FootprintsintheWind.com

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.

Do what you can, not what you must.

:- Doug.