FootprintsintheWind.com

To find the great heart
of the people
for us to live within
and from
this is our work

:- Doug.

What’s your horizon? How wide a panorama do you see? To whom do you contribute most?

What’s your world work?

:- Doug.

I am not the center of compassion in the world
Nothing there is I must do
G*d in me is
Every loving thing I find I will do

:- Doug.

To be wholly who we are we have to give ourselves out. A stream is not a stream if the water does not flow. To fulfill ourselves, we must risk emptying.

:- Doug.

You have lived insufficiently
if you have lived only
for yourself, your family,
your own
you have an obligation
to help a larger us

:- Doug.

Naysayers have an easy job. It is always easier to say it cannot be done and cross our arms, than to find a way to plunge our hands in up to the elbows.

:- Doug.

Humans need humans—our hands, our hearts, our voices.

:- Doug.

Our responsibility is both easy and difficult: we must share our persons.

Easy because it is no work because it is us; difficult because we are not used to doing so. But we must do so if we are to progress to the higher places we desire.

This is a responsibility we owe to our grandchildren and our grand-nieces and -nephews. This is a responsibility we owe to the world simply because we are here. The world owes us respect because we are here, but we owe the world and those in it the respect of giving our very selves. This is the bargain we accepted when we accepted birth.

We can make the world better. And not just in small ways. We can increase the level of good of the whole world. Not only can we, but we have the duty to work at this. Results are far from guaranteed to any one of us, but only possibly within the grasp of all of humanity.

:- Doug.

No snowflake, melting
Makes a mountain stream

:- Doug.

A tree is not a tree
without the soil
without the rains
without the sun
A human is not human
a person is not a person
without friends
without shared bread
without shared work
without shared dreams

:- Doug.

No snowflake flies alone.

:- Doug.

Our Western thinking runs this way: No one will do anything without being paid for it; we will not do anything for ourselves that we can buy. Of course this is nonsense: we have community, and as volunteers we can do more than individuals and more than the economy.

:- Doug.

For our world-child
what are we to do?
Conceive, nurture,
bear, birth, nurse,
encourage to climb and play,
again, again, again

:- Doug.

Arrows
Of water—down
Of time—forward
Of person—higher

:- Doug.

There’s almost always something that can be done.

:- Doug.

With is key.

:- Doug.

Don’t go back, go forward. Add the new insight to the old, grow.

:- Doug.

I used to say the subjects of death and dying are fun, when what I really meant was that what people do in its face can be poignant and beautiful. Or that my real life’s work is fishing. One thing stands for another.

:- Doug.

Life is a come as you are party—
song, beautiful song is its marker

:- Doug.

Wholeness is truth.

:- Doug.

Beauty is perhaps the mother of truth and goodness.

:- Doug.

Let us be about enlarging the beauty people see because they co-create it.

:- Doug.

The world is larger, collaborative, and beautiful.

It is larger than we thought, larger than we know, larger every instant, and growing. It is collaborative: being one, it is absolutely necessary that we work together, that we invite, that we play. It is beautiful, full of beauty and wonder and awe in each instance and in the whole for it is whole and one and mystical and earthy.

:- Doug.