FootprintsintheWind.com

A goal is a crutch. It is not what you want to live. It can help you walk, but if you are able, why do you need something that can get in your way?

:- Doug.

We do not get people to march, to sit-in, but invite them to sit down and hear each other, and then get on with their work.

:- Doug.

Our need for experts is expressing our need for diversity—new information, new thought, new enthusiasm.

:- Doug.

My life is my conversation.

:- Doug.

Why are you here today?

To change the conversation. To change the story we tell each other. To find the persons who are changing the world.

:- Doug.

Cell phones:
From whom I am with
From where I am
I don’t want to be that
Disconnected

:- Doug.

Is it cool dark waters? Are its faces at once strange and familiar? Is it befuddling fun work—a tangled yun of farn? Then it is the new conversation!

:- Doug.

Too often we look for
A direct connection
& direct connections are not required
In matters of spirit
A baby’s crying in Mexico City
Inexorably means
A prayer in Kiev
People setting to work in Indiana

:- Doug.

To let others
Under our skins
Gives us gifts
Of talk deep

:- Doug.

Story, Song, and Hearing are the strength of humanity. Hearing implies open hearts, open spaces, action, engaging, open minds, open hands, the people owning their community, their lives. These compose the gossamer thread of incredible strength and stickiness that runs through the heart of each human and ties us together as one.

:- Doug.

This conversation is new in this way, too: it has an arrow, a direction, a good direction, benefiting humanity. It has heart purpose.

:- Doug.

Extricate: to disentangle. Intricate: to entangle better!

:- Doug.

It may be necessary for me to break cleanly with the way we have lived—and for my hearers to find their more gradual changes within their accustomed lives.

:- Doug.

It may be that some we call pessimist see so much complexity they are overwhelmed.

:- Doug.

Inaccurate it is to say I am an optimist: I simply see things: things that are possible, things that are a different way of seeing, things that can make a better world. What informs my vision is not that I tend to take a hopeful view or even my belief that good will ultimately prevail—I do see that there is evil and suffering all around, and it is part of the world in which we must live—what immediately and deeply informs my vision is my grandchildren.

I want them to have what is possible for them. One possible world has people tightly packed and milling about like so many night­crawlers in the bottom of a bait can—this is not a world I want for my grandchildren. Another world is an Utopian field with children running and jumping and pulling colorful streamers behind. Neither do I want that for them. What I want is a world they need to work for, a world they need to heal—and one toward which they want to stretch with others.

This is no “ism” at all, simply a knowing that if we want a good world, a humanly livable world, all who care need to engage. We can neither give up, nor abdicate to some far off leader. We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the ones the world has been developing toward.

:- Doug.

We are more tightly; we have never talked like this. We must work for dancing and away from away from.

:- Doug.

O! To be able to tell what I see! I see a garden of flowers and vegetables—colors and shapes, fragrances, tall and short, touched by the breezes, visited by bees and butterflies, an ecosystem growing living cooperating. Someone comes along, someone who has never seen tomatoes before, someone who refuses to eat them and moreover demands that they be uprooted and thrown far away from here because they are obviously poison! And the plants which depend upon the tomatoes lose vitality, a little at first, more later. And the person’s health declines, and all suffers as he extirpates more and more of the garden, declaring all he needs to eat is corn, the colors of the flowers are only a disturbing nuisance not to be tolerated. Season after season the corn depletes the earth of the nutrients the corn needs, and the crops grow sicklier and the man. Across the way, beyond the fence is his vigorous neighbor, waving to him, offering him some of the bounty of her garden. And he will not, for he put up the fence. In variety she grows strong and full of health.

:- Doug.

The closer we come together, the more isolation there is, the more we try to protect our little shells.

Perhaps the unconscious reaction to population compression is to seek for protection, to withdraw, to isolate, to get a gun, to fend off, to kill the Other. The conscious reaction can be the contrary, to seek for gathering, to love, to open, to get a hug or a dance, to draw in, to hear others.

So when we find ourselves too close for comfort, we can take it for a signal for us to reach out and draw closer, to take down the masks and walls, to hear ourselves and others.

:- Doug.

Hope is harder
To understand than anger
But stronger

:- Doug.

We need all of us
Would you throw away
Your last loving touch?

:- Doug.

Work not with fear but compassion—tell the stories of the unheard ones. This is where hope arises—hearing each other to wholeness.

:- Doug.

What ought not to happen were we not ready for it in our thinking and our thinking together: what ought not to happen, does happen—there is a promise here. It is as if we were opening the doors and windows and skylights for it. It is as if we knew it would happen, just not when or how or where. It is as if a riderless horse happens by, or a breeze, or a person calls when we are busy with doing the work of life, and we can be transported and transmogrified if we are willing.

:- Doug.

A promise
If you think beyond the ordinary
Especially if you converse beyond the ordinary
If you insist on doing so
It will lead—seemingly by chance—
To something that ought not happen

:- Doug.