FootprintsintheWind.com

Caring people working together in a good environment can produce extraordinary work. That means it is incumbent upon us to ask, What then is a good environment? It must be open—free—enough to allow them to work. Since this is unusual in our culture, the freedom needs to be announced. It needs to facilitate each and every nexus of caring. It must provide safe places to meet and minimal tools for meeting—chairs, perhaps, and paper and drawing instruments. In the caring people themselves we need the widest diversity we can find. What else?

:- Doug.

Of what are we together capable?

:- Doug.

Who wants to have conversations that matter?

:- Doug.

You do not even know whom you are
How then do you expect to put a handle on G*d?

:- Doug.

We humans are a gregarious breed.

:- Doug.

Give G*d time, your time.

:- Doug.

We are forming our divinity as we emerge within the mist. Each step we take our foot forms before it touches earth, each thought our mind forms as it touches that of G*d.

:- Doug.

I’m not worried about how to explain it. I just will. There may be obscurities, but those who hear will see the real heights we can attain.

:- Doug.

There is a height, a peak experience here, where people in conversations that matter to them lose themselves in the flow and come out the other side with some new realization, some new work that is already a part of them. They are giving themselves to something larger.

We cannot guarantee peak experiences and flow states: we can only open the space for them to happen, invite them. They arise among ordinary healthy people who feel free to be.

So when we seek to invite, we need to ask what we wish to invite: bodies lukewarm to take in what we spoon to them; wallets to pay for tickets; or people engaged in a great work.

Arias demand a singer; arias demand a hearer; an audience is superfluous.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 910

What if our death were not an end
Nor a beginning over again
In angelic realms?
What if it were a culmination,
A fruit, a seed, a chrysalis,
Exploding colors, sounds, flavors,
Aromas—A Big Bang:
And here we are a dot in
Someone’s death!

Please pass it on.

© c 2009, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Just how many peak experiences have you had sitting listening in a lecture hall?

:- Doug.

It is all of a piece
This life, yes?
A great complex piece

:- Doug.

Love with waste

:- Doug.

We lack the courage
To ask each other
To be real
When that is what we want most
From them
From ourselves

:- Doug.

Yes, I believe G*d is lyrical as the Psalms, weak as a babe in a cattle trough, powerless as an about to be executed prisoner, one who speaks only as loudly as a still small whisper, and who resides in all creatures, small and great. No, I do not believe it even interesting to ask a real G*d to do magic tricks. Perhaps I believe in a G*d whose periphery is nowhere to be found but whose heart is everywhere, a G*d without metaphors, shape-shifting, changing, diffuse, and above all meeting.

It is this divinity with us, that of G*d in all, that I seek to have all people, and you, see and act upon.

:- Doug.

Jesus was never about guilt. Jesus was ever about freedom from guilt. Getting on with it. Forgetting self. He kept saying, It does not matter. Help one another. Love one another. You are the needed spice of the earth.

:- Doug.

Make more time
Say your message whole
In the face of your listener
Demand something

:- Doug.

When you invite someone
ask of them something
difficult—
work,
themselves,
days of their lives,
—a thing of great worth

:- Doug.

I think it wrong to clasp irons of guilt around the legs of women and men whom you have set free.

:- Doug.

A poem should exceed the poet’s grasp, or what’s a versing for?

:- Doug.

This was my morning driving
along a busy street:
red flashing lights
van ahead, cars other side
all pull over, wait
as ambulance pulls into
nursing home facility
we all ease back onto the street
having helped
one of us unknown
complied too with law
Law is society’s
minimum kindness

:- Doug.

Life is an occasion for being kind.

:- Doug.

Oh poor me
the cry of the
clinger-on
hypochondriac
one who won’t try
expecting to be done for
These are the prayers
to nauseate divinity

:- Doug.