FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1561

Grin-on-your-face creativity: I enjoy this conversational creativity, even when I am opposed. Even when it is a slog uphill. Let’s not berate the hill, let’s remember the whee! on the other side. The people who say eehw at what we propose are only showing the flip side. There is hope with them and if they do not get over it, we can get over them: Next!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1560

An Alzhaiku

The world becomes whole
undifferentiated
confused? Maybe not

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1559

I am a young man hired to keep clean the workshop of one Thomas A Edison. What a man. So out of touch with the world around him, like all the men he employs in his workshop. Fiddling forever with odd possessions. Absent minded people, forgetting to eat. And Edison himself: asleep often in the middle of the day. I leave the place (and Edison still up and about) tidy at dark and come back in the morning to things strewn all about: broken glass, papers, blankets, wires, nuts, screws, and pillows. Mr Edison sleeping in the middle of the day again, and his companions speaking incomprehensible things, words no one ever heard—if they speak at all.

So I wonder how this is different from the place in which my grandson works a hundred some years later—a nursing home?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1558

I am Mexican. I am Muslim. If I am not, if we are not, I am not, we are not.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1557

I love to make mistakes with words—they give me new things to see!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1556

If you want a doctor’s skills at end of life to give you a second chance with those around you, forget the doctor: today is your second chance. If you want those skills to hang on to what breath is leaving you, breathe deeply today. Here, however, is a valid vital use of those skills: to keep you present in your final moments.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1555

It is said we are greedy and selfish
It is said this is our human nature
The deeper truth is we have a human need to meet human need
Let us then go to our borders in multitudes
Let our “governments” know
We would share our food with our hungry
Our roofs with our shelter-less sisters and brothers

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1554

Thanksgiving dinner table game: Thank someone at the table for something.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1553

Related are the current mass migration of war refugees from Syrian and Afghanistan regions, and the wars there with radical breakaways from Islam, such as ISIS/ISIL and Al-Qaeda. Caught up in this at close range are debates and fears over “illegal” immigration. At a greater remove and still related is the rash of mass murders. Clearly there is anger and its stronger cousin fear at work.

We have a system of quagmires all flowing into one another. Not one is more basic than the rest.

We must work on all at once. Picking out one only (besides the fact it would be impossible to gain a consensus on such a choice) unbalances the system further, causing it to spin even more erratically. No one is in control.

It needs all of us, many actions, little ways and large, strong and gentle, to right the spinning world. Let us belong. Let us work.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1552

Pardon me, your worldview is showing.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1551

After the Paris attacks the world is at a turning point of a new order: either we become more paranoid. Or we seek something larger. Perhaps something contemplative, reflective: see bigger than before: beyond binary thinking. Could we lead even the bad guys into a new world?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1550

You and I come in
focus then fade to nothing
brook babbles along

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1549

My big test seems to be the death of my parents. The lesson was indeed subtle and fine. I have been trying to get it out in the open, poking holes in the grey cloth that covers it and me, all these almost 20 years since.

That might just be the lesson, from an angle: to find one’s true self, one’s essence, to find these within family, tribe, nation, planet, galaxy, universe, mother universe. It is a discovery of distinction and of relation. It is a discovery of engagement, meeting, conversation, poetry.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1548

In November we have only 2 candidates. In the real world we have many choices. So we seldom if ever need to reject out of hand another’s proposals: we can simply bend and braid both ours into ours. The point is elections and politics and commercials have us thinking the world is this or that: binary. There are larger good things that can give us this and that—and more besides. It is hard work: thinking required.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1547

I do not have to explain all; I can say what is important now. I do not even have to remember the big picture, just this piece-event.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1546

It seems true then, at least from what I am seeing now, that all we have is the betweens. There are no absolute entities at either end of the thread. What then? Only the smile of the Cheshire cat. The cough, the laugh, the playfulness, the love.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1545

Poetry
ought to be
more than mere words

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1544

Many of us know the old story: an Easterner and Westerner are talking about the foundations of the earth. The Easterner maintains that the earth is supported on the back of a large elephant. What supports the elephant? asks the Westerner. A turtle, is the reply. What supports the turtle? Another turtle; from there it is turtles all the way down.

But what few of us have heard, till now, is that the young daughter of the Westerner was listening, and told her mother the last was “tutus all the way down.”

Well now. Really: now. In quantum science, it turns out that the earth is supported not by any thing: there are after all no things, no particles always present. Rather, all shifts back and forth between energy and mass. E=mc², remember? So the world, the universe, is one big cosmic dance.

And what better to wear to a dance than your tutu?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1543

I like haiku make
the syllables evoke from
winter snows bright red

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1542

Hairy white against
blue skies nature’s brush strokes curved
straight lines? Only man

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1541

Another mass shooting
what did we miss
that we brought in bullets?
why is the relating we create
death?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1540

I still fear
my poetry

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1539

No time
No space
No cause
No effect
What’s left?
Only what’s been all along—
Relationships, patterns,
Rhythm, music,
Dance, vibrations,
Light, love,
Play, laughter, laughter

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