Health draws sickness in
Health draws sickness in
Giving to each
Broken piece
All it needs to be
Roundly filled
:- Doug.
Archive for November, 2006
Footprints in the Wind sm # 722
Footprints in the Windsm # 722
The answer to your fear comes when your vision opens.
Please pass it on.
© 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
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
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Evil at work, good at work
Look, look about you: the vast majority of the earth’s peoples and species are good, intending good. To intend harm and evil is an aberration. To teach these that they are evil and deserving of guilt is evil at work. Good draws out good.
:- Doug.
I offer it to you
Lord, I do not know about this, so I offer it to you: not for a decision but as grist for conversation.
:- Doug.
We have the capacity
We have the capacity to invite emergence
We open to connection & conflict & crisis
We welcome rhythm and pattern
Story & dreams & hands call the dance
:- Doug.
To my vaguely depressed baby boomer wife:
To my vaguely depressed baby boomer wife:
For the last several decades you have been somehow dimly aware of something in the back of your heart, nagging at you. There are days when you can’t get anything done, you have told me. There are times when you would rather eat bon-bons and watch “The Price is Right” than do any work. You have told me this too. Sometimes you don’t tell me: we go out for supper or you make bland.
What’s going on? Perhaps it is a symptom of 1950s upbringing: every little girl’s dream is to get swept off her feet by an handsome prince, have a glorious wedding, and live happily ever after. “Happily ever after” is always vague, so we got exactly what we wished for: vagueness.
Perhaps it is our society: all individuality, all for me. Even our churches preach a gospel of individual salvation. Our advertising certainly defines satisfaction as getting more for me, ever more, and always being dissatisfied.
What it amounts to is something else you have told me, and which I myself have said more than once: I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
The solution? Well, does life have a solution? Can you solve life, once for all? If not, how then shall we live?
We live best when we face these questions. We live most when we live a larger life: larger than the little day-to-day one we see when we are vaguely depressed.
This larger life gets us outside ourselves. It invites us into other peoples’ lives. This may be why you sang in the church choir, lead another, and volunteer in several organizations. You are reaching out to others. You are helping. You are seeing a larger world.
This larger life calls others into our lives. This larger life calls us together.
This larger life calls us to love, justice, beauty, goodness. There is much that needs doing in the world. There is much that can make this world better, whether we are righting wrongs or working on dreams.
What do you see that needs doing? How can I help?
What gifts? What worlds?
You not only are capax universi, but you hold the universe in your palm. You can change the worlds, you can stir the stars. Yet your visions, your visions! are of such small inconsequential things! How dare you waste an earth mover on scraping the stones from your car’s parking space! The insights of a mystic on vacuuming your carpets!
Yet what does this mean? It means there is justice and peace going wanting for your efforts. It means people starve and die. It means people go homeless. It means children who hear not a kind word, children who are not heard. What gifts do we have, what worlds can we serve?
:- Doug.
My task
This is my task—to tease out another’s vision, to help that person name it vision. This opens the universes, for ever.
:- Doug.
Memory it is that kills the child
Memory it is that kills the child
in us
Been there
done that
we say to ourselves
before we even have the words
when in truth we have
never
been here
done this
:- Doug.
Perhaps I need to be turbid for awhile
Perhaps I need to be turbid for a while,
allow the water to settle itself.
The world is not only clear.
The world is beyond clear.
We so often want clarity and simplicity in a
muddied complex world. This is
denial of truth.
We turn away from ugly, in
denial of the beauty there to uncover.
We stay in our rounds,
afraid to expand our circles, in
denial of good.
These three strands,
woven, one, us.
:- Doug.
Are we too fat?
Are we too fat?
Do we keep taking in after we’re full?
Take time to eliminate, get empty first,
through exercise or simply
time between stuffings?
Can a full jar accept fresh liquid?
Programs, plans, platform speakers
but no effort given over to
emptying, opening, lying fallow
in preparation to receive and
be fertile ourselves?
:- Doug.
Too much light
Too much light
clarity hides
four other senses
nuances
peripheral perception
intuit
subtle emerging
blunders blinders
blanks blurs
falters reversals
reality
allow await
tranquil
empty
together!
:- Doug.
Do you dare exclude?
Do you dare exclude any good ideas? Any fact that may help? Get it all in the room and dealt with.
:- Doug.
To “sell” OS, first put aside
In order to “sell” OS you must first put aside the idea of its magic.
:- Doug.
What’s your big work?
What’s your big work in the world? What are you doing toward it? Today?
:- Doug.
The great conversation
The great conversation is ever between despair and possibility, smallness and grandeur, sin and redemption, shrinking and expanding. Humanity touches both earth and the heavens: we have the capacity for both compassion and flight.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Wind sm # 721
Footprints in the Windsm # 721
The coffee shop
People are coming and going, getting their drug to start them pumping. Pumping what? Do they find friends here? Sometimes. Do they find Its here—people to buy their products, services, them?
Did they see the beggars by the door? What beggars by the door? I thought the proprietor ran a better shop than that, making sure those with their hands out, the scruffy and unkempt were kept at a distance. The outwardly homeless are, for sure. You have to drive past them to get to this trendy joint. What neighborhoods do you drive through? Who haunts the bus stops and seamier sides of town? Do you nod to them, wave, roll down your window and say Hello? Neither do I. Of course. But why not?
Remember the people we left at the door? The people who have houses, but still homeless? Perhaps yourself: hoping someone notices you, says Hello, engages with you.
Some of us go into the coffee shop, head down; some are scanning for a home for their hearts. Some don’t really know why they are there; some just want to get through one more day.
A tragedy in one act, no villains, no heroes, no heroines. No plot.
Such are our lives at the coffee shop, circa this year.
Yet, is it so written? Is there no choice? Is there no vision? What could this place be? Who could we be—not just you and not just me and not just those over there, but us. Together. Is there a role for an “us?”
A memorable vision
Jack goes into the coffee shop for his morning latte. Jill is sitting, sipping tea, browsing a Website, and waves him over. “You seem agitated, Jack.” “Yeah, a few minutes ago, I saw a cop putting an Hispanic man in handcuffs. This idea of arresting people because of where they were born bothers me.” “Yeah, but what can we do about it?” “We can write it down, take pictures, hear peoples’ stories, ask others to listen. This is our country, our community. If not us, who? Wanna help?”
Beauty, truth, good are born of such conversations. Love.
All because someone dared to give voice to their vision. To look to see larger. Love.
Hate and fear will still rule many hearts. No matter. Love.
Please pass it on.
© 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
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
Footprints in the Wind sm # 720
Footprints in the Windsm # 720
It is the job of all of us who see what’s going on to aid the conscious evolution.
Please pass it on.
© 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
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
We are weaklings, we are unable, there is no hope
When we call in the experts and they are not us, then we are saying We are weaklings, we are unable, come save us! When we strike out at others and sell drugs and steal, then we are saying We are frustrated, there is nothing ordinary we can do, we want you to suffer too, because we are weaklings, we are unable, and you would not come and save us!
No, it is not simply saying we have in the room the best heads: it is saying What vision can we have? What is possible? For if we can imagine, we can work toward that, and something better is possible. If we will not give our hearts and heads to visioning us, then there is no hope.
But we know there is hope, or none of us would be working.
:- Doug.
Our visions are too small
Our visions are too small
dead crumpled bills
to spend upon trinkets
—dreary crumpled dyings—
we could for the same cost
—but not investment—
have a new earth
:- Doug.
G*d cries
What is it you want me to do? the believer cries—
What is it you must do? in reply G*d cries.
:- Doug.
