FootprintsintheWind.com

We are our world. We are also our divinity. My image of divinity currently seems to be an all pervading presence. We are in and of divinity. But more than that, divinity is all there is. Divinity is not a “he” who is our “Nobodaddy,” our Daddy Warbucks, our personal magician, puppet, nor puppet-master. Divinity is powerless as Bonhoeffer says God is: suffering with us. Always with us. Responding. Not solving, but with us, for us. With us is more powerful than power.

Hear you in this the first shall be last, the meek shall inherit the earth?

:- Doug.

Who is stealing from the poor? The Bible that the thieves spout so fluidly convicts them, but they think it speaks of someone else.

It goes beyond buying sweat-shop athletic shoes: it invades our oil infested lives. We buy beef from Argentina: how did it get here? The fertilizer that fed its feed, of how much oil was it made? We complain about the cost of gasoline for our vehicles, yet our government subsidizes the oil companies who pay off the sultans who stole the oil from their own poor. We buy strawberries from California, yet grow good ones here: how much oil is in your strawberries?

The world is entangled, and so it is hard to figure out what comes from poor folks’ oil lands and how much was our own labor and ingenuity. But that fact convicts us too: we cannot as easily as we do dismiss as not us the Muslim dying of hunger in an open sewer in Indonesia; we cannot so easily speak of a terrorist around the world when we saw our own police terrorize our poor and hungry in New Orleans…and we did nothing.

We are an entangled, engaged, related world. None of us is separate. The way to open our hearts is to open our minds, our eyes, our front doors, and go out and meet the people who with us are our world.

:- Doug.

The question is
Do we think with our closed wallets
or our open hearts?

:- Doug.

Our times are beyond
opening our ears
We must open our hearts

:- Doug.

Giving attention
That’s what meditation is
Contemplation too
Beyond paying: expecting
No return
Going beyond returning
Walking where the stream flows
Watching, giving attention
There is always
Something worth attending
Something beyond

:- Doug.

Why is your first action
To make me into villain
Talk to others
Gather ammunition
Rev up your anger
When you could have
conversed with me
& set it all right?
Is it our rugged individual times
Have we trained ourselves
To see antagonists all around?

:- Doug.

No one poet sings
Every needful thing
But all of us

:- Doug.

Commercials silenced: You must buy this
Consumerism opened: Sit and absorb
I like the way Quakers worship

:- Doug.

There is something larger yet
Waiting for you
Calling us all together

:- Doug.

1+
Together
We are more

:- Doug.

There are restrictions on individual action; perhaps we do not often see these limits. We are, as individuals, limited. There is more we can be, more we can do, together.

:- Doug.

Transcend individual restrictions
Join

:- Doug.

The response
to all the greed and ambition
is in hearts human

:- Doug.

If they want to live
letting come what may
or taking charge
let them
live their own lives!

:- Doug.

There is a longing for connection, and well beyond that a profound longing for oneness. Not sameness, but unity in our very diversity: making larger and more lively, more lovely, more colorful linking of hands.

:- Doug.

Where is the truth
underlying these old words?
Words of lambs & fathers,
powers & magick,
dependence & death,
words from which
I am now repelled?
These words spoke of humanity,
of death & life,
dismay & celebration,
birthing cries & graving cries,
cries out to a larger reality,
over which our forebears
have thrown costumes
which fit themselves
as I probably am doing today

:- Doug.

O what meaning
Is meaninglessness!

:- Doug.

My problem with being stern is that I am taking a role, one I have not played before and have only thought through one line or two. Better in the moment to invent ways to be friendly and gracious and see how deep I can go with that.

:- Doug.

I invite this old age estuary to pour into the sea, to expand and spread itself. This is a larger picture than devising the meaning of one’s life, of hugging and forgiving and laughing and crying at our death bed. We all are poured out into the great sea; we all spread out and expand. This is something to celebrate, not mourn. We can pour out our libation into the great sea, and become larger whole.

:- Doug.

Walt Whitman wrote about life and me concluding the good we are is to add our verse to the “powerful play,” that “life exists and identity.”

That is what we are after as individuals, is it not: identity? We need to know that this individual jot mattered, was heard, made a difference: touched and this one’s touch was felt.

:- Doug.

Wills, Trusts, Powers of Attorney, Personal Care Agreements, Living Wills, end of life caring, Long-Term Caring: I help people write love letters to their families.

:- Doug.

If our client has the right to his or her own death upon which he or she has not focused, who should first raise the question?

:- Doug.

A world becoming is the work of and is conversation. Conversation conceives the world capable of becoming ever more whole. Conversation is on the move as is the world in which on which and with which it works. Conversation is moving itself ever toward wholeness, expanding wholeness. Conversation is the world becoming.

:- Doug.