FootprintsintheWind.com

True or false: Leading is a spiritual discipline.

:- Doug.

Stretch forth your heart
the core of your being
to another being & you will be

:- Doug.

I learn my insights
speaking to your condition, our
condition

:- Doug.

What can I say to you who
want to learn how to lead?
You know.

:- Doug.

Stretch toward life, opening.

:- Doug.

Let me speak to gracious and courteous souls. The rest of you are invited along as well…but I expect only the former to hear. We grow whole.

:- Doug.

The three great wholeness needs of humanity are to be:
Invited
Freed
Welcomed home

:- Doug.

Not in a hurry
to get any place
we’re already here

:- Doug.

The way through
is together
The way ahead

:- Doug.

God permeates all
Flows through me
Is the betweens in which we converse

:- Doug.

We are perhaps frightened by our power and capacity, and do not wish to step off into open space. But we are the ones born with wings.

:- Doug.

We can do the larger, higher thing immersed as we are in holiness. Because we are nourished by life, we know what can happen here.

:- Doug.

We live in a total world and have both feet in its beauty and mud: ought we then rush to clamber out, when we can bathe in this lake and become heroes of our tribe, gatherers of the best that lives in our compadres?

:- Doug.

Assume in your words and sentences people want the higher: an engaged life; inclusiveness.

:- Doug.

Some crusts taste good, the crunch a delight to tongue and mouth and teeth; sometimes we need the nourishment of the main part of the bread. So it is with our religion: crusts need to be cracked open.

:- Doug.

The face of disability is changing and it is us. We are becoming an aging society and our living longer has revealed to us new accouterments of aging in the form of various dementias, most of which are physical. Our laws and our views of the rights of people need to keep pace. Should a person so afflicted be imprisoned in one place, unable to change residence to a place where she can be more free, better cared for? We have a right to move about the country—if we have our full physical faculties. But as soon as those faculties have waned, we say they cannot change the legal status of their lives. Is this in keeping with our highest values of freedom?

:- Doug.

Vast, tantalizing is this world
Vast, tantalizing are we within it
Vast, tantalizing is the world we can make

:- Doug.

O what sweet mysteries
This little black stick
Has heard—and told!

:- Doug.

No longer only an advocate of conversing, now an explorer of new continents, a Columbus setting out to see.

:- Doug.

My work is at once larger—for the world—and smaller—to be worked out in daily-sized doses.

:- Doug.

Inviting us to converse is what G*d is doing.

:- Doug.

Meeting conversation, meeting the world, meeting G*d: this is my charge.

:- Doug.

What are the depths of this one which will plumb the depths of me? What depths might we invent among us? Invent in both senses—the modern creating and the ancient finding what already exists, even as Platonic forms.

:- Doug.