FootprintsintheWind.com

I’m no more divine than you are
and no less

:- Doug.

Universe swing like the pendulum do
First the tribe and the old soft shoe
All for Me-Me is what we’re leaving
For opening one and opening all

:- Doug.

If we hide from their hide
Then they our enemies be
If we touch their hide
Then we act for all

:- Doug.

Our pictures of God are more directly a picture of our patterns of thinking. One sees war, one sees Pappa, one sees judgment, one sees embrace, one sees puppet-master, one sees a pat on the bottom and a nudge on the back, one sees boundaries, one sees infinite worlds.

:- Doug.

What is the best way to get across a crowded dance floor? Life is our dance.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 804

It may happen for us

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

Why are you working for money? The truth is, you are not working for money. You are working for love. Love of self—what can I get?—or love of family or church or humanity—what can I give?

:- Doug.

Our problems are complex. They are tangled. They are tightly connected, so that if we think to solve this one straight on, we may find we have caused a new one over there unknowing.

We cannot dissolve the knots. Life is as life is. All is interconnected. What we have not yet tried in any concerted fashion is bringing complexity itself to bear on complexity.

What is one the most complex of systems? Humanity itself. The human being standing in isolation is a complicated tangle, bunch of blood vessels and nerves and lymphatic systems, muscles and bone and brain and thought and action and skin and digestion and a host of microscopic parasites living in on and under each square inch of us. Yet that one human is only part of the interconnected web of humanity, interconnected by family lines and friendships, by association and work, by politics and religions, by commerce and bumping into one another, by speech and touch and glance and odor, by nearness and distance, by working together and pulling apart.

If we got serious about bringing this human complexity to bear upon the complexity of life, then we stand a chance of understanding and working with life, of growing and working with what faces and embraces us.

We need to meet what meets us. If we think we can shove our way through the crowd and get our way all the time—we will find the crowd often has other ideas. If we enlist each other, if we enlist ourselves to each other, then life becomes meaningful, good is possible, work gets done.

We have proven shock and awe does not work. We must try something else. We must work.

Working with others—co-labor—collaboration—is not easy. We want things easy and clear and simple. There ought to be a life’s instruction manual, a one page sheet saying how it all works. There is none. That is how it works.

With every baby born, with every increase in our population, the strands are woven ever more complexly. Soon we will meet each other at every turn. If we are to grow, become more and larger, we need to embrace—and dance!

:- Doug.

Life embraces and embraces more and more each moment. As it reaches out its tentacles it meets itself! Then embraces. It pulls in diversity and twists and turns and colors and scents and sounds and tastes.

Life embraces ever more, giving each more room and freedom and space to stretch itself. The tighter the embrace the more freedom each has.

:- Doug.

The complexity of our world is growing by the day. This is our urgency. We must address our complexity with an interweaving of peoples and imaginations. Not to untie the impossible knot—for this is our life. Life itself seeks to become ever more complex. We seek to grow with life, embracing its embrace.

:- Doug.

It might happen that together we change the world.

:- Doug.

With whom have you had a meal or coffee who is changing the world?

:- Doug.

Change may happen. Good may work. Let’s try.

:- Doug.

Who sees what is not right and is doing something?

:- Doug.

Eyes open! Eyes open! What is going on in the world?

:- Doug.

All are genius; speak of the genius in them when they are uncomfortable with the word G*d, for G*d is imagination.

:- Doug.

We are being called to expand
to whole
to become the whole universe
to be the whole Divinity!

:- Doug.

I am weaving strands of action among persons. I am weaving people together. People act. So says I AM.

:- Doug.

Who might possibly change the world? Would you please introduce us?

:- Doug.

Help people who might possibly change the world.

:- Doug.

Awakening compassion is the work. Compassion is a place.

There is no other goal. If we act out our compassion, the world changes. We change.

:- Doug.

How do we move from love of money to love?

:- Doug

It is our job to figure out how to move from a money economy to love.

:- Doug.