FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 958

What if the trees were alive
& you & I
& between us these shimmering spaces
rocks & roadways & spinning moons—
whom could we be & what could we do?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 957

Enlarge conversation
Enlarge humanity

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 956

Can you imagine—
A future alternative to our present?
A world where people not power move our country?
People singing about their work?
Everyday people writing poems about their cities?

Can you see yourself as part of humanity?
Can you picture a group of people—and you as part of it—excited for a project?
People eating the juicy fresh fruits they helped grow locally?
Can you touch another’s skin and heart?

Are you able?
This is where we’re headed
What we’re working toward

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 955

What if humanity meant something different from what it yet has?

What if meaning and purpose and spirit became part of our gathering, bringing us not a better world, but better persons? Not one by one, but together. Together is the trans-human.

The trans-human is forever gathering out of the mist, we are seeing more of what is possible. For us.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 954

To round out our work
To hear the work telling us what needs doing
To enter into the space between never knowing where or how we will end up, with the purpose of throwing ourselves fully into its adventure for good
To seek out others of like heart
To let the work tell you what it wants—where the natural turns & breaks & curves are—so you can avoid forcing and cracking its utility and beauty
To be curious about how all this will come out…
To wait out beyond our grasping for immediate results so as to allow something of ourselves—and others’—O and all others’—out to full play, knowing—no, hoping & expecting—something larger will play with us…
To open space for new life, curious & squalling
To open in ourselves a space of mind…
This is the way of life; we can choose

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 953

We are given a back and fingernails that we might know our need for, and our joy at receiving, the aid of another.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 952

Conversing stirs
Imagining,
The Holy

Imagining
Is Emerging
Is Divinity sprouting

Conversing stirs
Imagining,
The Human

More than stirring
Conversing is the essential:
Meeting brings forth
Divinity & Human—This Us

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 951

The frog says to itself: Oh! There is danger coming! The only escape is hyper-space mode. Here I go! Whew! Never know where I will be when I come out of hyper-space, it’s always someplace new and unexpected. But out of range of the danger.

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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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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

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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

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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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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

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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