FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1065

This gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is a good thing for the human race. It is showing us how we can foul our own nest. It is getting us thinking and conversing about what we should and should not be doing. It might even get us talking about our addiction to oil as a root cause—an addiction that like all addictions can make us inhuman, inhumane, and harmful to all around us.

The risk is that when we get past the emergency stage we just go back to our old ways, thinking that our magic technology has saved us again. The damage we are doing seems to be growing. Exxon Valdez and now this. Small nuclear accidents and then Chernobyl. We are getting better at technology and so our ability to create bigger and bigger harm to each other and our home grows by the day. We must talk each other into right ways.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1064

Let it go! & Let it go
Into the world!
This poem’s as whole
As it’s gonna get
In my hands!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1063

What is my real Why? Why I do this is to connect people to G*d, or more precisely, to help people realize their relatedness with G*d, their continual playing with G*d.

Some play by lying on their couch and saying Let me sleep this afternoon, maybe tomorrow. Some play by getting out on the field and playing their position.

All make the world by what they do, even if they do not. If we consciously play, we enjoy more life, we have a more fulfilling life—for all the living. Withhold and we are all burdened; jump in and the water becomes better.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1061

The world stands sorely in need of more idealists.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1060

Be gentle, soft and effective as a breath.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1059

You don’t need to get anyplace.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1058

In what today do you need to be heard?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1057

The things that matter in this world
Traverse between our hearts
A child’s dream—unlikely dream
A cry of pain, injustice seen
Your neighborhood in disrepair
Ordinary people waiting
For someone to act

The things that matter in this world
Traverse between our hearts

Give your hand to this one child
You the witness have a choice
Hold injustice in your heart
Or lend your voice for theirs
Call your neighbors wake us up
And we can tackle this

Matters of the heart provide
The oomph we need our world to turn

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1056

How can we be filled if we are not first emptied?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1055

Our baby never cried
Our baby was never born
We smothered it aborning
We killed it in the womb
Did not allow seed to meet egg
Our baby never cried
We would not listen
We would not hear
We covered our ears
And yours
Our baby never cried
We would not meet
Our eyes we withheld
As our ears
You do not exist
We mourn only ourselves
We must mourn, for
Our baby never cried
You we would not meet
You neighbor, friend, future
We refused to hear
Our baby never cried

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1054

Those about me might be clashing, I see the earth turning, turning toward openness, truth, beauty and goodness, I am turning it that way with my efforts, gentle and soft and effective.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1053

More important to life
than order
is not justice and compassion?
More seriously for life
than consuming
ought we to take brother and sister?
Is not life
to care to suffer to die to feel?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1052

Be open, be empty, bring love.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1051

We have a responsibility to our grandchildren to teach by our example how they can live so their grandchildren can live.

We do not have a responsibility for them to give them an opportunity to pursue their goals; we have a responsibility for them to help them choose their path.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1050

Hear, hear with my heart
Empty, empty to receive
Now, now is new

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1049

Death is a passage
Through an orchard
There are fruits
There are tangled parts
Where few have been
Orchards are part
Human intervention
Part natural processes
Over yonder is the house
Where I used to live
On the other side is light
In between is orchard friendly
And a little unknown

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1048

Make peace with your life.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1047

This morning I was reading Martin Luther King, Jr.’s doctoral study of theology concentrated on personalism—a term I had not heard before. It holds, in part, as I understand it now, that the human personality is at the center of the cosmos. My picture of that is like the result of the big bang—all constellations and stars start and therefore are at the very center at all moments and are simultaneously moving out into the world from there, expanding the space between them, expanding the love in which they swim. And so it is natural that the thing of which we are made is what feeds us most.

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:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1046

Claim your authority for then you write us large, augment our highest humanity.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1045

The highest in us
Requires of us
Gathering within
Time for silence
Space for not knowing

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1044

In illness
stillness is the way
to hear the unknowable
loving

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1043

I am seeing
G*d is personal
yet not an old man on a big chair
who hands out sweets
who does our every bidding

G*d is more the all there is:
the wind,
the weeds,
the wonder,
the foundation that holds it all up
the one who mourns when we mourn
the one who surprises us

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1042

We are in danger of no one getting heard, whether it is the majority or a minority. We are thumping on each other’s skulls and screaming into their broken eardrums so much that we are not heard, nor can we hear much any longer. We are in danger of falling apart for want of hearing.

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