FootprintsintheWind.com

Why are people not born immediately after conception? Do they need time to gestate? Could it be the same with ideas?

:- Doug.

The pot needs time to simmer and work through ideas: it gives dignity and respect to the ideas; a mind shower tends to lead people to assume that the ideas are all fully-formed and ready to go. This is not how ideas generate. Instead, we get an inkling, then we think about it and see where it leads.

:- Doug.

We need to bring fire and fire together: small groups can kindle these ideas, develop them. A larger group will tend to give more voice to the idea-killers, and to those who have the loudest voices or talk the most. We need to encourage all voices.

:- Doug.

Northrop Frye writes in his Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake: “Those who have fed the hungry and clothed the naked are here, because they have realized the divine dignity of man.” (p 81) Yes! Humans have divine dignity, and to repress the imagination, the action, of persons is to repress the divine.

:- Doug.

Restoring dignity is not a gift we bestow, but a grace we are sometimes privileged to carry. Dignity consists among other things in seeing G*d in the naked, hungry, angry and conniving one.

These are people who have become separated from their lives. The antidote is to insert them back into life. Power comes from giving—the separated one by giving receives the power once more to live larger.

:- Doug.

Do what you can, not what you must.

:- Doug.

The half-day solve-everything event: why do we over and again try to do this to ourselves? Change is a process. What we are seeking will not be done in a day, but will take work beyond that. We are asking too much of the human organism to ask that people resolve all the things they will want in a few hours. We need sleeping on it time. We need conversations that can go deeply. We need reflection time. We need continuing conversation. Trying to force things into a time frame that is too small is like forcing a fat kid into a size small shirt: buttons are gonna pop, the shirt will be ruined, and the kid will not be clothed.

:- Doug.

Conversation opens the participants, gets us asking ourselves, individually and together, questions that can change how we approach life and life together. Renewed, we can.

:- Doug.

Put hydrogen and oxygen together and you get…wet! Add carbon and you get life!

:- Doug.

Conversation creates worlds.

:- Doug.

What could you do, working with others, to make ours a community that works for all?

:- Doug.

Where could you use this?

:- Doug.

We are already human.

:- Doug.

Let’s together jump in.

:- Doug.

We are the hungry.

:- Doug.

I choose to make myself available.

:- Doug.

We are already in the conversation.

:- Doug.

Are we already here?

:- Doug.

We are all already about getting persons in community to converse.

:- Doug.

Make of your life a participation in our life.

:- Doug.

A person lives with other persons; an individual, an ego, “lives” separated. An individual is about a narrowing survival; a person enlarges the human calling.

:- Doug.

In conversation, I can surrender myself and still take my unique stand: what is surrendered is my ownership, my ego; what stands is wat I discover in the conversation about my wholer self, and about the self between us of which I am partaking.

:- Doug.

How odd! In the morning, women put things on their faces, men scrape things off, and both think they look better for it. Yet this is an emblem of our times, yes? For we are so separated from each other that we cannot show our faces to one another…nor to ourselves.

:- Doug.