FootprintsintheWind.com

The world is ever
Thus and otherwise
Always more than we see

G-d is ever
Thus and otherwise
Always more than we see

Let us keep exploring.

If your soul is deadened, mine is too. What does it profit you to have money in the bank and no life in your soul? If your soul is livened, mine is too. Choose life. For all.

:-Doug.

I speak in poetic, metaphoric language, and maybe you are not there where you can hear it: but hear this: life is not a straight line, our G-d is not a straight line, but bubbles up, emerges where we least expect and at the most opportune times. G-d needs us as much as we need him: we for our existence; he for our facets, our nuances, our very crookedness. It is not a matter of acting upon one another, but of being with each other, acting in each other, creating an unknown us from known elements. Reality is not separating but togethering.I speak in poetic, metaphoric language, and maybe you are not there where you can hear it: but hear this: life is not a straight line, our G-d is not a straight line, but bubbles up, emerges where we least expect and at the most opportune times. G-d needs us as much as we need him: we for our existence; he for our facets, our nuances, our very crookedness. It is not a matter of acting upon one another, but of being with each other, acting in each other, creating an unknown us from known elements. Reality is not separating but togethering.

:- Doug.

There are at least two things that make conversation special from everyday chit-chat: first, it is conversation at the level of no shells nor shields, vulnerable, open, presence, essence to essence, truth to truth, exploring, not trying to protect one’s position or persona, so that real work gets done, people and situations and worlds are changed; second, a sense of the possible emerges and grows, things look new.

Another way of saying the first is perhaps the conversations that matter of Juanita Brown and The World Cafe. It is a good phrase and worthy of promotion. It does seed the thought, but does not get to the profundity of it. What is the notion, then? I want to get beyond truth to truth, essence to essence. I have written about lostness and mystery, vulnerability and openness, connection and relation. What are its hallmarks? Searching our depths. Working. Sharing our questionings. Exploring. Not knowing. Open to whatever shows up. Comfortable with being uncomfortable. Emergence. Turning. Metanoia. Indra’s Web. Surprise. Persons flashing in and out of existence. Bursting through past thinking and history to what might be. Examining from as many angles as we can think of. All this around questions that matter, and then that goes almost without saying, for we do not experience lostness, mystery, openness, connection, turning and bursting through in nonsense. We must engage, and so that is what this matter speaks to.

This then is the answer to “news to use:” it is news that matters, something that you do not use, but which meets you. News that meets, that confronts, that holds you in its presence, with its gaze that is from G-d.

Matters then is Meets? Perhaps.

Lostness is central. With it, we can see what is really there, not what we presumed was there, or guessed, or hoped. Especially, with lostness we can meet: each other, and the eternal Thou in which all lines of relation meet.

We will openness and vulnerability; we are graced with surprise and presence and meeting.

:- Doug.

Three things Buber says in my reading today. All three are in the same section, mostly on the same page (I and Thou, 39), so he sees a relation among them. Yet they are startling: “Spirit is the word.” “Spirit is not in the I, but between the I and Thou.” “Every response binds up the Thou in the world of It.” And another: “Only silence before the Thou…leaves the Thou free, and permits man to take his stand with it in the reserve where the spirit is not manifest, but is.” [All italics Buber’s.]

OK, so man is in spirit, not spirit in man. Got you. But every response turns the Thou to an It? And “response” not speech or wording? Only silence is easier to understand–many things are not capable of being captured in words–things as in persons and meetings. We swim in spirit, we breathe in spirit, it is the atmosphere in which we live and move. It is pure being, perhaps, essence, something else maybe. It is between I and Thou. So when we respond, we are trying to grasp, to hold, to name, to control. And yet our response can be to just be, to witness, to stand. So does his “response” mean words? We live in words, not words in us, “man takes his stand in speech and talks from there; so with every word and every spirit.” So response seems to mean speech, utterance, trying to put into words, whereas word is what they are made of.

We are then, when we try to put something into words, making it smaller than it is.

It is thus limited, not free. We are making it words not word, not spirit, not presence. It no longer burns, but is black markings on a white page in a dusty volume on a forgotten shelf.

The question, what does he mean every response? seems to be answered in this: we are making small, hemming in, when we use words for they limit the presence, the word of Spirit. The paradox is that converstion, dialogue, is necessary for us to meet in that spirit, that word, that place in between. Thus we need a healthy dose of silence.

And so some time for silence this evening, as well.

I am seeing in Buber something I had seen before with my head, but now with my heart, my cor, my essence: humankind must live in both worlds: I-It as well as I-Thou. The lyric, uncanny, strange punctuates the life of It, where work gets done; yet this is a higher work. In some way that is incapable of living in words. It is the word. It is on the tip of our tongue, when we notice.

:- Doug.

Last night on the news was this story in South Bend, Indiana: http://www.wndu.com/news/092005/news_44636.php

Someone went to help the unhelped on the Gulf Coast–rented a couple buses, enlisted some volunteers, blankets, water, food, housing, love. Local officials came close to calling it Illegal; local large charities asked Who checked their medical records, the victims’ backgrounds?

Last I knew it was legal to offer rides to strangers. Last I knew we did not require passports, visas, and background checks to cross state lines.

Sounds more like turf wars to me: the bureaucracies hate being helped, let alone upstaged when they are not meeting all the need. Fear is what they conjure up here for those who would help: because they fear.

Since when is love illegal? Stupid maybe, rushing in where hierarchies of angels fear to tread. Shoot love, ask questions later. Love is the antidote to fear. It is necessary to love.

Light is reflected in image
and image in light
so many times over
we do not know who
is who
is who
is who

Who was that masked one
in our beginning?
It’s not just that you see whom
you were meant to be
but the reflection of whom
we might possibly become

I found myself wondering what will happen after the people come back to the Gulf Coast. How will they rebuild? (I don’t like build in this setting: would prefer a more organic word, because it is first and foremost a living, growing thing.) In any event, I think it will be the smaller towns which come back first. These people know that they are all they’ve got, and live it. They will be most pragmatic: this is what we have, and if anything more is to come, we will have to produce it. And they will move toward something new, even while they are trying to keep what is best of the past.

People will need to grieve, to have their if onlys, their bargaining, their emptiness. And then, and only then, they will ask the question What next? If they can do this together, the process will be better, deeper, longer lasting.

They are writing the story of hope in our day. They are the examples, in the cocoon it may be, but the examples of courage and hope and help that we will look back on years from now. They are building us, they are building the stuff of epic and myth.

They have an opportunity that many of us will come to envy: a clean slate. Well, not yet clean, but the only choice will be to gather up the debris and clean the slate. Then they can start again. Or rather, start anew.

Our ahead is together. The tool of that ahead is conversation. We need to invite conversations. On the Gulf Coast. Around the country. Every day. This minute.

The larger city people will take longer. Not only because a bigger vehicle takes longer to turn, but because they tend to think in terms of Let the big people make the decisions, I hope they do this or that. I wonder if Euell Gibbons had been in New Orleans, would he have grown fat? And if he would have organized folks around him to gather food for a feast for a whole neighborhood? It is not that his knowledge and folklore are fading fast, but that the notion that we can find what we need anywhere is fading. People can do what they need done. For themselves. Without waiting for others. Are these people capable of seeing themselves anew? Of course. But the steering wheel will need to be oiled and worked back and forth quite a bit before it will work as it could, so long has this vehicle been towed, the steering wheel locked.

And the devastation has not been as complete in New Orleans–a report for instance says that 80% of the French Quarter is still in good shape. So there will be less of a clean slate to write upon there. This is good–it is an anchor that will give people hope faster, but it is not so good–it is an anchor that could hold people and their thinking back: they will see themselves defined by their architecture, not by what might be deeper, more lasting.

But our help is necessary both places: small gatherings and large. Our work is to invite the conversations and welcome those who come.

:- Doug.

I have a light that will help us see where we are going–
it is in the heart of each of us–
all of us–
how dare I hide it under a bushel?

If I travel from sunrise to sunrise
I always return to my beginning
my beginning is always ahead.

Humanity is like the weather–
when two or three elements move together–
they’re always moving, aren’t they?–
something’s gonna happen–
But–
humanity has a choice.

Gangs roaming the streets of New Orleans, people shooting at the helicopters trying to evacuate the Super Dome: this is something directly out of a disaster movie. People are becoming angry, but some are also violent. Then there are stories of overwhelming sharing and caring and sacrifice for other humans. The depths of humans and the human species is brought out.

The looting, the gang turf wars–is there a role for conversation? The role is up front, before the disaster comes, to help people see that they are one with the others around them, trying to do the best they can, the others are not other but their own kind, trying to help, nothing and no one to be feared. This has to happen one and two at a time. No government program will resolve it, but parents must talk to their toddlers, must sit and read with them, must meet with other toddlers and parents, grade schools need to get past the us vs them way of teaching, one person in front of the class doling out the good stuff to the dummies with their minds out, kids must learn from talking and sitting and doing with one another, pre-teens working on projects, learning first hand that people can and do care, learning how to be with others. Then, when the storm comes, they are ready to help not harm, they do not see it as a chance to get even or get more than their share, grab the gusto, but a chance to be their highest selves, and that is together.

But even after the storm, we need to make the effort, hard as it might be, to reach out to those inclined to violence and taking to seek their help, to show how they are important and to see other people as important too. It means approaching them not as an enemy but as one off the path.

Perhaps those who work in the prisons, have much better ideas and insight.

It has been coming home to me in many ways in the past week that there are no easy solutions. To ask How is often to ask “What magic pill can I give to this situation that will solve it once for all time?” and of course there is no such thing. It takes hard work. More than that it takes engagement.

And that over time. This is the eternal vigilance that George Washington reminded us of 2 centuries ago. Engagement over time.

:- Doug.

We are imperfect because we are incomplete
I pray we never be complete
For then we die eternally

So let us seek each day to fit
The world to our several hearts
Or our hearts to the moving world
& so discover fresh anew our unending life

:- Doug.

in a spirit of poetry
we see anew
we live

:- Doug.

Activists—people who get things done—more than most people, live in conversation. Conversation is not just how they get things done, it is life itself, how the doing gets them, and round and round.

:- Doug.

Invite the conversation. There is only one conversation.

:- Doug.

Open the container of true conversation
peer inside—what is it?
intimate—inviting into and out of a part of you you don’t often get to show
reflective—the spaces between give us the notes
responsive—pledging, plying, enfolding
meeting—raw side to raw side
exploring—to find the story we share
acting—out of our shared depths
mattering—for us & for our community
opening—to silence & emptying ourselves

:- Doug.

There’s always money for a celebration.

:- Doug.