FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 789

It’s not a question of what’s fair; it’s a question of anyway. It’s never fair when someone does evil unspeakable things; but you forgive them anyway. It’s not fair when life sets you back on your heels; you simply find your direction from here anyway. Not what’s fair but anyway.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 788

Be an inviter of deep conversations, interested in how we connect questions, stories, and conversations to make our world work for all.

Conversation moves us to action, so what actions matter? Who is all? How big can you stretch your idea of all? What is your story? What stories have you heard that we should hear? What are your live questions?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 787

Some day we learn we are a part and it is most important to participate.

It is a dance, a soup, a hive: communitation! Community in action. What we most desperately need is engaging community action.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 786

Worship services should be the least spiritual part of our week: a diving board into a life deep with God. Worship services are not particularly spiritual as a rule, but are there to encourage us to want to take the dive.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 785

Do you see the pond, or do you see the fog drifting across the surface, too? Do you see the person, or do you see what is drifting across their surface, too?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 784

Does our community work for all? What will we do?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 783

The challenge to thinking about a gift economy is that we get caught in snares of thinking How can I get mine—my food, clothing, shelter, transportation, conversation? Maybe we need to be thinking How can I give mine—away, faster, bigger, for more good for more people?

This is exactly the meaning of “the Queendom of G-d:” this is the cosmos where the divine human plays! Seek first this Queendom, its expansion (not beating people into signing a particular oath), and all the things you worry about will take care of themselves, because it works for you, too!

Oh you of little vision!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 782

The Spirit of the Lord is a butterfly, flitting where it will, bringing joy and beauty to all, uncapturable, unownable, but belonging to all.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 781

Wanted: Troublemakers.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 780

Our community in conversation creates life. If we converse well, we get life. If we choose to converse about death and dysfunction and duality, we breed assassination, rape, terror.

We can choose to take our world into our hands and make it a living place that works for all. This is the issue of our age. We can choose how we meet it.

We do choose how we meet it every day: sometimes we choose to converse with others about what we might do—and then do it; most often we shake our heads and go back to our half-pounder with cheese and bacon and fries—eaten alone inside our SUV. We get what we converse about. If we are to deserve more, we need to take the risk of starting the conversation.

This does not mean we close our eyes to assassination, rape, and terror, and turn our news programs into sugar-coated fantasies. What we can do is turn our attention to the ways people are meeting these challenges. This is the real news, not the sensationalism which leads us to despair and felt terror. This is the really sensational: humans meeting the challenge. We can pay attention to the challenge, or we can invest our attention into the work of meeting the challenge. So our news becomes stories of people working between the bombs and in the burned-out places to bind wounds, build new things, and grow people. No more just Hell only. Hell and grace.

But the key lies not in our news programs. We can choose today to turn them off. The key lies in choosing today: life or death? Hell only, or Hell and grace?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 779

Perhaps when we say self organization what we mean is self creation, and this in fact is what people hear—and fear. We might create monsters (monsters there already be). We might create tyrants (Hitler and Saddam). But we might create lovers (Jesus, Mother Teresa, Buddha) as well. If as Blake says we are the divine human, part of the continent and not islands, then we do create. A and B come together to create X. X creates A, B, A and B, and X.

How is this so? Everyone we have ever met is a part of us, has added to or subtracted from us, our essence, our personality, our soul, our spirit, use the word you are comfortable with. We too are a part of them. We also work on the ideas and images we receive and make them into us—so we are creating ourselves. All the time.

As ordinary as all this is, it is also extraordinary and miraculous. That is because we are not mere computers learning to build other computers and ourselves, but we are the wind, able to leap centuries with a single bound, touch hearts a continent away, and be.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 778

This might be why some conversations feel dead: we are not working on live questions: things which demand of us our input, our selves, our being, our work. We need to be doing work in our conversation, or we do not feel alive. If we are not doing heavy lifting conversations, then we feel dead. Conversations that work: this is when we feel alive. Let’s watch for that and see if it is true.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 777

Pasts separate us. What draws us together is who people are becoming. If we but see who we can be, we are able to come together warmly and become more wildly diverse. In conversation we are opening space for our becoming.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 776

What if we each had kaleidoscopes with which to see people and their various colors and textures and viewpoints and imaginations—shaken, nudged, and rearranged with others? What would be possible to see, and to do?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 775

Breezes, Bees and Butterflies
Do dwell within my Heart?
All Fields, and all the Meadows wide,
Spaces open too?

You, idea Wild
You, our every Child
Feral Butterfly
Up on the Breeze
Bee among the Clover sweet
You, the Blood that feeds our Heart

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 774

Lost touch
The elder in the nursing home
alone, craving hands
that mean him or her
instead gets efficiency
and more isolation
these years her last
to make right a babyhood
left alone
in crib or playpen
fenced off
from father’s mother’s sister’s brother’s
touch
adult years holding
the world at bay
with a handshake
being taught to fear hugs
but never quite learning
touch is what she needed
all life long
please touch me
the man of enterprise
“builds” an “organization” of souls
but fears to touch them
and more to let them touch him
until he reaches the same nursing home
and sees the potential he
left dying at his door
please touch me now

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 773

What is the magic whispered into the breast of a human that lets it see beauty in the distraught woman, kindness in the heart of an angry man, creativity in the hands of a “common” laborer?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 772

We were taught by the early church, and are still taught by the modern one, that we cannot be trusted. We have no worthy direct experience of God nor ourselves. Only those with the credentials and robes can intermediate ourselves and our God for us. Beneath our veneer, we were told long ago and so still believe, we are vile, corrupt, faulty, sin-full. If we explore we will find only monsters. Lies! We explore and find beneath the robes and behind the curtain only good people like us, in all ways people like us. Some have experience with God and self and some do not. God comes to us, too. We are good because we are of God.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 771

Make use of your foresight—
Fore-see the world we want
Forth-see the world we want

Don’t be content just seeing
the way things are
See the world the way it could be

Then roll up your sleeves—
create!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 770

Jesus was here not to promote faith in himself but to give us a new worldview that we might live a more abundant life. That worldview? Us alive.

This is what Jesus was about—helping us see the world differently, see G*d closer and larger, see ourselves larger.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 769

All we have is slight changes. From here we move worlds. If you change your trajectory by one ten-billionth of a degree, you land upon a different star.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 768

Can you hear me?
We need to talk
I need you to run to the shoe store
My spouse calls to me
calls me to
the mundane
the humus
the human
my feet
where I touch and am touched
away from
my head
my imagined imagination
Can you hear me?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 767

Power is accompanied by—and needs—an equal quantity of powerlessness, or acquiescence. Seek powerlessness, or its dark sister, fear of powerlessness, first among the powerful. Power and powerlessness are both illusory. Therefore be kind.

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© c 2007, 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