FootprintsintheWind.com

Holy, whole you are
More than you are!

:- Doug.

A prophet cries out
In the streets of our city
Pain you!
What have you done?
Own this in deep remorse
Permit your pain to heal you.

Grieve you!
Naked, on bedrock
Allow your grieving to heal all of you

Converse you!
Grow your hope
& put it to work.

Story you!
Generate new worlds
Worlds living, organic & whole

:- Doug.

When the beloved dies, let us be ready to ask in love: What will you miss? What did you not do you wish you had? What specific thing can you do to carry out in a larger way what you wish you could do? How can you make the world whole despite the fact that there is now a hole in the world?

:- Doug.

Today’s prophetic voice speaks through the power of grief & pain to heal us; and the power of consciously conversing & storying to generate new worlds.

:- Doug.

You told me once
But I forgot
Does money buy a happy life
Or does a happy life buy us
All the money we’ll ever want?

:- Doug.

Sometimes I think all about us is a wonderful story: science and technology will make life better, enough money will make us happy. & then I realize that money does not buy us a happy life, that it’s just the opposite: a happy life buys us all the money we want.

:- Doug.

Play in earnest.

:- Doug.

Conversation carries a sacred function. It bears a generative force, for what we can speak can be; what we hear can be. Conversation is holy work because it is about hearing hope out into the open where it can go to work. It is about hearing our own voices and those of others. Story, hope, hearing, supporting, participating, creating: this is conversation’s progression. These, done consciously, are holy, yes?

:- Doug.

When we say something is cultural we mean it is invisible. We man also our part in creating it is invisible.

:- Doug.

It takes time but worse than that it takes effort to reach your remorse to reactivate memories of your highest the effort of watering a seed and waiting and seeing your knees are dirty so dirty you cannot get the stain out. From that stain how did we get hope and beauty?

:- Doug.

There is a vacuity and emptiness in our goal-driven Dollars and Numbers culture. We contribute to it every day. To grow from here will take a turn of heart. Only this, but no less than this.

One person or a few cannot fix the ecology by changing more light bulbs and recycling more; we cannot free the peoples by marching on Athens; we cannot with our science bring back the honey bees and lightning bugs. What we can do is what only individuals and especially small groups of people can do, and it is much harder: we must change our thinking, change our hearts.

:- Doug.

We can help people become transformed by touching them in the depths of their hearts. These depths might be made of only two elements: soul-joy and soul-pain. Soul means something that is at being level, that resides in our naked guts. Soul-pain might actually be deeper and more fundamental. Or maybe we wish not to go there, so it becomes more and more a shadow to us. When we get here, it feels like a cracking-open.

:- Doug.

This is part of the definition of wholeness: we must have the pain as well as the joy to be complete, to make the joy deeper, cleaner, clearer.

:- Doug.

The pain we inflicted
Returning, will afflict us
This is the start
Of our healing, of
our being grown whole

:- Doug.

She gave up
a career to care for her
mother, declining
but all she gave away
was ambition
to get the giving

:- Doug.

We are heirs
We inherit all the gifts
All the responsibility

:- Doug.

Humanity walks on 2 legs
Careful mind
Poetic soul

:- Doug.

This room open to another, larger
That to the world’s opening
Here is a window with the briefest
Slice of the panorama
In here intimate, out there opening
Here we seek to make the conversations
Of home

:- Doug.

Why speak to the future?

:- Doug.

How do we speak to the generations?

:- Doug.

What if we are living in a big seed as of a sunflower? What do we know of the creatures who people the surface of a sunflower seed, or its inside for that matter? What do we know of their work, their lives, their hopes & dreams, probably so much like our own? So our seed is getting ready to shoot into space, to split and send down roots & out shoots but before all that to rest a season—yes? And we, & we, just do not see large enough.

:- Doug.

When we enter that sea as one of its drops we become not dissolved but whole, the whole, completed and complete. No loss to fear, gain with whom to play!

:- Doug.

Because it implies marching against, overcoming, struggling with, maybe we should not pray “in the name of” any thing or any one. Perhaps we can pray “in the light of” something or some one. Then we no longer rend apart but are part of the whole.

:- Doug.