FootprintsintheWind.com

What does the world need today? Persons—those who know themselves and who together take responsibility for their lives and our community. Persons know the world demands them to take charge, to do something to make it better. Don’t think I said we need people. The world has plenty of people—those who bring no face, no heart, no hands, no others. A person takes the world into his or her heart. People are merely that non-existent thing—a crowd. We need persons who are real and who really do what they see in the crucible of conversation is needed. What do you see our world needs today?

:- Doug.

The music is all
Around us
The story is
The music
The tune, the harmony
We the notes
Romping and playing
The story is all
Through us
Telling
True
Larger than our ken
Calling us
Calling us

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 852

Before it’s too soon
We need to do this
We’ve never talked like this
Sort of inside out
There are so many of us together
All that’s left is to dance
All that’s right is to dance

Please pass it on.

© c 2008, 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

Where is the voice needed today?

This voice is one of bringing people together. Bringing us to an entirely new way of being in this world: together. Working on the small group level to humanize the world, to bring our resources together to solve the problem of plenty of need and plenty of people to help.

This is perhaps an age-old problem. We cannot know. But we know that we have not brought together people in this way ever before. We are growing physically closer to each other as the globe stays constant in land mass and the population grows and grows. We are seeking each other out in ever increasing groupings, both in size and numbers: families, tribes, settlements, towns, cities, states, nations, leagues and unions and compacts of nations; clubs, town halls, associations regional, national and international. We have always sought to be heard and met and understood; now the world is larger than we can solve by talking to Mommy or Daddy or a council of wise people: we desperately need to bring all our resources of field air and water, of people and perspective, of body and mind and aspiration to bear upon our situation. We are confronted with tangled opportunities which demand distributed brain power from all corners of our world—rich poor black red yellow brown white educated uneducated rural urban powerful powerless religious spiritual humanist agnostic friend foe foreign local expert generalist us them all. We need to work all together.

More importantly we need to dream all together.

:- Doug.

I must touch not heart, not head, but spirit. For me Spirit has a different sphere from either, and communicates with both. Others may decide that it meets their definition of emotion; that is their question to deal with. For me, I see elements that lift it above: we see another possible world. We do not see with our eyes. We do not see with our wishes. We see possibilities. We see connections. We see likenesses and wholeness and gestalts.

:- Doug.

We are changing how we change the world.

:- Doug.

I haven’t been holding back the good stuff—I’ve been brewing it!

:- Doug.

How do I reach into the core of people? By reaching into my core and sharing.

:- Doug.

I don’t want your heart; I don’t want your mind; I want all of you, your very core.

:- Doug.

We are Community Disorganizers—to help change the world.

:- Doug.

Connecting small groups personally is a way to spread conversations.

:- Doug.

Small groups are tools of conversation. Conscious evolution is a fruit and vegetable of conversation. Conversation is the stuff of life. Conversation and life dance, embracing: conversation produces life; life produces conversation.

:- Doug.

About Global Warming

We always wanted to control the weather—and now we do. What are we going to do about that?

:- Doug.

The word—still
The word hears
The word rips

:- Doug.

In the beginning is still the word.

:- Doug.

We come to meetings to tell people about our projects, to invite them to use our services, get healthy, but do we engage them? Do we ask their help in something bigger than spreading the word? What word do we ask people to spread? What size is that word? Is it simply to tell others about the health fair next month, or to work together to get us past the epidemic, whatever it might be?

What would be a larger sized word? And does it just involve one way flow or two way or more? How might we truly engage each other that the word becomes the Word becomes the Work becomes the community? Can this word-work make this a better community? What can we try?

I know that conversation does all this. I do not know how—here is a mystery I love to live within, discovering its powers previously covered-over. I love to live out of conversation into larger conversations. Birthing life! Birthing living!

:- Doug.

Shall we get conscious about conversation as a way to conceive new life? Do we have the nerve?

:- Doug.

In us is the capacity to—
Reveal G*d
Expand G*d
Birth G*d

:- Doug.

To converse is to love, to converse is to give life.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 851

Now, now is our time:

1. We confront a surfeit of challenges, an abundance of persons to address them, and our problem is complex: putting them together. It will take all of us.

2. We face population compression—more of us each day on a ball constant in land area—and maybe shrinking by melting ice caps and piling up our wastes. We must converse together, work together—we have not ever tried either before—or we die.

Please pass it on.

© c 2008, 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

A credo

First is G*d. All flows from here. That is saying something, since it could be viewed the other way: that G*d arises from the human. G*d is in the human to be sure, and the divine and the human inter-exist. Yet the divine is larger, has leakier edges.

G*d is relevant because we are of this community. We are seeking to grow this community, make it whole and healthy, and this entails embrace and confirmation. The dialogical is of G*d. G*d is the conversation: G*d converses and is this flow between.

We are nothing alone. We cannot exist without reference points. We cannot know ourselves until another knows us. This is why we seek love—not just something to hold, but someone to know us and hold us as just us. Neither can we be together if we do not exist as individuals. Both are needed.

Dialogue is both our existence and what we do. We are beings in our doings.

Our purpose is to stir things up. The stirrings are the living edge of us. Where we leak into others, there we create new life. This is the work of conversation: to create new life.

Dialogue then is not a mere tool, but the fountain of life. Drink from each other’s mouths and ears the stuff of life.

The between is life. The between throws off life. The between lives. The between gives life. We meet in the between. We live in the between. What we do separately is done only to serve the between. The between is life.

Giving is what feeds the creation of new life. Trusting allows us to give and to receive. Asking opens our ears to the asker, to the between, where we know without reason that we are.

The more life we give, the more we live. We are here to live this life, not to withhold it, for giving is living. The measure you give—pressed down, shaken together, overflowing—is the measure of your living. Trusting the people means we know them as others, persons: persons like us, with dreams and schemes and fears and pains, with the desire to make things better, to live. To live! It is what each and every one of us wants and needs. We can trust that need, and all that works towards that, when persons are trusted. Asking is the way—into the between. It creates relationship, it drops shields against trust, it leads to giving each to the others. Here is life. The work of conversation is approached through these three doors. The working of conversation is life. This living creates life.

The work of conversation is creating life.

This is what we are about.

:- Doug.

People are busy. We must fit our call on their time to their busy lives, or we will not get the numbers nor quality we need. Thus goes our thinking and with it the opportunity to make the change we want.

There is a volunteer emergency guardians project that demands volunteers go through a 40 hour training over 5 weeks before they can serve. The schedule demands of them 2 evenings a week plus two half day Saturdays. They have enthusiastic people who do their work for years, and only need word of mouth to attract good, caring people.

It is commitment we need. When we set our sights on numbers, we are looking for quick answers, and these dissipate as quickly. If we get committed people, they will get the numbers we need. They will be the seed for the important harvest. That seed takes the time it takes to germinate. Forcing deforms, kills. Real change needs to do its work.

The question is just how important we think our church, community or project is? What level of importance do we place upon it? If it is of low importance compared with the other claims on people’s time, then we are right to fit around their free time. If we are only after numbers and not commitment we must avoid any hint of sacrifice. Do we hold this dream in such low esteem?

:- Doug.

G*d is the one…who wants all of you.

:- Doug.