FootprintsintheWind.com

Think whimsically!

:- Doug.

Community makes us whole.

:- Doug.

If you are a child of G*d, then you have G*d’s seed planted in you. How does it appear in you? Do you honor it, cultivate it, pay attention?

:- Doug.

Poetry is about experiencing life from the inside. For me, the inside includes other people, conversing, inter-coursing.

Poetry is about the inside and the inter-side.

This insight helps me see that my work is not moving the group along, not moving to any place, but seeing what life there is to be heard, now, what life can be teased out into the open.

What I long for is to be reflective in public, to carry the sensing of these pages into inter-course, to evoke when with others.

It partakes of dream, of doing, of staying with people where they are. I may want to take them deeper, but they are where they are. Mine is only to observe and report and stay.

So stay is strong and profound. Stay with the inter-side. Stay.

:- Doug.

Stay
Stay in the moment
Stay in the hearing
Stay in the silence
Even when all about you says
Rush! On to some new Rush!
Stay

:- Doug.

When once we see
Truth is Heart
We can speak it

:- Doug.

Poetry is revolutionary
Because it speaks for the emerging
Love

:- Doug.

Community is healing
We need each other
Here, hear, we are whole

:- Doug.

I’m stuck for words
They stick on my tongue
Yet there is something
Within that wants out
For someone must hear
And so I must speak
My silence

:- Doug.

What would it look like for you to have compassion for G*d?

:- Doug.

Small groups get to work on large things.

:- Doug.

When people say Open Space will not work chances are they are looking at the wrong end of the tool. The shape of the handle, the grip by which you pick it up is less important than the business end. The business end is working together premised upon a trust that ordinary people can do work that matters. How you pick up the tool—the market place, the wall, the circle—is of less importance.

So open space is not so much circle, bulletin board, market place: it is mainly the last three words that we so often do not hear: get to work.

:- Doug.

I do not believe that the world works primarily by force and power. Some parts of it do. But look about you: there are more kind and gentle people, more giving, willing to help people than people bent the opposite way. Those who are in power and try to run the world by force are fearful people: holding on with their fingernails, forced to use force since it is the only power they have and they know its weakness and their inability to sway people save they use coercion. They know they have no power if the field were equal. The world is primarily existing and continuing by the work of the people of the primary focus of heart.

People respond how they have been trained to other’s tragedies: they send money, they go. We see it every time there is in the news a major tragedy. It is only the loud voices which try to make us into machines and cold shoulders: the elected officials, the corporate chieftains. They have gotten so much into All for me, they feed such wounded encapsulated fattened egos, that the only thing they know is coercion and yelling. The world would work without them…and possibly better. Think we would not have figured way to distribute electricity without CEOs? Invented wheels? Met the needs of others?

The real thing here is that we trust the people. People have good in them and will work toward that. They need no coercion, they need no carrot. There is inbred in each of us a love for others. Sometimes it is not developed. Often it is beaten out of us by the system that others have developed and that we have acquiesced in. But we can in one day throw off these ropes and move to make things better. Then the next day we can choose to go back to business as usual, or go the new way, or at least do more of the one day doings.

:- Doug.

Get busy in some small group or groups—the more the better—the more loosely and fuzzily connected the better—the more wide-spread upon our earth the better. Here, among people who hold each other up, you will grow. You will grow yourself, your companions, and the world. Here, nothing is lost, all finds its highest and best.

Nature mostly puts the flower at the end of the stem.

:- Doug.

An agenda can function like an invitation—opening space for who is possible.

:- Doug.

See the cloud. Where did it come from?—last I looked the sky was clear. I watch the cloud—it moves, it changes shape, grows, shrinks in response to the currents. If you look, you miss movement. You have to look longer to see movement. It takes desire to attend.

:- Doug.

A man set up a hole in the wall into a slum in India and stuck a computer and touch pad in the hole. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html Kids came and taught themselves not only computers but English—and they taught each other.

What’s so amazing about that? The only way any of us learn is for someone else to help us, even if we both are finding our way. The exploration is fun and keeps our attention: we are detectives solving a mystery! Education, learning, is self-organizing. We swell our own egos to say that we need a talking head at the front of a class. We just need someone to want to learn.

:- Doug.

So many ways to say what we are here about:
Opening space among people for their divinity
Calling out human divinity
Letting out the divine potential from human beings
Largering

It is somehow all
Working among, freeing spirit

:- Doug.

We are waves flowing into waves, oceans into oceans, sea-tides with sea-tides. We open, we open, we open to immensity, and within us is immensity opening to immensity. All sides, all directions, immense, beyond measure, beyond, beyond. We are. Immense. Waves, flow. Waving, flowing, coloring, singing, being, loving, living.

:- Doug.

You cannot shut off your mind. You can give it a task.

:- Doug.

Conversation takes place in the spaces between the words, the gestures, the glances, the thoughts. Conversation perhaps does carry us. In any case, conversation cannot be dissected into words, gestures, glances, thoughts exchanged: something else happens. There is a glue, a sticky gossamer, drawing us together, informing us we are one, and lighting a fire in us that sometimes warms, sometimes burns, sometimes sends us out. Conversation carries us out…of ourselves, our selfish selves, and into largering.

:- Doug.

Engaging people in life means engaging with other lives, with the living: other people, all other people, other life forms, other things that exist, for they all inter-exist with us, and we all grow together.

:- Doug.

The tentativeness we all feel about what is our calling, our work in the world, is a good thing. It leads us to see what is going on in this complex world, test our singleness of purpose against it, and invent new responses. Our un-ease over this keeps us looking for higher principles, threads and streams running through. Sometimes the eye does not see because the eye is precisely what it is looking for. We are perhaps the thread or the stream running through, and we have the ability to decide and to invent beyond deciding.

:- Doug.