FootprintsintheWind.com

Looking forward to seeing my grandchildren this evening, telling stories, playing. Young life! Possibilities and potential!

:- Doug.

What is the American mythos around collaboration, neighbors and conversation? Barn raisings, potlucks, The Alamo, Paul Revere, 13 colonies, the revolution. What else can you add?

:- Doug.

This is God
you are the face of God
the face inseparable

:- Doug.

God is coming down
to meet us, soak us
drop by drop
thousands by the second
a car splashes gallons against our windows
a father walks in carrying a multi-hued finger painting

:- Doug.

We are a gathering
of friends
on this ball
in the middle of space
surrounded befriended embraced
by a host
of each other

:- Doug.

What do you mean, Doesn’t believe in God? Meaning God as we define—image—God? Doesn’t have faith means what? Faith in our list of things to believe, that is, to do?

:- Doug.

Is prescience the same as wisdom?

:- Doug.

To love your grandchildren is to accept them and to challenge them. One without the other is insipid and unloving.

:- Doug.

I can’t tell you everything there is to know about POST because everything has yet to be encountered.

:- Doug.

When we invite people to the center to write their issues and opportunities, we are loving them with both faces of love—acceptance of their human lostness—and challenge to see their divine potential. In the paradoxical space between this softness and this hardness, we stand.

:- Doug.

The work of conversation is inventing persons.
My work is inventing persons.
Your work with me is inventing one another.

:- Doug.

We are ever powerless and powerful at the same instant. Powerless to change the past and powerful to create the future. Powerless to change another, powerful to change ourselves. Powerless at 66 to become a professional basketball player, powerful to tell wondrous tales to grandchildren.

:- Doug.

You’re here asking a question. I hold up your courage for all to see. For in asking you open yourself to the potential for an answer. Then you will find yourself on the spot.

:- Doug.

What is your potential yet to be realized?

:- Doug.

Everything is in between, that is, in motion, becoming.

:- Doug.

With a single lens you cannot get a picture of the whole without distorting something.

:- Doug.

What’s our responsibility for our world?

:- Doug.

Spirit transforms are other words for spirit moves. We might also say spirit quantum leaps.

:- Doug.

Perhaps our ideas of heaven originated in seeing a possible fulfillment of our being—a reaching of wholeness. Living in perfection would be the positive extension of this; “suffer what Pharaoh does to you in this life, your reward is in the next,” the negative.

:- Doug.

What questions do you bring? Your questions are more pregnant than any knowledge you could bring, for they can initiate an exploration and maybe that is wisdom.

:- Doug.

Here are some wisdom questions you might ask yourself, your friends: What is wisdom? Help me find my wisdom. How would I take into the world a task like Fostering conversations that matter?

:- Doug.

Where in your body does wisdom reside? Is it in your brain—what you know, what you’ve experienced? Or perhaps in your feet? It might be if you dance. Or in your voice or mouth or breath if you sing. In your imagination if you tell marvelous tales to your grandchildren.

:- Doug.

What is my wisdom? Maybe there is another way to look at it, a different question. Maybe wisdom is not a thing, especially not to possess. Maybe it is a way of being, a movement through us, with us, some action or way of acting that takes hold of us. Maybe it possesses us, or maybe we are interwoven with it, inseparable, something that grows on us as we move through life. Maybe it is a companion, sharing bread with us, asking us to share bread. Maybe it is our midwife and we wisdom’s midwife, bringing something new, a dream, a better way for the world to be. Maybe wisdom is the wind.

:- Doug.