FootprintsintheWind.com

What is the world-wide conversation we need?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 630

What is whole?
What is open?
How to love?
These growing questions
we live under
are each day
called to give
our new answer.

Please pass it on.

© c 2006, 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

Tell us about a conversation that mattered.

:- Doug.

Who are the most surprising people you have worked with?

:- Doug.

My work is conversation. My passion is conversation.

:- Doug.

To my good friends–

Please introduce me to a group who is coming alive to their possibilities.

:- Doug.

We find ourselves in our interactions with others.

:- Doug.

I need to let myself go and open to whom I might be.

:- Doug.

People come together: people grow out.

:- Doug.

Discoveries contain within themselves invitations to more discoveries. There is infinity within the atom you hold in the palm of your hand, and eternity…

There are discoveries even within discoveries, like Russian nesting dolls, except that we can go in both directions, opening out and up as well as in and smaller, except that we can go in all directions if we choose. I choose.

:- Doug.

What discoveries have you made about life?

: Doug.

What the world needs now
is not love
but a specific kind of love
–conversational love–
meeting person to person
working together
from the center of the heap
outwards
towards our evolving future

:- Doug.

People don’t see what you see–so it’s up to you to pass along the view from your observation station.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 629

What we need is the heart connection between the hearer and the heard, investment one in another.

Please pass it on.

© c 2005, 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

To my good friends–

I wrote this morning:

I have come to be changed.

But I wanted to ease the words somewhat, lessen their import by saying What if a leader stood in front of you and said this? What if you were challenged to say this? But the fact is that the words came to me unadulterated. I have come and am going to be changed. I do not want to leave you behind, Lord, and you will not leave me behind. But these people will change me, and perhaps more than most. Who knows? But it is something we need to be aware of and open to: when we meet, we will be changed, we will not be the same, we will grow, we will lose and we will gain. I have come to be changed.

Whenever persons meet, since they come into being by virtue of their meeting, then those persons are changed. They are changed from potential persons to actual. They are changed from whom they thought they were to whom they are in this person’s presence. They are changed from whom they were in that person’s presence to whom they are in this one’s presence. They are changed from nothing to somebody. They lose a piece of themselves. They gain a piece of the meeting that is between them. They lose data and gain wisdom. They lose fiction and gain truth. They lose assumptions and gain personhood.

Every day I’m different. I move from what I thought, believed and beloved yesterday to what I think, believe and belove today. I do not repeat myself as much as I thought I would; I contradict myself more than I consider safe. Once I saw this as a defect of my character; now I see it as near the center and good: when I find I do not repeat myself I know I am moving. Herein, growth. Herein curiosity. Herein life! I have come to be changed!

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

Curiosity: this is the subject of the chapter which I finished this morning from Theodore Zeldin‘s An Intimate History of Humanity. Curiosity seems to me a daughter of love and a sister to truth. Curiosity is attractive and attracted. Curiosity attracts me this morning and has given me a hint as to a gift I have which I had not before seen as gift: that of being curious about things, of trying on different ideas during my reading and exploring, that this is not a negative but a positive, that I am able to thereby grow and add to and subtract from myself as I go through life.

Growth includes subtracting from ourselves as much as adding to. This is good to keep in mind. We are well served to look for things not only not to do, but not to be.

Curiosity might kill the cat, but the cat might need to die, and who said death is less than healing?

So curiosity is at least a clue and a path to conversation: Tell me about yourself. What attracted you to that? Who are you now whom you were not when you were a child, whom you were not last year? Why did you change and which do you think is better? Was the year a good one for you? What is on the horizon for you? With whom do you find yourself having good conversations in your life and work? What is a good conversation?

I am curious about conversation. What makes it good? What can it accomplish? Who are we when we converse? Who are we when we converse better? Who can we be? Can conversation help us get where we want to go, achieve our destiny? Why would we want to? What can we accomplish in conversation? When do we start? Why haven’t we started yet?

Why haven’t we started yet? Perhaps that is the hardest question for me. Is it really because I haven’t found the way? Or because I haven’t tried?

With whom to try? With those about me, while I am breathing. Be curious. Dig till we find what we need to converse about. How can we become who we can become? How can we do more of that? We are a culture which loves How questions, so we can use them to get us working on the Why questions: How can we move toward what matters? How can we ask Why more often? What work needs to be done? What are the important things we are all too busy to do anything about? What are the things we do not have the power to solve? If we do not, who does?

Lord, questions are the daughters of curiosity, the troublers of truth. I too am a troubler.

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

What needs to happen in this world? In this community? In this conversation?

:- Doug.

What to be curious about, concerning G-d? What to be curious about, concerning conversation?

:- Doug.

Seek to be a part of the teem.

:- Doug.

It is good I try on ideas from many authors and peoples: it is for good we influence each other; it is for good we try out new mixtures with the familiar.

:- Doug.

Joseph Christmas!

(Just in case
“Mary Christmas”
is wearing a little thin)

:- Doug.

G-d is trapped in the human breast and brain; we need to set him free. I am disturbed at times with the pictures of God has a plan for me, I will trust God to make it right. These seem so simplistic. What if G-d wanted you to act? What are you doing? Yet it is more than acting: it is taking responsibility, being an actor, leaping onstage and entering the main act. Never fear, the play is large enough for all! All are playwrights as well as actors. God is larger than the one we have kept trapped inside our brains and breasts. Leap onstage! Create! Step back far enough to take in whole universes and become intimate with them all! It is not enough to passively receive grace: you must then become grace: to people, to animals, to plants, to universes, to your circle. For what are you saved? For what are you saving yourself? Are you a gift wrapped up and put on a shelf, awaiting the right party? This is the party you have been invited to. Party on!

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 628

This is where we are going: changing the world in a fundamental and good way, so that we G-d the world.

Please pass it on.

© c 2005, 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