FootprintsintheWind.com

What are your people’s maybes?

:- Doug.

What are the questions your groups are asking? What questions do they dance around, not quite get voiced? What’s the buzz?

:- Doug.

The task of any group of conversants is not to make a product, but to meet their questions in a way that brings forth what is in them.

The questions are us. The questions live through us and we live when we engage truly. Seek not results but your self’s abandon.

:- Doug.

Live questions make conversation good.

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

What does it mean to speak in person? When are we in person? When are we in our own person? When is another person in us and we in them? What does it mean to be “in?” Presence?

Who is a person? What? Presence again?

To be goodness, truth or beauty embodied for another and for ourselves?

To be truly there for and with that person? Might this be an unpacking of what presence means? To allow the flow between persons that is conversation, dialogue, meeting? To find the gossamer strands of Indra’s net crossing and sparking a node for this instant and no longer?

Seeing, doing, being: Can we not only be in person for another, but see in person, do in person? Could we see into the person, do person with them?

:- Doug.

A friend called today to say that September 11 was also the anniversary of the start of Gandhi’s peace movement, in 1906.

On September 11, 1906, in Johannesburg, South Africa, a young lawyer named Mohandas K. Gandhi called together a group of people to oppose racial limiting legislation. 3,000 people that day signed an agreement to disobey the proposed law by nonviolent means, whatever the cost.

What can this “coincidence” mean? That good and bad are part of us: terror is as much part of the human way as is peace? That we may not have to lash out against terrorism with violence, but that there is another way, viable and life giving?

Please tell me what you think; I am trying to understand.

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

It occurred to me last night that what I am, and we are, about is the transforming of persons. This is what it means to rip: we are covered over with a grey film and do not know ourselves. When we rip, we not only see our colored light, but we see that we are all those colors and creativities and light itself!

Last night I wrote: “If I am then in the transforming business, what does this mean? Transforming from what to what? Transforming into human beings…meaning what? Discovering what this means?”

I think this is right: we are much larger than we had thought. We had thought we were money-getting machines, here to put up houses and shopping centers and things people would consume. We after all thought we were consumers. Perhaps we need to think of ourselves as larger than that, as producers, creators, humans.

What can it mean to be human? What could it mean?

I do not know if goodness, truth and beauty are the keys to the universe; I do know that these are some of the basics of human thought, from ancient Greece to now. So these are doorways into what is deeper, what is more truly human.

So we have power/doing, feeling and meaning: things to open us to seeing more, doing more, being more.

Hmm…: goodness-power-doing; beauty-feeling-being; truth-meaning-seeing. Parallels if not synonyms.

:- Doug.

My investments are in people—investments of time, of being, of opening.

:- Doug.

It’s not just me—it’s all of us together.

:- Doug.

Give to me even your fear.

:- Doug.

It’s not the conversations
that draw me to conversation
nor even what the people do
but how they are transformed
and thus am I; thus are we all

:- Doug.

Conversation is how we give birth to groups as persons now beyond labels

:- Doug.

There is a price I have to pay for this
Conversing, bringing forth—my life
I must give it; I must give it entire

:- Doug.

What is the hardest to say?
That direction goes truth.

:- Doug.

There is a love in conversation
Let me touch

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

The only ones who are going to get “these people” out of poverty are these persons. You cannot do it for them; you cannot do it to them; you cannot even make them want to do it.

You can, however, meet them as persons and invite them to meet you as a person, and to invite them to help you see how you can help, if they want your help at all.

“Poverty” is a construct, a term made up by those who have to describe those who do not. Might it be pejorative?

:- Doug.

Conversations are footprints in the wind, blowing where they may, from where and to where we cannot see far. These nodes of conversation blow around us and we stand in them, lean against them, are turned by them, or just think them nice breezes, by turns. We do well to note the wind, to catch it when we can, and to know it is beyond our control.

:- Doug.

This is what we have to offer each other: not the assurance of success or change, but the possibility. We can assure each other that if we do not meet, change if it comes will come with pain and great effort. But if we do talk, it is possible. The only thing we have is conversation. We live in conversation. Perhaps one person can today go into the woods, fell the trees and build a cabin, even mine the ore to make the saw and axe blades with which to cut the timbers. Unlikely. We need each other. Help only comes through conversation.

We are offering, inviting possibility and with it hope.

:- Doug.

Meeting pokes holes.

:- Doug.

The end of heart is art—creativity, beauty, sensitivity.

:- Doug.

Why should we want to consciously evolve?

At first I thought it a response to two poles: hubris, in that we think we cannot improve our species; humility in that we hold back from trying.

Then I thought it necessary: for the good of our grandchildren.

Now I am thinking it is wholeness, fullness, completeness: to poke holes in the grey cloth over our heads, poke holes that can show us we can let it out, let it out!

:- Doug.

How can we be complete without being heard?

:- Doug.

If we could choose how we evolve what would we choose?

Would we choose to make our species better at building shopping centers? (Careful! It’s not as easy as it looks to answer.) Better at getting money from each other? Better at extracting and using up earth’s resources? (What’s better?) Better at caring for the ill, the justice deprived, the respect-less?

:- Doug.