FootprintsintheWind.com

There will be someone there you need to meet.

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G*d is the space we’re in.

:- Doug.

In our ordinary thinking, the opposite of challenge is ease. We choose the right path and expect the road to open to us, smooth and quickly traveled. Yet challenge may be a necessary part of our progress. It may help us appreciate the end, true. But its main good is giving us cause to lift our foot for this step.

:- Doug.

Lietaer and Belgin in their Of Human Wealth set out a list of larger tasks for humanity in this early part of the 21st century. This raises my sights above reading to Grandma in the nursing home, so much that I think it will be a good exercise to see what ought to be on our todo list as a community and as a world community.

Their list (p 236):

“Ecological clean-up and sustainability implementation.
“* Climate change mitigation.

“* Urban restoration.

“* Improving literacy levels globally.

“* Feeding, clothing, sheltering, education, and inspiring billions of humans.

“* Ensuring decent care for the growing percentage (sic) of elderly in our societies.

“* Providing learning and creative opportunities for all.”

Globally and locally, I would add:

* Providing ready opportunities for each person to engage in the work of the community.

* Engaging elders in the larger work of the community.

* Reduce the isolation that people feel from one another in our culture.

* Change the habituated response to conflict from violence to kindness, acceptance, and a mutual exploration.

* Include people more openly in the decisions of local government.

* Develop ways and opportunities to provide food clothing shelter and transportation to people who aid the common good.

* Find ways to put together those with the need with those with the resources.

* Change the mind-set from thinking of money to thinking of the resources themselves.

* Encourage the elders of the tribe to contribute their wisdom and stories and resources to the building up of the community.

* Encourage religious congregations to get active beyond their doors: active in caring for the less fortunate, active in justice work, active in movement within their communities.

* Encourage student and parent involvement in the direction of their schools and education, that is leading out.

* Encourage neighbors to meet and engage each other in conversations that matter.

* Educate politicians away from Machiavellian, dualistic, us-against-them patterns of thought into diverse and multifaceted fitting together pictures.

* Clean up the depressing dirty, broken, sick, and graffiti covered areas of our cities and countryside, making more life-enhancing and nourishing space.

* Find ways to get people meaningful work.

* Get people more involved in recycling.

* Get people to the river.

* Find ways to include ex prisoners into productive, creative society.

* Reduce drug and alcohol abuse in our community.

* Increase the people who take part in the life of their communities.

What would you add for your community? How could we make this list more concrete?

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

The police officer who was shot Friday died yesterday morning. There is a great deal of eulogizing going on in our community and among the police community, as well as hero-naming. Yet I have a concern, a worry, that all might not be as it is portrayed. The worry is this: the police officer was off duty and apparently on a date. The two of them were approached by someone who had a gun in what was described as a robbery attempt. The rest is unclear; police spokesmen have said the police officer followed police procedure. There was an exchange of gunfire and both the officer and the assailant were hit and hospitalized. The policeman pushed his date out of the way taking three bullets. My specific worry: did the procedure require he pull his weapon to stop a robbery attempt? Did this escalate what could have been a mere loss of a wallet to a loss of life? Was he killed as much by the policy as by the bullets? Could the policy be examined to see if the use of weapons of life destruction can be limited?

Is there anybody out there who could tell us what the “standard” police procedures are in these situations?

:- Doug.

What’s going on in your community about which we need to put our heads together? Can we come up with a new direction? What if we put our hearts together, too?

:- Doug.

The way we move beyond debate is to look for larger vistas, patterns and rhythms, to open our ears and hearts to other melodies, starting with the people here in this room.

:- Doug.

It is important that we do what we can—all that we can. We are able to do more than we think, especially when we are with people who like us have tasted the power of a community doing.

:- Doug.

The work of conversation is drawing out from each other our light. Here we dare to glimpse a new earth and a new heaven.

:- Doug.

Our scriptures reveal more to us of us than they do of divinity. They tell us how we think of the sacred, and so reveal only snatches of what is real. What is real is always much larger.

:- Doug.

You don’t have to do anything—you are free to do!

:- Doug.

For ever is spatial as well as temporal—we are to live for ever—in all places and reaching beyond!

:- Doug.

You can fight city hall. You only have to decide. Then you are free to decide to work with.

:- Doug.

Become Jesus of the sacrifice
Then you live forever.

:- Doug.

Bring people together for change. It is the only way that will ever work.

:- Doug.

When our worldview allows for an immanent as well as a transcendent G*d, we begin to see that all are connected, we see that we are one, that among us lives divinity, and the breaths we walk among are sacred. More significantly, we see that we do matter—to others and to the world and to the future—and matter materially. Most epochally, we now must throw our lives into the world mix, we must become our part, we must give up our lives for others. So, we live.

:- Doug.

Please introduce me to someone doing something epoch-making.

:- Doug.

Have you ever gotten anything significant done without a conversation?

:- Doug.

Where is it written that humans must give all their efforts and all their thoughts to earning their food, clothing and shelter? If we as a society think only of the goals of making more money, have we advanced beyond the aboriginals who to this day can spend hours around the fire talking of their dreams? Or have we regressed? Is there nothing more important?

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

This complementary currency stuff holds promise to me of worth of the people on the margins, because we can value their efforts, creativities and extras. They smile, they point out beauty, they love. This is all of us. Their art—storytelling, music, meaning, wisdom—is valued to the point of giving currency and flow. They are part of us, part with us. So when they pick up litter from the street, or smile for us in the grocery, we give them something from our heart.

Heart currency perhaps this is.

Giving money is crass, beneath the dignity of the persons involved in the intercourse.

This changes how people think. This changes how people interact. This changes how people see one another. It changes all this because it causes us to look at one another and our essential movements anew. We see the heart of another in the little extras they give us. It is extra currency. It is extra notice we give, extra attention. As a result we are paying extra value. To others, to ourselves.

I guess I am seeing this as a way to sustain my wife and I after we can no longer “work.” What is work? This causes us to redefine this word. It is no longer a 4-letter word, but bigger than this. It is no longer a commercial exchange, but a human exchange: We see each other, we exchange our humanity in gifts bestowed, not favors bought. The value of each of us goes up. We say “You can eat because you have been loving to me. I can eat your love for me. I can live on that for a week.”

So could people make a living, and a life, doing primarily complementary currencies? What could that look like?

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

I am not particularly in to the church services for Good Friday this year. But right on cue there is a darkness coming, and the weather suggests a 40% chance of thunderstorms today. Yes, I know you died to make a point that life is bigger than death. There was much pain around your death. There are lessons to learn from what you said and how you lived those last few hours. Yet I am wondering if there is perhaps a larger lesson wisdom from it. Died for our sins is a peculiarly temple way to look at what happened—this relates to the notion of priests and sacrifices. I don’t see a God who wants sacrifice as the key to this. I see a G*d who wants to say, You matter so much to me, see, I will have my son suffer, just to make that point, and the point that your life is larger than your death. It is not that you will survive and live in some Heaven years from now: it is that you can do much larger things now! If I give myself to the full price, you can too, and you will then really live. You will live here and now and there will be a heavenly realm now, on this earth. You will have brought about the new Heaven and the new Earth, in an instant! Live, will you, live!

So, rather than being a somber humorless time, I see this as a time of celebration: look what happens when you can give away your life. Today. It is not that death was conquered, death never had a hold to begin with, death never was real.

Sure, we can re-live what the disciples went through and witness the pain on the cross: it is saying this is real, this is earnest, this is blood and mud and no beer. So is our need to get in there and work at love. Love is hard work. Love is dangerous work. Love is sweaty and working against and over obstacles, love is clearing the woods to build, love is planting the crops, love is hoeing the weeds, love is pounding the fiery iron into shape, love is getting your blood drawn and your body quartered, in some way. Love is living on this muddy ball.

:- Doug.

There is so much to do, time is so fast, we need to do what we see to do now.

:- Doug.

There is work to be done: do it. Worry not about your pay. Find the biggest work you can do: do that.

:- Doug.