FootprintsintheWind.com

Who are you, Lord? You are the one we meet.

:- Doug.

Much of our aid to the poor is a way of holding them in prison, however subtly. How does that look? Teaching, giving: these are ways that say Depend on me. Assimilating others into our culture is the same thing: My culture is better than yours. True, our culture is the one we both live within, or at least I think you are living in mine. Even the definition of poverty is in my head, not necessarily yours, at least until I start denying you ways to eat and get cared for. Further, these are ways of I doing to Its.

But there are other cultures: gift cultures, homemaking cultures, relation cultures. Our culture is largely built out of economic bricks. What we are doing is with one hand denying people the necessities of life, and with the other giving them what they need, but grudgingly, sparingly. Our economy is based on withholding, scarcity, limited printing of money. Were we in other parts of the world or other cultures, we might live in a milieu of sharing and gathering natural abundance.

So, knowing the problem and its roots, how do we go past it? Are the people who are helping really fighting the culture and the economy, rather than some vague formless thing called poverty?

There is mental illness which prevents some people from earning the way we do so we can share in economic spoils. They might have other ways of being a valued part of our society, if only as persons for whom others can exercise their caring.

There is anti-social behavior and its extreme example, criminality, which prevents some people from the way we do so we can share in economic spoils. Then can take care of themselves.

There are those whose life situation has demanded of them that they care for others, children or infirm parents, for instance, and they are unable to play in the economic field with the rest of us. They could be supported for their important activities for the rest of us.

There are those in generational “poverty” who perhaps live in a different culture. Could we encourage them in their culture and help them that way? If the problem we perceive as poverty is really drugs or indiscriminate pregnancy, for instance, then perhaps we are chopping at the wrong roots.

:- Doug.

There is a prison in our way of dissolving poverty
We teach, we give, we assimilate:
All focus on We doing to Its

:- Doug.

Who is G*d? To the imagination G*d is not mystery but fully released imagination. Who then is the human? What are the elements of the imagination we call mystery? Breakthrough, peer to peer, emergence, birthing persons, initiative, more persons looking, more persons choosing direction, co discovery, distributed responsibility, knowledge owned by the whole, knowledge generated by the whole, yes invented here, realization that we are in control of our lives, common experience, more eyes, exploring assumptions, more patterns seen, co-leadership emerges organically, larger patterns seen, previously unheard voices are heard, people become more effective, the people unfold, the species unfolds, embracing of differences as valuable, more flexibility, a realization that we are part of something larger than us, contribution, people knowing best, wisdom is co-created, complexity demands an integration of many minds—a larger mind, direction finding, aberration reducing, creativity, betweens, birthing of persons, larger possibilities, increasing our reach. What else can you think of? Together?

:- Doug.

It is more likely than not that amazing things will come out of real meeting. It is the only way for amazing things to happen.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 753

When what you do helps, you are hooked.

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

Teaching someone skills to get out of poverty is not the same as persons meeting persons. The phrase peer to peer seems to fit. There are things generated by their eyes and ears that no single person, let alone generalized program, can see or hear: this is their vision. They can see things in the future that others with ready-made solutions are denied. Perhaps even things these others deny. When we catch glimpse of our vision, the course of study holds us back. It is this we want to instill and we must, we must, make use of all opportunities for it to arise. To do otherwise is to deny the other and our community. We must engage the highest and best in all of us. At every opportunity. At every meeting.

:- Doug.

Is this the role of humans? Subdue the earth might be precisely this: not ruin the earth, but make of it something alive and generative. To redeem the fallen means to free him or her to do something larger. This is perhaps my point of convergence with Blake: the constant emphasis on sin and guilt is wrong. That is what Jesus came to remind us to put an end to. We have larger work: we are the light of the world. Why do we gather people, preach to all nations? To free them to be the light of the world. We have missed the kernel for the shell! We are to engage in life, not withdraw from it, nor make of ourselves an island apart. We are to redeem the world from its slavery. We were slaves in Egypt…we were removed from our home…but now, we are free, home, able!

:- Doug.

If getting others into the room increases our numbers of eyes, what do we see? Not much more if we have a talking head in front of the room: we all see what she sees. Nothing new. But when we allow voice to vision, then we spark new vision. What is vision? Seeing what good we can do.

:- Doug.

Teaching subtly reinforces that someone else has our answers. Peer to peer work brings out our own resourcefulness.

:- Doug.

What do we mean when we say we are working against “the odds?” We often mean we are working against experience, or more precisely, lack of experience: we have never seen this before, therefore it is “improbable.” As if we have seen all that is possible!

:- Doug.

Just as three dimensions include 2, and a sneeze includes a breath, so does conversation include talk, meeting include hearing persons.

:- Doug.

What do you see? What do you see? What do you see? Not what I see, not what she sees, not what he sees, yet the human in each of us, among us, sees all angles, all parts, all wholes, all patterns. In seeing, creating. In imagination at work, birthing worlds and persons. What do you see? What do you see? What do you want for us?

:- Doug.

Statistics serve mainly to grasp an It-world. It is on the far end of the spectrum from the Thou world. It will take us at least an hour to get back into a person-meeting frame of mind after being faced in the opposite direction.

:- Doug.

More eyes, more vision
More light, more help
More hands, more feet
More energy, more mouths
More imagination
Only awe

:- Doug.

Expertise can express itself as a question.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 752

The human mind encompasses more than one brain. What could that mean to you, if you lived it?

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

Blake sees Jesus as the quintessential imagination-freeing person; Buber sees Jesus as the quintessential dialogic person. Both are saying the same thing: that dialogue and imagination are ways of turning the world. Imagination in dialogue is the key. Imagination is released through conversation, and so the world is turned, is unfolded, a new Heaven and a new Earth is begun. How can you have imagination except in dialogue? It must be communicated—sent and received. Then it grows. Then it has its opportunity to change the world. Imagination stuck in one person’s head is nothing more than memory. The key to both is engaging the world and the persons in it. Blake’s imagination is not simply working with things, but meeting people, freeing them to act. Buber’s dialogue is meeting people, freeing them to be and to act.

Imagination in dialogue: creating the world we want; being the person we want to meet.

Whom do I want to meet tonight? A person who is full of imagination and meeting. Imagination in meeting. Imagination meeting.

:- Doug.

Why are people not born immediately after conception? Do they need time to gestate? Could it be the same with ideas?

:- Doug.

The pot needs time to simmer and work through ideas: it gives dignity and respect to the ideas; a mind shower tends to lead people to assume that the ideas are all fully-formed and ready to go. This is not how ideas generate. Instead, we get an inkling, then we think about it and see where it leads.

:- Doug.

We need to bring fire and fire together: small groups can kindle these ideas, develop them. A larger group will tend to give more voice to the idea-killers, and to those who have the loudest voices or talk the most. We need to encourage all voices.

:- Doug.

Northrop Frye writes in his Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake: “Those who have fed the hungry and clothed the naked are here, because they have realized the divine dignity of man.” (p 81) Yes! Humans have divine dignity, and to repress the imagination, the action, of persons is to repress the divine.

:- Doug.

Restoring dignity is not a gift we bestow, but a grace we are sometimes privileged to carry. Dignity consists among other things in seeing G*d in the naked, hungry, angry and conniving one.

These are people who have become separated from their lives. The antidote is to insert them back into life. Power comes from giving—the separated one by giving receives the power once more to live larger.

:- Doug.