FootprintsintheWind.com

Revolutionary it is to give away something valuable, the most valuable thing I have. Yet that is what I have been doing, inviting people to become producers of life, to find their qualities and strengths, to share them in community. So perhaps rather than seek to convert this larger to money, I do well to subvert. Giving is subverting. Subverting what cannot last. Giving lasts. It is the radical act of relating: giving the anonymous a face and a story. Its name is love.

:- Doug.

We need conversation so much
& we have so little
about which to converse!

:- Doug.

Conversation gives us opportunity to:

1. bring out or reveal to us our own truest qualities, our own deepest strengths
2. move from being consumers to producers of our lives
3. open the door to a fuller us
4. create magic by bringing together
5. enlarge individual and world

Conversation creates the space for these things to take place. Which of these things do you not want?

:- Doug.

All fear resolves
to the fear of death
and then we come to know
death is no stranger
and will visit me
or I will visit death
and stay
this we fear the more
or the less

:- Doug.

Is entrepreneuring about money—anonymous pieces of paper or bits in someone’s computer?

:- Doug.

Let us invent the next step, beyond learning from one another, to what?

:- Doug.

Depersonalization is implicit in mass scale. It is for this reason that taking conversational methods to large scale is rowing up a rushing stream.

:- Doug.

Forget living a life that matters
—live a day that matters

For that matters
—live a moment that matters
—this moment

:- Doug.

Shh. Go slowly for now,
notice
in moments particular—
walking
chewing
telephoning
playing with your mate—
a bit of the
larger unknown

:- Doug.

We are in the soup—the soup of divinity. When I said this is the insides of God I realize now that was literally true. All is divine, all is divinity, divinity is all. Not merely in all but its essence. Everything—the totality—is holy. It is a mystery for us to meet anything holy—not as we meet another, nor yet as we meet ourselves, but as we explore new wonders. Open we must be, silent, receptive. Hearing we can. Hearing we are. It is in this soup, in this weave that we exist & become whole, complete, fecund.

:- Doug.

If competition and survival of the fittest is the rule of nature, why do humans continue to have poverty?

:- Doug.

Voice before voice
voice before words
comes out to play
in poetry

:- Doug.

When we listen to the clouds
the ageless
ever-moving
mystery
of which they speak
we can hear
if we will
we can know we are
                                     what we hear

:- Doug.

There is room in me
and in all of us
for immeasurable life
more than intertwining
more than interdepending
there is room in us
for us
for all life
now and yet to be
for life immeasurable

:- Doug.

Would you like to have a way to get your family talking about emergency medical decisions?

:- Doug.

Whom can I meet today?

:- Doug.

Is conversation important to your family? What conversation would be especially important?

:- Doug.

We engage the world as It or Thou or Us or with Poetry or Whole-making; the realm of conversation begins in the later fields of Thou and becomes strongest in Whole-making.

:- Doug.

Every conversation is whole-making.

:- Doug.

I may be that sycamore one of the two tallest trees you can see from your window the other, my brother tulip tree the first year you were here you almost cut me down you with your new chain saw until you saw my leaves appear later than all the other trees my leaves as large as my brother tulip’s in the land of the Wabash in the land of the sagamore in your window frame I stand and my roots drink the same water as yours

:- Doug.

We’re not completely whole
until in us there is something
broken
Might the same be true in
our families,
our society?

:- Doug.

Exactly at the very heart of brokenness
is wholeness

:- Doug.

Dead! Just like that!
Your heart is ripped in two
this wound never heals
somehow from your dwindling blood
comes a larger completeness of you
compassion for others in varied pains
from brokenness, wholeness

:- Doug.