FootprintsintheWind.com

The Work is to increase the proportion of poetry in the world. Won’t you join me? What does poetry mean to you?

:- Doug.

I want to make poetry—make making—make beauty out of the human.

:- Doug.

Where does the urge to live lead? Toward what does the arc of human bend?

:- Doug.

If you want your children to do better than you, that spells different from what you have done.

:- Doug.

I want people to be agents, actors, doers in their own lives, in humanity, in life! Humanity is not done growing up; life is not done. I can help a little.

It will take thinking. It will take action. From each of us, and together. It is time to move while we yet can think and do. What do you do human that could be done wonderfully? Together?

:- Doug.

I am inviting people—you!—to do human. Wonderfully.

:- Doug.

I don’t intend to save the world. Only humans.

:- Doug.

All embraces conversation. Or maybe conversation embraces all.

:- Doug.

Complexity is conversing.

:- Doug.

I have curiosity for complexity.

:- Doug.

Progress or process? The beginner has a message. The person of experience has questions. The departing one lightly holds curiosity.

:- Doug.

My computer system, even my family system, is comfortable. We get along well and I am happy with them. They will not stay the same. I will have to learn new things, accept changes. No matter what you’ve got figured out and settled, you don’t.

:- Doug.

Today all points me this way: Invite people to converse with us in various languages, say drawing, photography, gibberish. This rubs our noses in fresh insights. Our insights might not lead to anything clear and definitive, just a new path into the wild and tangled. We thus find ourselves in the real on the barely recognizable path to understanding more of the language Human and to trying out ways to speak it a little. The language Human is produced in the converse, just like we probably produced all the spoken languages.

:- Doug.

Confusion the path to seek. It is the only path for those who are seeking the real. For real is not straight lines only but swirls and eddies and clear waters and muddy, and full of things to eat us: confusion. Dive in! Swim for all you’re worth! Here, only here, is life whole and real.

:- Doug.

I’m discovering the language Human.

:- Doug.

To think differently
to act differently
converse differently

:- Doug.

For the next 10 minutes do only one thing at a time. No multi-tasking. No meandering thoughts.

:- Doug.

We can transform from spectators to actors. We set in motion. We change. We elicit power from people.

:- Doug.

Boal calls theater—acting—a language, and reminds us that a function of a multitude of languages is to extend our grasp of the real. Thus, I think, the more languages we employ—pantomime, dance, song, groans, baby talk, puppetry, photography—the more we discover.

:- Doug.

Tell one another what’s good.

:- Doug.

We are human. The start to doing better is to admit it. Hello, my name is. . .and I’m human.

:- Doug.

God perhaps is seen as the one who can follow the knot, who can love the knot. We however are who make up the knot we do not see.

:- Doug.

This human is a doing more complex than I had thought, than I am thinking, too. I must stretch not only my muscles.

:- Doug.