FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 797

This deep blue
These leaves catching
Red fire! and burnt orange
From each other
Preparing to take flight
These ask of you
What have you done
—you who are in charge—
For our world today?

This is how the earth renews itself, how life renews itself, how we all live: through giving in small ways and large, but giving in all cases our all.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 796

We have all gotten distracted and have forgotten that we are in charge of the world. We have abdicated that responsibility to governments and corporations and charities. So we need to disorganize ourselves first—the comfy let George do it place where we all want to live—to find out that we, each and together, are in charge and can change what needs making better. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 795

Borders! We have expanded our borders from sea to sea and beyond. We now have the capacity to extend them even further. This time we can do it by capturing not lands but hearts and minds (people might even stop hating us!), where every one is one of us. We are here, at this choice point: roll up ourselves into a tighter and tighter ball and keep everyone else out, setting walls at our borders; or take an open stance, extending our hands and arms in welcome, expanding our borders, a growing and growing circumference: embrace.

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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

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 794

We are more than enough
We have more than enough
When we put us together
We are, we have, more than that
We are, we have, all we are and have
This is a good place to start

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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

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 793

Be bold—
Say it!
Own it!
We’re helping change the world!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 792

These people
—our times—
so wrapped in
themselves grasping hoarding
blink dumbly
when asked
What is your great work?

Why not? I want to ask
Why add your weight
to the burden of widows orphans?
—but I too am guilty

People are doing things
getting storing taking their leisure
only buying their charity
they could be giving themselves
receiving others
flourishing
the world needs

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 791

Now I see the ? from another side: G?d has the question for us, has “his” ear cocked for us, wants to hear us whole! So the question mark flows both ways—we are the mystery to each other, wanting to hear each other and be heard—and it flows in a spiral.

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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

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 790

Is there anybody with whom you would not trade places? Then it is time to get to work. Does our world benefit everyone?

It is our job to do that work, whether we get paid for it or not (read: whether we benefit or not). We get mixed up between getting paid and being able to have what we need, as well. If we have what we need (food, clothing, shelter, transportation, communication), and others do not…the need is clear, if not the next step.

The next step? Where does it touch me, how can I help? No catch in the stomach, just meet the need: yours are already attended to. Are you doing the most you can to help?

Are you using your highest and best for the task? Seek to give your biggest effect skill and resources instead of saying Yes to slinging hash in the soup line or hanging wallboard in a home-build. But that’s no excuse if you fail to give. When you have not been asked: organize the thing!

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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

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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© 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

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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© 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

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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© 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

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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© 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

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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© 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

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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© 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