FootprintsintheWind.com

There is a community within each of us, and others surrounding each of us, and these communities in fact form a fine lace with others throughout the world. A lace fine but stronger than steel. We are not only individuals; our strength and wonder is not centered only in our standing apart. Tend the silk as well as the knots.

:- Doug.

Some works are impossible to complete: yet we must do what we can.

:- Doug.

I won’t find the answer this easily—there is no the answer.

:- Doug.

An aspect of wonderful is seeking out and appreciating the strengths of others and our environs.

:- Doug.

What did your life center around? Work? Family? Colleagues at work? Friends? Hobbies?

:- Doug.

Human brain plasticity counters the argument that there is nothing new under the sun, that human nature is unchanging. Richard Davidson makes the analogy to brushing our teeth: we do so not because it is innate but because it is a learned behavior. There are other skills we can learn and develop. Doing human is a skill: one that involves choice and practice and thinking.

:- Doug.

We think there are some non negotiable good things, but what if they are only one step on the path? What if out of these there is something sounding from core, but through a mist? This is the study I am making, the question calling me.

:- Doug.

Converse
as straight ahead
as it gets

:- Doug.

Disappeared
and now we are disappearing from here
as well

:- Doug.

I will know I have found the trailhead when each step leads us to terrain rich in unanswerable questions demanding our unswerving attention.

:- Doug.

Now my client is humanity. I must discover and advise the ways open to our development. More, I must study and then point to the ones most likely to get us where we ought best approach.

:- Doug.

Can we do better?

:- Doug.

A question pursuing us all: Do I have a meaning?

:- Doug.

We are all interplay.

:- Doug.

Look to people for what’s excellent in them.

:- Doug.

The human we do

:- Doug.

What the 11th generation has taught me, so far, is that no one can predict what will be the good, the true, the beautiful for others yet to be born, yet to settle into a place. I take from this that we can best put our efforts into encouraging each other to look for the good and ever lean into it, even when we fall. Look into ourselves, our forbears, our offspring: each can teach; each can learn.

:- Doug.

Human is a moving target. Good.

:- Doug.

My theory of everything is it is all in conversation.

:- Doug.

Worship is mainly showing up. Same for prayer. Same for conversation.

:- Doug.

What today opens to me is the recognition that we all carry (perhaps all) flaws, some potentially fatal. We can therefore be school to one another, boosting up one another, to keep us to our higher and better characteristics.

Character is symbol or imprint of the soul. Now this is fruitful: we are here to boost one another’s souls. So we study one another, as if books alive, and each draws out the other as well as him-or herself. This is the purpose of conversation.

:- Doug.

We might help each other work on our flaws.

:- Doug.

We are a school book for one another, demonstrating, deconstructing, and sometimes explicating good traits, good actions, good directions, and in relief to these, a flaw, perhaps tragic. (Can we use our recognition of this flaw to turn us, the all-inclusive us?)

:- Doug.