FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 950

I have no call to be reasonable. My call is to the spirit, to the experience of life that precedes cognition and separation from life and others. My call is to engage people in the life of divinity which exists fully between and among people.

My call is “urgently out beyond the ordinary and the reasonable,” to use Brueggemann’s phrase. These have gotten us where we are, which is ordinary and reasonable, but we need to go to a new place. The place we are is full of pain.

What pain? The pain of being unemployed or underemployed. The pain of being not heard. The pain of being invisible.

What new place? You have the power to make the world better, to turn the world just a bit toward kindness and connecting and moving.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 949

There is work that needs doing. We are able. That is all we need to have in mind. We may get paid, we may not. The point is that people have need of us.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 948

We do not so much have divinity within us but the other way round.

The mystic used to search within for divine forces. No more! For the mystic is within the divine. The creative unfolding whole, is conversation, is divinity working; the mystic has a role—standing in the face giving, accepting offers, extending invitations, helping the whole well unfold. The mystic is midwife: witness to blood and screams, holding hands, waiting, cutting cords, cleaning up, sharing, smiling, crying, resting. All midwife the whole: the whole births.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 947

We are entangled together, and cannot separate ourselves if we try.

We are changing the world, and cannot stop our effect if we try. The question is, are we changing it for good or ill or just adding dead weight to what the others are doing?

The world is in process of self-organization, and we cannot stop that if we try. We can help it along.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 946

Who are our neighbors, who our brothers and sisters? Who can help us? Our bellies are full and pendulous; our muscles loose as our bowels; our food too rich for our health; and our eyes see not the drugs we give our poorest to keep them in our jails and west ends and south sides and graffiti-fied no-neighbor-hoods.

Who can help us, now? We are blind; our bodies no longer feel; children die and we know no longer how to weep. We send money, but only our wallets feel smaller, and we cannot know larger.

Who can help us cry?

Who will console us who need no consoling? Dance with us when we will not? The only time we grieve is at a funeral; this is something to grieve, yes? We dance only at weddings and nightclubs….

Who will speak with us? Is there anyone? Our talk flees from consequences: we have forgotten soul-wrenching and spirit-opening: we experience not the unknown and unexplainable.

Who can help us, after all this time? To whom can we turn? We have no each other anymore.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 945

The dancer is happy
The dancer is groaning
Whichever is true
Unlike one taking charge
Unlike most of us numb
Most of the time
The dancer is alive.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 944

There is a place in conversing where you and they cease all separateness and become one moving. This is where we turn the world.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 943

I like purposes. One can live with purposes. Goals are ends, deaths. Purposes bring life, purposes swim and dance, purposes enable us to go unknowing. Purposes are eyes-open to obstacles and oppositions and give us the heart to continue nevertheless. Purposes can meet the changing landscape—woods and rivers, plains and mountains, uphill and down, beauty and ruggedness, people with different skins, ideas and lookout points upon the world. Purposes are Mother Teresa in Calcutta, Jesus on a cross, Gautama finding enlightenment in suffering.

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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

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 942

The time has come to converse around
our circle, and to put away our child-time
toys of debate and hate and what’s wrong
with you and him and her and everyone:
to see that we are all people suffering, all
people trying our hardest to make life
better; to sit down and reason together,
and more than that, to each other and from
each other and for the generations coming,
to commit

Please pass it on.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 941

Give a broken thing
Broken things still
have songs left in them

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 940

How did I add value to the world in the day just past? How did we?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 939

I believe that
the next leg of our progress
the next leg of our repair of the world
the next leg of our evolution
is together
consciously together
this is the meaning of holy
this work is holy
for this work this is the time

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 938

There is another way
Banks have cut off our money supply
Wait for the flow to start again or
Is there another way?

There is another way
Buy tomatoes from slavers’ hands
Or burn all that oil to get them here or
Is there another way?

There is another way
Live with oppression or
Start a war or
Is there another way?

There is another way
Plead for a job
Or live in tent city or
Is there another way?

There is another way
The needs we had last summer
& people to meet them still exist
There is another way

Please pass it on.

© 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

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 937

Asking for what we need—is something we have forgotten in our culture. Wondrous stuff when we do.

People are good, people are trustworthy: another facet of love.

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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

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 936

Never doubt
The value to another
When you try, not knowing if…
When my parents died
I told my friends online
In that cold, impersonal, often cruel world
And coming back to me
Through those hard metal wires
Among the bits and bytes
Was pure love
And it warmed me
A dozen years passed
And it warms me still

Please pass it on.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 935

It is our responsibility to give the future our choice. This might be a bold choice: act! It might also be a quiet, sit at home and nurture choice: this too is bold.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 934

You have a message
a word a glance a work—
to lift us all
shout look walk
breathe our species’ transforming
birth our pregnant heart-break
open for us the meanings
of our still strange encounter

Please pass it on.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 933

Shall we see with the poet’s eye?
To the real, to the real
Flesh and mud and blood
To bone and marrow and quick
To life, to life, to real
Profit and true weal
Prosperity that lasts
When money and debt run out
To life which lives!
And hugs and tickles
Laughs, cries and bleeds
Grows
Among
Poets’ eyes

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 932

Distance
—from me to my spouse
—from me to G*d
—from me to myself
—from me to you
—from conversation to conversation
—from mind to mind & heart to heart
Distance adds dimension
Distance adds depth, profundity, texture
Distance is necessary to living fully
Distance gives riches, depth, death, grief
to emptiness, openness, living, celebrating
Distance is color, shadow,
the missing from the present
the more
beyond beyond
How far away are you?
May tell you how pregnant our life is

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 931

Tread lightly on
our Earth
Leave your Footprints in
the Wind

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 930

Newness requires
Over-againstness
Tension
& conflict

When we first thought
We had all the answers
Was when we
Lost our souls
—Our souls are of the same
Creative stuff as divinity

We must converse
As if here we live or die
For surely we do
And we live as
Soon as we die

Please pass it on.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 929

Is there beauty, is there truth, is there goodness in your work?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 928

The poetry of your life—
where does it reside?
in sons and daughters
wives and husbands
places we’ve lived
jobs we’ve given up
work which grew us
tasks we were called to
perhaps against our wills
scraps of life
we always meant to put in books
scraps of life only now understood
yesterdays and tomorrows
what about todays?

Please pass it on.

© 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