FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2491

We need to heal
We are the only ones to do it

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2490

The dark and living alley
two rows of bushes tall
a tunnel behind and between
neighborhood houses
where as children
in secret we played
at life in earnest
safe from
and in
our parents’ eyes
What can we, then?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2489

When you catch a fish, and release—have you changed her life for ever? Do you imagine?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2488

That we don’t raise our voices to his antics testifies against us that we don’t value, don’t reflect on, don’t exercise, our, nor our fellow humans, freedoms.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2487

Fight back: Be friendly.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2486

stare into
hot chocolate mug
stir
wait
at last
opening
flows

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2485

This gathering may be something greater than us. We gather on that chance.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2484

You can say things when you are with one other person you cannot say otherwise. Indeed you are led to say them. It creates a holy hole in time, a confessional of sorts. It is not there with three or more and definitely not there when one is alone—you are too slippery for you.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2483

Will you be my companion—eat bread with me—as I dement?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2482

Every word you say, every silent moment you share, echoes down the centuries and generations, and like wind, can and will change lives. What if that were true? What if it were true one per cent of the time? What purpose does that truth infuse into your hot chocolate—right to the last?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2481

To be many things at once is to be . . . and to be wise . . . and to be real. How many things can you be, and contradictory, in this conversation?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2480

How can we dream to change the course of the world when already, or soon, our hands will not be on the levers and ship’s wheel? The seed of the response is already planted in that sentence, in what we yet might plant: Dream. The soil is the next generation and the next as far as our eyes, and theirs, might see.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2479

Beware: the unwise invades you too.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2478

You have only to search
           Your own body
For what is given you
           An arm a leg a heartbeat
Given by your friend
           A freshening
Of innocence

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2477

The steam from our hot chocolates mingles
We become real for the first time
—And it is together

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2476

Don’t search within, search your self—you have more dimensions than in and out. You are of the Human, so you are immense of angles, corners, airs. Search in a new direction each day and you will never run out of unexplored. Share not; search.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2475

What would happen to our culture’s values if all people died at age thirty? Forty-nine?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2474

In an Artificial Intelligence-governed world this may be the role of the human: to make human the best possible, generation to generation.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2473

Who will not defend to the death your right to say it?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2472

Two little yellow butterflies
mere nothings in the universe
yet there they were
pushing each other higher
did they know from higher?
mere nothings in the universe
to it in every way essential

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2471

Of course you will irritate one another. Cut those times short. Increase the curious moments. Get momentous!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2470

It is more than Rilke’s becoming a world in response to another. It is true as he says we probably cannot merge (I take it, in the sense of disappearing) into our other—we can only be ourself. Yet I think that we need that fully human self to enter into this together state with our other. We are never finished meeting. We are never finished growing. So we need to ever uncover and affirm that we are and need to be strangers.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2469

There is, between us, some possibility of a state more human than we might attain separately.

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