Personal only?
Personal only salvation
Saved for what?
To bring others here?
Why? You don’t care
Unless
You and they are connected into one
:- Doug.
Archive for June, 2007
Do the life-affirming work
This is life-affirming work. It is about opening what may be life suppression systems so that life’s work can get done.
What is life’s work? Life!
Within that I see all of the words that are contained in that: G!d, imagination, love, laughter, story, conversation.
But I also see ways to speak with people who are not yet in the spiritual way of seeing: Life is the work that needs to get done. Money, business, creativity, everything is there to feed life, to nurture and grow it. Whatever does not fulfill that role gets cracked open.
:- Doug.
the chick must break the shell to live
We disorganize communities
to affirm life
imagination affirms life
action affirms life
organization for times gone by
stifles and suppresses and must be cast aside
the chick must break the shell to live
:- Doug.
Imagination beyond a collection
In our imagination is beyond a collection of mes. There is an us, besides: more than a simple sum. There is a multiplication, too, and a trigonometry and an algebra and many calculi.
:- Doug.
The best that can be
The best that can be
thought or said
painted or composed
is ever in the reach
—singly & within the groups—
of every person
:- Doug.
Poets do not know
Poets do not know
the fullest meaning of their works
(only professors do!)
what readers bring is part—
even then the poem remains pregnant
Persons do not know
the fullest meaning of their minds
(only their minds are of the universal imagination!)
it takes a community too—
and even then the minds remain pregnant
:- Doug.
Stirred in
Poets know not
full meanings
of their jottings:
universal imagination
stirred in
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Wind sm # 776
Footprints in the Windsm # 776
What if we each had kaleidoscopes with which to see people and their various colors and textures and viewpoints and imaginations—shaken, nudged, and rearranged with others? What would be possible to see, and to do?
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
What happens in together is this:
Conversation is
how we create:
how we imagine:
together
What happens in together is this: ideas are easily generated. But ideas that work require more than one person. Together means both that we generate ideas no person alone could generate (in addition to those we generate alone), and we promote the ideas we will work on. We both narrow and widen: we narrow the ideas to cut out the off-kilter ones while we widen the number of possibilities within the kilter.
:- Doug.
Flowers who fear to open are we
Flowers who fear to open are we
Open to be seen, open to the bee,
Open to let our fragrance out and then
To die and become fertilizer for others
:- Doug.
The only answer to despondency
The only answer to despondency is imagination. If you are stuck or find another stuck and no way out, look toward your imagination, or another’s, or ours. Even if you cannot see, trust that some one or ones can, for divinity is in humans. When there is no way, imagination offers a way.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Wind sm # 775
Footprints in the Windsm # 775
Breezes, Bees and Butterflies
Do dwell within my Heart?
All Fields, and all the Meadows wide,
Spaces open too?You, idea Wild
You, our every Child
Feral Butterfly
Up on the Breeze
Bee among the Clover sweet
You, the Blood that feeds our Heart
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
Reading Emily Dickinson’s “It’s all I have to bring today–” (# 26)
Today I read Emily Dickinson’s “It’s all I have to bring today—” (# 26):
“It’s all I have to bring today—
This and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees—
Which in the Clover dwell.”
One commentator says “this” is the poem itself: that helps me.
Emily’s poem could also be read allegorically, G!d speaking: This poem that you are feeling and you are just getting ready to write is all I have to bring today, this and my heart beside, this and my heart and all the fields and all the meadows wide…. This and my imagination, which is in this poem and my heart and yours….
—and my heart and all the fields and all the meadows wide and all the open spaces of all the places and all the open times—
And all the Breezes/Floating with our butterflies….
Transformation is about seeing. Transformation is about small changes. Transformation of the world is then in small things that I do now. The Little Flower and Mother Teresa were both onto something large: small things. This is not just changing a little corner of the universe, but is in fact the still point of the turning cosmos. This still point is less a place and more:
Transformation comes in
seeing
small changes
your “little” life
Transformation is
in the still point of the turning
large shifts in small bundles
an opening of the eye
Do the bees and the butterflies dwell in my heart? And fields, and meadows wide, and open spaces, too?
Breezes, Bees and Butterflies
Do dwell within my Heart?
All Fields, and all the Meadows wide,
Spaces open too?
This seems to be you, Lord: breezes, bees and butterflies, imagination wide as the fields the meadows touch and all that touches them, and feral too and so are we and wild.
Little things and large are seeded here. It is all real, as real as a seed and a child and an idea Wild.
You, idea Wild
You, our every Child
Feral Butterfly
Up on the Breeze
Bee among the Clover sweet
You, the Blood that feeds our Heart
:- Doug.
O! Were that all humans were poets
O! Were that all humans were poets
—and we are!
in chrysalis—
telling forth the imagination of G!d
writing and reading scriptures as allegory
calling all humans to our apocalypse
divinity alive—
participating in this life!
:- Doug.
We live in questions for we are
We live in questions
For we are questions
We struggle to know the answers
about our lives
“Why am I here?”
“What is the meaning of my life?”
When all along it is our place to
ask questions of life
“What do we want to make of life?”
“What new questions do we demand from life?
The essence of our life is in the questions we ask
the questions asked of us
and the questions we ask in response
It is up to us to ask the questions
of life
We live in questions
For we are questions
:- Doug.
Knowledge can say nothing
Knowledge can say nothing about unique events. That’s why experience ever desecrates anything new.
:- Doug.
beyond dogmatism
We must get beyond dogmatism or we will surely die. We will kill each other off. We will strangle our imaginations. Same thing.
:- Doug.
Not conservation
Not conservation but working within is best. We cannot go back and become ancient tribes again. Nor would it be good to preserve something solely because it exists. Neither is it good to throw it away because it is in our way. Nor to destroy. Weave what is into what might be. Be a friend to all coming your way. Assist. Gentle go among.
:- Doug.
Your breeze come
Your breeze come, your fish splash, your bee buzz among us.
For yours is the fruitful breeze, and the powerful butterfly, and the beauteous bee….
:- Doug.
Butterflies from cocoons emerging
Sometimes the butterfly just cocoons herself off from the activity of the world; when it is time she emerges: beauty!
:- Doug.
