FootprintsintheWind.com

Transformation is task. Ever incomplete, it is joy.

:- Doug.

Can we know anything, grasp it forever? Nothing is forever. Everything moves. No one; every one; all. Yet inside lives a need to know and be known. Our question is to find a way for this one, now, to creatively say goodbye. We know forever the good, beautiful and true we have touched and set it into motion, outward.

:- Doug.

What are the parts of ourselves that need transformation? Can we know?

:- Doug.

Do I make poetry because there are ones with whom I want to get in touch?

:- Doug.

Do I create words because I see more there and want to share?

:- Doug.

What is it about little girls and mystics that leads them to want to spin themselves dizzy?

:- Doug.

What is the role of departure in conversation? It seems it must be great, must at least not be ignored. It could be that if we do not disengage here, we may miss engaging there in a new way. It could happen as running out of steam, but if the conversation be good, it calls for a good ending.

What makes the ending good? It invites a going forth. Perhaps it invites a returning—as a new person. I think of the Hero’s Journey cycle as informing this: going forth, meeting danger, being—with one’s own innate resources—transformed by meeting danger into a new person, who then returns to the community, changed, changing, to the larger task of meeting anew.

We are whole yet incomplete. Our task is to complete. Once we move toward complete, we find other ways to complete. Changing our community, contributing to its change, takes courage and energy that no one of us possesses. Energy is not a thing to possess, but a flow to invite, receive. So we use our energy to ignite and invite others’. It takes courage to invite it, faith to know it is there in most people, some nearer the surface, some buried deeper, most hidden. Departure is not only a new beginning; it is an arbitrarily named place on the spiral.

Departure might be a call to reflect. Departure might be a place to take a deep breath and a rest. Is departure the in-breath, the out-breath, or the small still space between? Might departure be more than all this?

:- Doug.

A turtle suns upon the edge of the pond
his or her perch looks precarious to me
but how’s it look to the turtle?
Perhaps a sunny beach and safe enough
by way of center of gravity.

:- Doug.

How does water get clear?
Settling
Running through the ground
Transmogrifying into vapor and rain
How do we get clear?

:- Doug.

I don’t like it when people have me figured out. I don’t even have me figured out.

:- Doug.

We often say that which we want to believe.

:- Doug.

Be the conversations you want to have in the world. Use the long stick to probe for authentic springs. The connecting thread is that we are all so uncommonly.

:- Doug.

We dance
you lead
so I may see
how I can help

Shy, aggressive,
flowing: each calls
for a different
fitting.

Will we accept from out the dance
that which makes us new?
They also change the world
whose favored step is to receive.

And stumbling
—ahh stumbling!—
can we do that together
and do it well, without intervening?

:- Doug.

We have retreats to get away from the day to day pressures and find something new in ourselves. We ought not be surprised that much of it does not stick when we return to the fray.

So let’s design these “retreats” differently. Let’s still go off site to get the perspective. But then let’s come back on site and live the perspective for a half day then a full day at a time, interspersing times—generous times—to reflect and figure out how to make it stick. Or find another way.

:- Doug.

If your god is a god of retribution, perhaps you could ask from where in you comes the need for retribution? Or guilt, or holding at a distance, or compassion.

How much of your god is your mind telling you what god is, and how much really meets you?

:- Doug.

Ask those you meet what they see, what they want to invite, help them grow muscle on the bones of their own dreams. Find out their dreams, call them out into the circle. The circle of humanity. Ask them what others think the dreams are, what the invitation might mean to them. What are the live questions?

The key is to probe for the live questions, the ouches and the gotta-dos. Here is life. Here is conversation. Here is G*d. Here is the multi-colored life that is persons, persons in meeting.

:- Doug.

The homeless
The aimless
People of potential

:- Doug.

I pay the price—
be generous!

:- Doug.

The world is trying to be
The one G*d so loved
We hope

:- Doug.

Some surprises of conversation:
* you say something you didn’t know you thought
* someone else says what you were going to say
* someone asks “Did you hear what you said? That was profound.”

:- Doug.

Chris Corrigan writes about 9/11, that if the attacks changed the world, then the terrorists are in control. The other choice in assigning responsibility is this:

“if the responsibility for world-changing rests with us individually and collectively, then we are confronted with the thought that we must bear some responsibility for how the world has changed, and know that it is entirely within our capabilities to change it again.”

Yes! We do not just have the power to change the world or our little corner of it, but we have the duty.

Chris, challenge us more!

:- Doug.

Conversations are questions. What if we did not live the questions but the questions lived us? What if the questions used us as carriers?

:- Doug.

What are the questions where you live?

:- Doug.