FootprintsintheWind.com

This is about
helping people become intimate with their life in their world
asking What gives us hope?
connecting what we do with the needs of the world in our epoch
getting people the opportunity to re-examine themselves and their issues and their relationships to their issues
people tackling bugbears and finding others willing to help
posting your most challenging questions on the wall and engaging whomever walks past…even if there is no wall
people working together to make the kind of world we want for our grandchildren

:- Doug.

People want to give.

:- Doug.

No matter how many mittens and sweaters you put on, there will still be a heat exchange. It is silly to think there are no other sentient beings here and that you will have no effect one upon the other. Look about! The world is populated with billions of souls: they will bump into each other, often on purpose. They will create more and morph themselves. You are not born alone, you do not live alone, and it is not you alone who meets your maker.

:- Doug.

We co-create our world out of the breezes. Whether we think we can or cannot fight city hall or start a community garden or overcome hatred with human loving, it will be born in our world. It takes on a life of its own, at once creating itself and its creators.

:- Doug.

We can look at the glass, pass the glass around, or drink it. Then we find out whether it has poison or ambrosia.

:- Doug.

When we are heard, we create ourselves. The hearer creates; the heard creates. The one heard is not the same as the one who spoke.

:- Doug.

Still the three kinds of conversation are buzzing about: Conversation-1 is transferring information; Conversation-2 is acting upon things; and Conversation-3 is acting upon the actors.

People know these levels and how to go there: seldom do we have the opportunity to choose. Community disorganizing then is giving people a chance to go to whatever of these levels they might choose.

People move information; people move the world; people move.

People move information: it might be humor or small talk (designed to move the information that I am a friendly, reliable, whatever kind of person I want you to know I am) or a 300 page business report. People move the world: this might range from Please pick up that scrap of paper, to organizing a church potluck. People move: here people take ownership of a project and are at the threshold of meeting and co-creating each other.

People engage top of head; people engage brain and muscle; people engage heart and guts. Conversation starts at the extremities and moves toward center.

:- Doug.

We know it is true to ourselves if it does not fit an existing category. Uniqueness points to new truth.

:- Doug.

What if infinity were not unlimited space but unlimited here? You could be at home on the north pole and here in Indiana—at the same moment. You could be inside a quantum leap and on top of a tennis ball at Wimbledon—in the same now.

:- Doug.

Wu wei
my way?
with those
making change good
gathering the heard
creating us

:- Doug.

Have you heard of Fab Lab? It is a project of MIT to bring manufacturing to the desktop. Check it out: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/ Kathy Joyce of HomeSchool Hub told me about it; she is working to bring it to Berrien County, Michigan this September!

This all struck me as Bucky’s ephemeralization: now we have a factory the size of a microwave oven. Some day soon we might get such things down to small enough to be carried within the human mind. Not a human mind, the human mind. What then?

Then we can re-create the world everyday, not only in our imagination, but in our bodies and in the physical realm, not just there, but in others’ imaginations. We will see that all is subject to us and that we have a responsibility to it.

What is our responsibility to our creations? What claim do they have on us? We need first to go through the conversation stage, we need to learn to relate well—peacefully, creatively, lovingly—before we start to see what claim our creations have on us.

So when I write a poem what responsibility do I have to it? When I create something in Linda, create a piece of Linda in our hearts, what responsibility do I have to her? To love, to honor, to respect, to continue to create and allow her to create me, to allow the poem to create me. I have a responsibility to be malleable.

Can we be totally malleable? No, we also have a responsibility to face who we create and speak our truth. This implies as well to listen and to hear, to take in and become part.

Is this also the case of G?d with us? To love, to honor, to respect, to continue to create and be created, to be malleable, to listen and hear, to allow the poem to speak G?d.

:- Doug.

A who without shape
A who without handle
On you
Or who

:- Doug.

On the conversation continuum there are natural stopping points, clicks on the tone control knob:

Conversation of the first kind is information transfer. Treble. There are three ways to delete a letter in your word processing program.

Conversation of the second kind is acting upon one another. Half-way. Please do this; What if we moved the sofa over there?

Conversation of the third kind is co-creating one another; it acts upon being. This is the kind we most want, but avoid whenever we can. This interweaves us and makes us all different. Bass. If we saw ourselves as change-makers, we could start a neighborhood garden, end this war.

Three kinds of work conversation can do.

:- Doug.

Imagination does not work just on its own, in a vacuum (at least in this world and my experience of it): it requires something upon which to work. This explains for me why sometimes I get lost in conversations and cannot find another way out: I am seeing a dearth of things upon which to work my imagination. Find something, someone to touch, to act upon, to act upon me.

:- Doug.

Sometimes more real—
Often more significant—

First sensing—
Second shaping—
Third amonging—

Throughout the real is imagination

:- Doug.

With Breezes, O! the Breezes—
With Bees and Butterflies—
With fear and not so clear—
Mystics wrestled here—

:- Doug.

Are you ever you talking to an it?

:- Doug.

Conversations take place in a living organism
—the betweens—
that’s why it feels like a third person
arises
but really we
arrive—
live
here—
We don’t so much give birth to
as we are brought forth by
the betweens
—organic process—
moving in the stream
Look too for the between the betweens
ever pregnant ever bringing forth ever aborning
a fourth person there is
in whom we live and move the world
not so much interpersonal as
person-inter-al

:- Doug.

Our tool is conversations that matter, conversations that work.

:- Doug.

Rather than tell you what you
lack
I invite you to
do
with your
life
between

:- Doug.

There is more that wants to be said.

:- Doug.

This might be why some conversations feel dead: we are not working on live questions: things which demand of us our input, our selves, our being, our work. We need to be doing work in our conversation, or we do not feel alive. If we are not doing heavy lifting conversations, then we feel dead. Conversations that work: this is when we feel alive. Let’s watch for that and see if it is true.

:- Doug.

The gift we bring is engaging people with what matters to them. Engaging people in their world. Engaging imagination, the highest gift. Engaging each other, the profoundest gift.

:- Doug.