FootprintsintheWind.com

Is a teacher at the front of a room of students the only model of learning there can be? Could there be better ways of calling people forth, giving information, applying wisdom, taking truth and equity into our lives, and whatever else learning is?

:- Doug.

Problem solving tells us that we have all there will ever be, and the best we can have is to arrange the pieces differently. There can be no present discontinuous with the past. There can be no hope. How can that possibly be reality?

:- Doug.

This is not community—your doing for others. This is you feeling better about yourself, salving you guilt. If they cannot do for themselves and this is your best guess of what this one needs, then you have come nearer. Community flows in all directions.

:- Doug.

How is what I am doing “the dismantling of the empire in its social practices and in its mythic pretensions?” (Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, p 9)

:- Doug.

There is an alternative to the culture which enmeshes us.

:- Doug.

The pictures and stories of our culture
Saying this is the only way life can be
And the ones of possibility
Are both forms of imagination
Saying We have a choice

:- Doug.

“Been there, done that,” “Here is what those people need to know,” “There is no hope” are all forms of imagination—just the eyes dimmed kind.

:- Doug.

You and I are not the only ones with imagination. If we bring to the center those on the edge our world gets bigger. Immensely bigger.

:- Doug.

What is the possibility conversation for this community?

:- Doug.

Test
Where you are
Is this the best
We can do?
Can we imagine
Anything better?

:- Doug.

Perhaps
People are not broken
Even the ones we think are
Even the ones who say they are
Perhaps
We are not the answers for other people
Perhaps
They need to find other questions
Or we do

:- Doug.

This conversation will change lives. This conversation will change our community. Will you adopt that as your intention for the next 60 minutes?

:- Doug.

Conversation is meeting G*d.

:- Doug.

Standing in the face of an other expands.

:- Doug.

I am insufficient to change our community—a community is more than one so it will take more than one.

:- Doug.

I am inviting you to use your imagination in service to our community.

:- Doug.

I am offering to my world an alternative now, the way to love: through the new conversation.

:- Doug.

The world can only be changed by acting together. The world is more than one individual and so it takes more than one to shift its course. The time of the great leader, if it ever was, is now passed. We have seen too much to follow one person’s ideas blindly. We need to be convinced. We need more than that to be part, to have the ideas and causes belong to us and us to them. Community change, community action; world growth, world action.

:- Doug.

It is between us that it all happens—not at us, not in either of us—precisely in that thread that sometimes runs from being to being. Here is that knowing glance. Here is where it all is, where the world sprouts.

:- Doug.

What would you change? We’re all leaning in, hanging on your words. Someone pulls up a chair. Ideas pop around the circle. We roll up our sleeves, our feet jangle. This is bigger than one person. This matters. We can. We will. We.

:- Doug.

What is the magic in the middle? In the middle of the muddle something arises, it sparks. We see ourselves as part of something larger, a whole. We see we can make our neighborhood, community, city, and world better in some concrete way. The spark gets our sleeves rolling up, it jangles our feet.

:- Doug.

What do you want to change? What needs a group working on it?

:- Doug.

G*d is the Big Bang
So small, containing all

:- Doug.