Single-pointing my attention on one thing—that leaf dancing on the end of the twig in the breezy autumn air—is not boring: it is difficult; my mind wants to jump elsewhere, such as to writing this. Come back, come back.
:- Doug.
I have never liked war and argument and stressing people. I love loving and conversing and engaging people.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 909
Today my dental hygienist told of her neighbor—an older lady—who really needs people to look out for her, but she does not want help. This living story shows we need to invent ways to be neighbors again (or actually from scratch in our new society). It has been a generation or two since people were neighbors and so for the most part we don’t know the art. We will need to create it. And that is good, for our times require of us a neighborly actions to fit our times.
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
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We may not be able to find an image for God; we may be incapable, large as our imaginations are; or God as spirit may defy image.
You might morph. You might be understandable to some people as the old grey man on a big chair. You might appear to others as Om or sound or turtles all the way down or an elephant or giraffe. That is all OK, now. I do not have to go searching for an image that works for all and for all time. I can see you as verb or adjective or no thing at all. You are there, you are loving me. All OK now.
So we learn to live with an imageless God. We allow others their images and perhaps they allow us ours. Our images may come and go, shape-shifting. Or we have none at all. Could we live our lives with no images of ourselves?
All OK now.
:- Doug.
We can take a larger view of the world; if we do, we are of the best of our species.
:- Doug.
If we set up a desirable
& then make it unreachable
What have we got?
This we have done with money & success
limiting each by Competition
saying this strengthens each person
seeing it does nothing of the sort
only casts out all but the few
frustrating, sending them to drop out & drugs
What is our true desirable
what is already reachable?
Collaborating cooperating helping
each other along
eating & walking & loving O to loving!
:- Doug.
We can cover a lot more ground
with our eyes than with our feet
even more with our imaginations
:- Doug.
Ω 1Ask one side or the other about: What leaves them feeling alive, engaged, contributing; or Their heartbreak. This helps us find that about which they care, which is their divinity. From here we move out again to purpose and action:
In worship today
all the sounds
children fidgeting
people coughing, snoring
comings & goings
traffic in rain
all demonstrate
God in everything of life
life in everything of G0d
The rim is part of the circle
the rim is large
the swirls tell us where
:- Doug.
I have a purpose
but no goal
purpose opens for me the gate
to wide expanse
without barricade
ever more is possible
:- Doug.
Why am I a lawyer? The reasons why today are not the same as the reasons I approached it. It is not that like the writer of Ecclesiastes I am sated, but that my pictures of reality and people and how I might help have changed. At one time it was about keeping money from the tax collector, or creating and preserving wealth for people. Now I have a wider view of wealth and a longer view of the role of Wills and particularly what people do for each other, even when they are generations apart.
How hard it is to think about, to picture, people seven generations after me. I have seen and met those two generations on. I can picture babies being born, screaming at the indignity of it all, primally asking to have their needs met. I can picture men and women working together and hope that they are working to help each other. But what their faces look like, what challenges they face, how they meet those challenges, how they center their lives—these are things difficult to see clearly.
So why am I a lawyer, today’s take? To help people communicate with other generations. To help people meet and be met by a world fundamentally wanting them. To help people get through the details so they can get to the living of life.
One long second
Human life is
Not a brief instant
But an enduring now
Plenty of time
Beyond time
To do what we can in
Large ways if we choose
Everyday ways for sure
—With capitals—
To Live, Laugh
Ever to Love
Why am I a lawyer? To work with people at the business of working with people, at finding what works, what gives life smooth handles, what encourages whole life living.
Why am I a lawyer? To help people fulfill themselves, to see their purposes larger and get on with those purposes.
Why am I a lawyer? To share myself with my friends. To give gifts of myself to others so that I might live large in and through them.
Why am I a lawyer? To bring peace to the world, to resolve irritations and irritate the resolutions, to bring the world to peace: wholeness, fullness, amplification. To encourage people to get along, to let difficulties go so they can grasp the smooth handle. To be among my friends and make their paths easier.
Why am I a lawyer? To bring love to the world: love for family, God however conceived, community. Love for all humanity, all life, all the world. Love in forms weak and strong, seen and unseen, realizing the unrealized, which is that love is what we live within.
Why am I a lawyer? To be in and of the world, helping it work. Helping us work. To conspire together—to breathe together, to bring, to a world often seen as dried out, spirit. To give each and all wings of imagining and dreaming.
There is more yet to say, and I do not know what it yet is. Law is about peace and intercourse and more, more, more.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 908
Obama is metaphor for me: He is a metaphor for dialogue and engagement of everyday people in the work of the community. Beyond engagement to invitation. I do not expect him to solve the country’s ills—I do not want him to do that. I want him to ask me. I want him to ask you. I want him to invite the best and brightest—those on the street, those in the factories, those in the midst of life—to help. And in that sense, his presidency, which has not even begun, is already a success: he has engaged people who never thought themselves political, he has energized a whole new group of people. True, it has only been in the electoral and political process, but that is a start, a teaser. Hopefully they will stay active. Hopefully they will care. Hopefully we will all care enough to work together on this world.
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
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
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