FootprintsintheWind.com

Let’s call people together to the middle of the country—and the cosmos!—South Bend, Indiana, for the grandchildren.

:- Doug.

I am a tough crustomer.

:- Doug.

Something going on → movement → change => transformation ≈> metamorphosis

:- Doug.

from the few around the fires
to tribes to nations
from quills to printing to smart phones
from conversing across the crackling fire
to conversing across the globe and into space
to dealing with advancing billions of us
whom we must meet
humans have progressed
reptilian brains warn us to flee
spirit invites us together
to adventure, create, meet

:- Doug.

Time and death are essential (not to keep every thing and every one from happening all at once) to show us our growth and possibility.

:- Doug.

The world
at our backs wind
in our faces slap

:- Doug.

I am
equally
I am not

:- Doug.

To be human is to be interwoven.

:- Doug.

One of the roles of Jesus, too, was to free people of their crustable ways.

:- Doug.

People are changing
Instanter not

:- Doug.

Grandchildren are moving
We’re all grandchildren

:- Doug.

What do we learn from death? What again? What might we learn if we were wiser?

:- Doug.

As elders we are humanity, perhaps life, knowing its death, its losses: its limits. We intuit resulting transformation. We know uncertainty—and most certainly ambivalence. Here we serve.

:- Doug.

We in this age live in more uncertainty than any past age, if only because there are more of us, all trying to steer.

:- Doug.

When are we?

:- Doug.

What for elders lies out beyond doing the right thing for the grandchildren? What if doing the right thing were the bare minimum?

:- Doug.

The qualitative distinction we as elders notice may go so far as transformation or even metamorphosis.

:- Doug.

Sharing the sacred = sharing the humanity.

:- Doug.

When you read “Life this” and “the Universe that,” you might substitute “God” if it helps your grasp. For me the danger is a sucking back into my Sunday School thinking rather than propelling forward into the needed challenges to my thought patterns—into a world beyond my control and within my influence, a world demanding of me something difficult.

:- Doug.

The grandchildren are wild
We then are uncertain
Meet wild to wild

:- Doug.

Instead of trying to persuade folks in the face of intransigent political divisiveness and ideologies we could simply demonstrate a series of truth statements by reasonable people. All will be true but eventually it becomes clear—they conflict! And we start to see not that many views ought to be accepted, but that truth is more nuanced and subtle than they or we would have us believe.

:- Doug.

The course we need to offer ourselves is far from candy-sweet: it is searing hot, it is kick in your butt, it asks you questions you do not want to be asked.

:- Doug.

This notion of tension has me this morning: conversation stretches us. It is a necessary stretching, a pulling us out of our little sphere, a heating us to get work done. So the conversation is a crucible, heat high enough to get us flowing, bubbling.

:- Doug.