FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2093

At my funeral, I do not want, or think I do not want, pictures of me from graduation, wedding, birthday parties. How could we ever get a picture of me at my client conferences, or fishing with my father in law, or fighting with my wife, or especially at critical junctures of my life: when I got fired; when I had my dream the night Mom and Dad died; when I got sent to watch Johnny Carson instead of being in the delivery room when my first son was born; when I made critical decisions about my life course in the high school gym and in the lobby of a hotel in Portland, OR some fifty years later. Perhaps I should have my years of journals for people to dig into. What would show your life and quandaries and themes?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2092

Be altared by what you hear.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2091

Is it invariably so that major new thinking tracks appear all at once and with force and maybe fully formed, or might they sneak up on us like a field of fireflies as the colors of the day take their leave and we discover again the wonders of the dusk’s sky?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2090

Conversation invites reaching out
Though your hand may get
Slapped or bitten

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2089

Curious is related to cure which is about care, concern, and trouble. Yes we trouble ourselves to become curious and our very curiosity troubles us with new things found. Its own roots are also in meanings of subtle, sophisticated, eager, requiring art. Do you still want to be curious?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2088

We are here to nibble on the ear lobe of the beast. The beast is a question: Can our grandchildren mean anything to us? What can we do about humanity? This is the question we whisper into one another’s ear.

What makes this work urgent? Now we have a generation which can appreciate the long ranges and the rhythms across ages, and think about doing better. It may be only one generation has this opportunity—we are the extra generation. So do we have a responsibility?

What makes this work intriguing? It offers our species a way to its fulfilling purpose. We might have a lasting influence for good. This work is impossible to complete. This work demands of us more than we can give.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2087

What beautiful thing are you this minute most afraid to say?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2086

The course of my life, I am thinking today, will be a study in conversations: wonderful to terror-filled, and all between. What makes a conversation that makes your life? If we discover this, we can lean into conversing across the centuries, and across our dinner tables.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2085

Plants in the garden—you, I, all of us. We do not stand out, we see how the others please. Together, then, the garden pulses, weeps. This is different from what in our hard-charging days we thought we were about. Our duty is to help others notice the precious life that happens in our vicinity.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2084

Start conversations in the parts in the worst condition, not the best. Here you can bring the most life.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2083

Listening to Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast on the way, especially back, something touched me, deeply, reminded me. Re-minded. Re-hearted. About the life and death conversations I have hosted. What have you just read, heard? Felt? How have you been touched? This is my Why—to touch this deepest spot-moment in the human, the place where we meet. Here we can meet across centuries, millennia. This person she is interviewing, Bryan Doerries, produces Greek plays, tragedies. And this points to a deeper impossible work: Presenting life and life choices (do you just live-exist, or do you live-alive?); presenting death and death choices (we will die, but to what first?). That’s a stark choice. With depth. A Why with a bite. This is a happy search: for the selfless, timeless place-moment where lives meet and entangle.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2082

Tell me about your father.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2081

There is this quality we weakly call human, but which is of the sacred and the soaring, the mourning and the plunging, of such a range we seldom call to mind. And then, when we most need it, we are it.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2080

Our coming elders are an army of fireflies—spreading out all over the earth—rarely seen except in the dark, providing inspiration only when we look for them, doing work unknown to us.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2079

There is a thing, we cannot live, unless we do.

This thing is fearsome. We do not want to do it. We must. We cannot.

This thing has no name. But we know it. Most frightening: it knows us. To the sinew and gristle and pulse. To the thoughts we do not admit. To ourselves.

Here is where we live. Here is where life erupts. Irrupts. Here is where the ancients past and future meet us. Here is where we touch our duty. Our duty to human. To live. To all there is.

There is a thing, we cannot live, unless we do.

How then shall we do this thing?

We look at, hear, smell, taste, feel the world we humans have created and ask what we did. We stay alert to what it says about human. And life. And long ranges. We touch what we can of this unnameable in the generations forward and afterward. We ever do what we most fear to do, what sounds our deepest sadness, what is most pleasing, what is most wonderful. We use these tools to drill ever further into the aquifer full and rich.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2078

What is the timeless way of conversing?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2077

Eating meals together brings intimacy. Such is one message of Annie Murphy Paul in an article, https://www.wired.com/story/how-humans-think-when-they-think-group/. I was comparing that to a TV ad for a diet supplement: A man is walking past a group of people and one asks him if he wants some cake. “No” he says delighted in his ability to resist caloric temptation. There are at least two ways to see this: it is raising up individual separation from the group, will power, and the down sides of doing whatever others are doing; and it is also sadly dividing off the person from the intimacy gained from eating together, encouraging outcast-making of the group and the individual.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2076

All but one of my names is unspoken.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2074

Most people think conversation is a tool. Not so. Conversation is the main life force and we the seeds to scatter it.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2073

Now my main work is to hand you this sticky dough-ball if you will have it: let me tell you about it. It is the essence of life and humanity. It has no name. No word fits it. It changes shape with each hand. It leaves some behind. Sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet. It smells of yeast, it smells of Limburger cheese. It is mainly a question: what will you do with it? Now that you have it, what do you see, feel, taste?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2072

Accepting that conversation is the buzz of any environment allows me to slip into and out of any conversation with any person. The conversation is always supporting us. I don’t have to make a subject—it is already present.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2071

One talkative day
would a fish ever say
“Water is only a tool”?
Fool!
Try jumping out of the bay!

One talkative day
would a bird ever say
“Air is only a tool”?
Fool!
Try jumping into the bay!

One talkative day
would a person ever say
“Conversation is only a tool”?
Mule!
No one will hear whatever you bray!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2070

The central mystery is that the world is made by conversation.

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