FootprintsintheWind.com

Who are you? is the question for our imagination to ask when we meet some one.

:- Doug.

Opening space is not about a facilitator but about you. It is not about bringing something in from the outside, but good out from the inside.

:- Doug.

How do you participate in evolution? How shall we?

:- Doug.

Imagining the real
an we bring something to being
with our minds alone?
as if imagining were done with minds alone!
as if imagining and the real were different things!
but can we see it larger than we have seen it before?
larger than it has ever been?
we see the real, hear its rhythms
—can we, imagining the real—
touch, taste, smell any essences?
so imagining together, we give birth

:- Doug.

What if we do need permission to act as children of G*d? What if you’re the one who can give us that permission today? What do you say?

:- Doug.

When is a verb a noun?
When you are calling it that
When is G*d a verb?
Not when you are calling him that

:- Doug.

Our work is inviting persons to the unfolding.

:- Doug.

G*d is the peripatetic teacher, facing us, demanding of us a decision to throw our lives into the ring, then turning and walking away, beckoning us to come to a new place. A respiration: in to intimacy with Being, out to transcendence of Becoming.

:- Doug.

What did Jesus do? He healed and he ate with everyone. We may not be able to restore a cut off ear, but we can help get out hearing aids to people, and we might help people hear the voice of the upward call in their lives. We might even listen for it ourselves. We can eat with others, befriend the hungry, homeless and those in prison.

:- Doug.

What is the between? It arises, and before that it is potential. Can we recognize it both times? Is it in fact more potential when arising?

:- Doug.

What is the unfolding we seek? What does evolution look like, on the ground, in feet and hands and noses? First: to encourage the inborn Thou to meet others often, regularly, and as the normal stuff of life. Second: poor and hungry persons meeting together to improve life in this place for other people.

:- Doug.

It is necessary for us to get conscious about doing evolution.

:- Doug.

There is a Thou inborn in each of us who wants—desperately—to be met. From here comes our primal need to be heard. We must connect with others. Mizpah coins, epic lovers, and yin and yang have nothing on us, because for us to be wholly who we are requires us to fit with beyond finite numbers of others in uncountable dimensions. We must become more conscious about it.

:- Doug.

One reason conversation is difficult is that two people must turn: remove shields and masks, and open. One alone can encourage the other, but meeting eventually requires at least two.

:- Doug.

Transcendence and immanence can be in one person
because meeting and intimacy can be in one person

:- Doug.

Transcendence speaks to our hearts
serving the purpose of calling us higher
reminding us there is more and we can be more
Immanence—intimacy—reminds us we are here
meeting us at home with our clutter and comfort
Immanence and transcendence are both presence

:- Doug.

My Being grows from my Doing
Yet my Doing proceeds from my Being
As from eternity, a thread through all my ages

:- Doug.

The something being done of necessity is good, for destruction is undoing. A negative is a nothing. It is sometimes the work of a shrinking, pain-engulfed ego. To say we are going to work together to do something then makes it clear it is a positive good, not a harm. A harm merely takes away, subtracts, and subtracting is not doing. Ultimately you end up with nothing. Less than nothing is not possible, so to work at harm is to work for nothing. Nothing is left behind, the person is not built up, but torn down, there is no Being to this actor. The Being is the eternal part of the human Doing/Becoming, and if the Doing is nothing, Being is not.

Holding other people at bay, keeping them outside our circle, is the same thing: negativing. We are negativing them, subtracting them from us, and in so doing we are becoming naught.

:- Doug.

Conscious conversation is both a starter of and a companion to conscious evolution. Conversation in the sense of meeting and intercourse is necessary for such conscious evolution, but not sufficient—there needs to be something to flow along its sluiceways. That something is desire to do something together, acting upon each other or upon the world. In this doing is expressed our being, and the thing done creates, in Blake’s terms, our form, image and Being. Doings are the fiery stones out of which Being is made.

:- Doug.

Let us create
conversation came before creation
conscious conversation
has to come before we
can arrive at conscious evolution

:- Doug.

What is the larger than us that is in us?

:- Doug.

What can we create that will outlast us? What is the eternal within our palms? If we can think such thoughts, we have the call to create.

:- Doug.

This is the issue that the fundamentalists, among others have: they are stuck in the cycles of time, seeing with dark glasses no way out. And some of us are seeing the apocalypse, not an imposed end of the world, but a work for us to be about. They see the big bang at the end of time, and we see it at the beginning! They see time as having no end, and we see it as ending and eternity remaining. We see a way out and it is our way to choose. Choose life.

We have the cycle of Noah and the Flood. If that is the cycle, it did not work: we are still stuck. Abraham from Ur; Noah and the Flood; David and the Philistines; the exile and the return to a land of sweat not milk and honey; Jesus and death: if this is the limit of our vision, then our vision did not work. God’s vision must be larger. And it must include us, not as dumb driven cattle, but as actively creative Beings.

Read the scriptures, read the world, with fresh eyes, eyes to see what God is up to: a vision. A vision so far as I have seen of a large human body, the body of Christ, diversity in unity, acting on the world, creating a City of God.

:- Doug.