FootprintsintheWind.com

We go to our spiritual home at week’s end to be nurtured, our wounds bound, our sights lifted. Do we go at times open to nurture, bind and lift.

:- Doug.

Focus the message on what’s important—meeting each other as persons, bringing out the diverse lights—and the right people will respond, from within their setting in life: business, hierarchy, free form.

:- Doug.

Agendas are a way of focusing our attention on what somebody thought in the past. They rarely are able to get us to thinking now. Only conversation can do that. The road to the future runs squarely through now.

How big is now? Do we blink and hope to open our eyes in the programmed perfect future? It will not happen: now will expand to take up the future too.

Agendas are a way we excuse ourselves from meeting: meeting now; meeting each other.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 716

Space being the best gift
—rich, fertile space—
let us give space to G*d—

Please pass it on.

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If we’re after change that matters and sticks, is it more likely to come from one person with a great idea telling us, or from several of us with great ideas working on them together? One person one way, or several evoking? Experts or us?

:- Doug.

If we’re to do something radical, it is important for us to allow space for the unprogrammed and un-planned for, yes?

:- Doug.

Ask often, What do we make of this?

:- Doug.

Inviters improve their meetings if they ask, What do we want out of this gathering? What can we hope? Is it possible to get money, physical labor, mental labor, or spirited engagement? Toward which end of this scale do we want to move?

So then, what if we moved the meeting toward the open, inquisitive side, seeking out this enthusiasm and the highest and best from these people, not just their money and grunt labor?

:- Doug.

What if? Let’s be inquisitive. Let’s ask harder, more enjoyable questions.

:- Doug.

The mistakes we make can—and probably will—bump us into better paths. You might say, “God loves a cheerful sinner!” That is, one who missed the mark and now found a higher one.

So you did not attain your goal? So what? Your sin—missing the mark—was good, valuable in reaching a better one, in putting you further along the road with no end. What is abolished is not sin (that is, missing the mark) but guilt (that is, getting stuck in the past). What is abolished is not sin but the past. That is why it is said God remembers your sin no more: it does not exist because the past does not exist.

God has no memory for his people. He only knows now.

:- Doug.

What makes you think success is any marker of the real? The true? Beauty? The good?

:- Doug.

We are being birthed every instant.

:- Doug.

Whatever you say: G*d is bigger than that!

:- Doug.

Now this
…is G*d
Now this
…is G*d

:- Doug.

How can you hold space? Space holds you. Space holds us.

:- Doug.

This is Eden! Our imperfection is our perfection. Perfection (as we once thought it) would allow only uniformity and no conflict, and probably no complexity. There would be no growth possible. Life would end. Or so it seems from where I stand today.

:- Doug.

What conversation offers us is an entirely new start. This is its thrill, for good or ill. We can escape history, become new persons, become a new one.

:- Doug.

This immigration issue is our times’ civil rights issue. In the 60s communism and “the Negro” confronted the white majority; in this new decade it is terrorism and “the Immigrant.” An enemy without and one within. One vague, the other flesh and blood. We are caught in a pincers—whoever we mean by we. We found then and find now that it is difficult to think rationally. Then and now we must make extra efforts to think—together. The road leads us through learning to simultaneously hold opposites—we and they—in our minds and hearts.

:- Doug.

Be moderate in what you offer
How can I when I see
what is possible for you?
who you are?
when you live?
how many who need you?

:- Doug.

Still the work is poking holes, letting people see their light.

:- Doug.

Always remember: There are larger ways of seeing.

:- Doug.

I see a continuum: on one end, we ask people to be informed and have their donations of time and money solicited. On the other end, their talents are not merely solicited but engaged: here the potential of the group opens out widely. On one end a focus; on the other fluid patterns. On one end control and predictability; on the other freedom and engagement. On one end a known result, similar to a hundred other meetings; on the other a wide range of results, many not thought of before. On one end more closed potential; on the other more open. On one end death of imagination and passion; on the other life. Choose. Choose life.

:- Doug.

There is a risk in opening conversation: as others take ownership we have to cede ownership.

:- Doug.