FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 981

What is the most important thing we can do right here and right now to make life better?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 980

Whenever you set out to do something, that’s when adventure ensues. Recipe for adventure: set out to do something in the larger world; meet someone along the way.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 979

If you can think of nothing else to do for life, plant a tree.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 978

This is why goals don’t make sense: you cannot presume to know enough at the start of any step to be able to design 10,000 more steps and then to execute that plan without deviation. Design and construction need to go back and forth filling in for each other at each interval.

And this then is a hint of emergence: it comes from the heat of this very back and forth. It arises from process, not out of one sterile mind trying to get pregnant all by itself.

True emergence can only happen when we take it out of the thinking chambers and subject us and our ideas to real life—all the people on the real ground. This is taking to scale—this is when everybody gets it—when everybody is invited and all who come are heard. Invitation must include the promise to hear. When design hears construction and construction design and both the whole on which we are working—here is emergence—of life!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 977

All-ee, all-ee, all in free!
Come on kids, come out and play!
We’re getting dirty out here in the street—
The day’s a wastin’ and we can make such fun!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 976

Decide which needs making wonderful. Do it.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 975

How are you part of something larger?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 974

Broken…or broken open?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 973

The optimal size of a working group is the number of people who can sit around a common pot of food and dip their hands in.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 972

Less are we skin-encased one things
More are we fields of ebbing & flowing living
Living is smelly beauty, powerful vulnerability
& all things humans own & disown
Here’s the important part:
When these fields meet, Where they meet
We form
Ourselves & then the fields shift
To reveal us new again again

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 971

Our wholeness
embraces
the good
the bad
the smelly

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 970

We think the reason to work together is to make the world better, if only for us, when in fact the purpose is to work together.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 969

Touch: a mini embrace

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 968

What kind of world shall we enact? One in which our acts are of love, of bringing acts together, of agencies of life. A world where agents try out ideas with “Of these options, which brings the most living?”

What kind of world shall we enact? A meeting world, where agencies meet agencies, actors actors, and living and loving results.

What kind of world shall we enact?

Why is this news I can use? Because it frees me of old fears and restrictions, allows me to think of new things and daring to do, and people to meet. What kind of world shall we enact? tells us we can choose, that our touch on the gossamer is felt.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 967

We may never have been stars
but together we make constellations

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 966

You are not alive
You have not life
Life is the stream which carries you along
Life has you
For a time and half a time
Then casts you aside
This is the great white hot hope
You bring to the world:
You can bend life
Do you choose?
But in which direction?
We the generations wait
‘Tis not you who converses
Birthing action
Rather you take the actions
Growing out of you when
Conversation births you
Life is Conversation
& each of us is a knot on the thread

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 965

We are caterpillars to the power of butterflies. If we wish.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 964

You kept your smile
While those around traded
Theirs for shouting, anger
But tell me—tell us all—
Did you do it to get
A better replacement ticket
Or for this gate agent
The world to make more human?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 963

We have a finely tuned
Detector of BS
Use it all the time
But did you realize
Just as finely tuned
We have a detector of
Humanity rising, rising?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 962

Every tool finds its place
Hugs seek a level of their own
Life it is life it is
Life rolls in & life flows out
Here is life like it is
Bread to share stay a while
Rest your head the world can wait
Every friend brings us home

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 961

Do something without thought of helping yourself.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 960

Birdsong in the distance
echoing under the canopy
of the cathedral’d woods

borne on the winds
to our ears
All is well—

life means possibility—
sing with me
let your spirit wing—

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 959

The redbud seen between the maples
The lake glimpsed where two walls stand near
More than full view a hint can move us

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© c 2009, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com