FootprintsintheWind.com

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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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1041

We stand in need of, more than holy communion, holy communitying. G*d is the community of the all there is; let no one pull asunder what G*d has made together. Yet we are in a culture that continually fractures us apart—with each other and within families and even within our own souls. We compete even to get first to the next stop light, we fight for our rights, we take sides in elections and between elections, we scream at politicians and “those” people who support other politicians, we divorce each other, children ignore their parents, we take pills to right our thinking, we anguish over our own thought processes thinking ourselves sick. We are pulling ourselves apart at the seams and rending the fabric in between. There is hope, and promise, but only those in communitying and conversing: there are no guarantees. We have to work to make the promise real, to put muscle and sinew on the bones of the hope.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1040

We need to take in, yes. We also need to percolate, and then to pour out till we are heard, and hear ourselves.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1039

Our holeness, without the W, is what leads us to whole. We need each other, for our separate holes, incompletenesses, imperfections. It is here where our growing edges are.

Where we have reached completeness, where we have stopped growing, we have calcified. We can no longer connect there. There we can be no longer human.

It is only on our soft edges, only on our broken places, that others fit. And when we fit, we fiddle.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1136

Conflict, debate,
vanquishing, hate:
not the way
to world’s advance

Stretching
our behinds off the couch
love’s way is moving
being touched
taking the chance

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1038

Who cares? Let’s bring ’em together and see….

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1037

“Hearing anything?”
“You.”
“Me?!”
“Your breathing. Your heart beating. Your stomach gurgles. Your spirit.
“Your large-as-the-worlds-that-be spirit.
“Your tiny hard-shelled ego within your spirit. Your meandering thoughts within your spirit.
“Your large-as-the-worlds-that-be spirit within your community of like spirits.
“I’m hearing you.”

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1036

Conversation is the lever long enough to move the world.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1035

A cold is sometimes a valuable thing to have: it frees you from thought to simply be. Here you can listen to the world go blathering by, feel the workings of your body, disencumber self from your mind.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1034

Competitions ought to be celebrations of our strengths of body, mind & spirit.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1033

Start saying what you’re seeing.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1032

We are holely people
You’ll know us by our many holes
We are wholly people
You’ll know us by how our holes never match
This way in every possible place we are
To you and every possible person wholly open

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1031

I do not know if I have had the experience of someone telling me my story, but I do know that often when someone tells me a story it reminds me of my own. This I think is a common experience. Today I must listen for my story in every story. This insight is profound, it goes in circles, for we may see as holy the story of all others and of ourselves, even when we think it unworthy. Especially then.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1030

Whenever do or more of us are gathered, then I am.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1029

“Everything terrifying is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants our help.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I wonder how that applies to our current hand wringing over “Terrorism.” Adding the “ism” to it gives it a dignity and personification it has not earned. It is in fact the actions of people who are no more than hoodlums, international criminals. It is not a way of life, not a belief system such as Lutheranism or Buddhism—or even atheism. It is actually helplessness and despair on one end of the scale or psychoses and pathological criminality on the other.

The use of religious framing and fundamentalism is actually a hiding place for those who have diseases and issues on this continuum. Other voices from these same religions condemn the sickened use of their faith and scriptures for such ungodly ends.

So how do we “help” the person who is suffering from such a disease? Perhaps fighting back does not solve the underlying problem of the person who is frustrated from lack of food or work or the ability to be heard. Perhaps bombing the psychotic does not calm him or her.

Could hearing help? Could earnestly seeking a way to address perceived and actual wrongs? Would it be more costly in lives and body parts and governmental expenditures and the taxes they necessitate? Could providing food and medical help and jobs help tone down the voices that are inflaming the mentally ill? Could gathering and making friends in turn gather police and medical people to find and treat the psychotics and thus reduce the risk to our world’s peoples?

What is the pay off criminals get from spreading terror? Could imagination be employed to seek a way to reduce that pay off? Beyond what we are doing now—using brute force—and letting ourselves be victims, could there a third way?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1929

Let’s work toward more of us saying, “I love this place! I love these people!”

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