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.