a dear friend: lovingly, acceptingly, and giving my all, standing up to him or her when I see a better way, standing up as my gift, my invitation, not demanding: giving.

In the flow state, one is one with the working the doing, and in the flow of life, that would be the same. The work is working the worker as the worker is working it.

This is the meeting on the narrow ridge: where one is at once giving and receiving.

This then is our stance with the world: accept its invitations, share our own, with no thought getting in the way, simply being one with the work, working the work, being worked by the work.

This is our great work: to meet the cosmos. This is our world work, our cosmic work. Cosmic conversation: we are working on the world at the same time we are letting life flow through us.

:- Doug.

Life expects you to meet it—not control it nor let it overrun you—but with it stand, walk.

:- Doug.

The purpose of jumping into life is to find ourselves as intelligent & excellent & creative. We have a fear of dreaming our higher selves—and here is our chance!

:- Doug.

We’re activating a different part of ourselves from when we’re looking for work or a meal—a higher part—giving, altruistic, connected with a common humanity.

:- Doug.

Goals are appropriate for ordering our tasks but not our lives. Nor probably yet our days of which our lives are made.

:- Doug.

The Postal Service is going the wrong way on energy usage: reducing deliveries and encouraging the use of post offices increases the trips made to get the mail from point A to point B. Driving from mailbox to mailbox uses less oil than several hundred people each driving several miles to the post office to pick up their mail.

:- Doug.

Why do we suppose we have to be spoken at to get a project done, to figure out what we’re about as a group, to get closer to God?

:- Doug.

You have something in you, you together, that you are not seeing. It is divine, this something, and it is released not in one person, but in between and among you. This something shows itself in passion and energy and living full tilt, giving all you’ve got, using you up, nothing left over, nothing held back, using you up!

:- Doug.

There is a flow to life. It is not the woo-woo of people who say that you will attract something. It is that life wants to well up in you. When you are a tight little ball, only reaching out to grab for yourself, you are dead and dying. Reaching out to give another person what they want and need as a human turns you into one, too, brings you alive.

Then you see things you could never have seen before. Then you feel things. Life opens its flower in your hand.

:- Doug.

This is the meaning of love: sticking your neck out for another. For nothing in return: just for being human. Just in return for all that people have done for you, whether you see it or not. Just to be human, to show that you are part of the family.

:- Doug.

Here is the offer: give. Give together. Hear each other. Share your story. Be vulnerable. Dare unknowing going. Life will flow through you. Life you can’t understand if you are thinking only about your next meal and how hungry you are. This is about being part of the whole, the larger whole.

:- Doug.

Do the work, then you are paid. Giving comes first.

:- Doug.

I see not sacrifice, not devotion, but total abandon, total throwing one’s entrails into life. There is no other way. Holding back is holding back from yourself and those you love: it is holding back of your whole self.

That is all.

:- Doug.

Only here, only hear.

:- Doug.

What appears solid is not. The earth is made of atoms and the atoms of empty space—and spinning. Here you take your solid stand—and turn to dust. Our best choice is to move, ever move: touch and love. What appears without substance is our substance.

:- Doug.

Pull your hand out of the bucket of water and look what a hole you left, people say, to challenge our egos. Still, beyond ego, beyond water standing in lakes, water streams: here put your hand in and you have forever changed the flow, remade the stream, and your little effort changes all.

:- Doug.

Some see us as Newtonian particles: separate and acting upon and acted upon, wound up and left to run down. Others see us as Quantum flow, moving even those things we cannot touch. Both pictures are true, for one is body and the other spirit to our minds and hearts. We can take hand to them each and both, and become wholer.

:- Doug.

All is flow, jump in! Paddle! Are you simply passenger carried screamingly along, or do you paddle? Paddlers have to work together or they go in circles and get carried where they do not wish, maybe dumped in the drink!

:- Doug.