FootprintsintheWind.com

I want to find my ways to gentle strength and strong gentleness.

:- Doug.

The question is poetry: poein, to work, to make. What are we about, but to work? We are not here just to lay and look at the clouds and to enjoy the beauty all about us. But we are here to do that! We are here to feed each other, we are part of each other. We are not just social in the common understanding of that term, but we are here to help each other live! People deserve to live. The soft stuff needs to be seen as the strong stuff. The soft stuff needs to be strongly held forth; the strong stuff needs to be known as gentle. Weakness cannot afford to be soft: only strength knows to be gentle is within its range.

:- Doug.

Connecting meaningfully
They saw their power
But did not quite grasp it
Unique persons appreciated
In all their vulnerability
And this became their strength
A group of school board candidates
Who could be competing—
Collaborating: searching for what matters
—and Who—seeing bits
Of each others’ worlds
In spite of their role—growing

:- Doug.

Cars at night on a country road
—Are they chasing their lights
Or being reeled in?

:- Doug.

Be soft about the strong stuff
Strong about the soft stuff

:- Doug.

Medicalizing our drug culture.

I wonder about how we can keep from falling off the other side of that? We are such a drug culture—our doctors seem mainly pill prescribers because that is how they have been enculturated by the drug companies. How can we trust that part of society to get us out of drug dependence?

On the other hand, they have the capacity to figure it out. Will they give us other drugs, worse than the first?

The answer I think involves all of society. We have reacted to the fear raised in the white middle class culture by pictures of crime and poverty associated with drugs. If instead we see this as victimizing a whole segment of our population, particularly those who are poor, we can begin to work on the problem. Why drugs? ought to be the question. Why do people want the drugs in the first place? It is not enough to say the high makes them feel powerful or gives escape from life: we need then to ask Why do they feel powerless? From what do they need to escape? If we can remove the desire for drugs then we make progress.

That’s why medicalizing gets us thinking in a better direction. It might not be the best direction. But it is better than deciding to lock up every black and brown baby at birth. If we get people medical help to free themselves from the demons, if we set caring people to helping them sort out their lives and find their upward yearning, if we help people find a way out and up, then we are on a much better path.

It is not bleeding heart to read the statistics about violence in poor neighborhoods. It is realistic to look at the statistics about drug related crimes and see whether we are making progress. It is truth telling to notice what we do when we drive down streets where crack heads and drug dealers do their thing: lock our doors, roll up our windows, look straight ahead. Why? Does this fear speak? Do we have enough cops to store all these people? Do we have enough prisons, enough courts? Do our prisons graduate more upstanding citizens or more criminals?

If what we are doing does not work, if our response is to try more of the same, what does that say about our sanity?

Is it time to pay attention here?

:- Doug.

To me
G*d is the organizing
In self-organizing
The dis
In Disorganizing
The active attractive
Force—Love

:- Doug.

Where do you want your words to come from?

:- Doug.

Conversation
Stepping above

:- Doug.

Beyond the prose
Life is poetry

:- Doug.

Hear
Speak
Unfinished
G*d

:- Doug.

HEART
__ART: The art of heart
HEAR_: Is to hear
_EAR_: Is its metaphor
_EA__: Singular
__AR_: Plural
__A__: One

:- Doug.

The aim of the game
Is love

:- Doug.

No! No! No!
Don’t fight me
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Let us reach for life
Touch! Touch! Touch!
Engendering, welcoming, receiving
Invite! Invite! Invite!
Let us be
Connect! Connect! Connect!
More
Hear! Hear! Hear!
In presence
Open! Open! Open!

:- Doug.

Let’s turn our American drive for quantity toward quality: Let’s continue to reach, but beyond consumption toward enhancing life.

:- Doug.

Perhaps we need to even think about influencing and inventing the way the world is going, not just preparing kids for a 20th century job, or even one the “experts” predict will exist when they graduate.

Even beyond that, what we need is not just collaboration at the board and administration level: we need it at the child level. The scholars need to figure out ways to cooperate and work together, and invent the future together, because if they don’t they will continue to live in a segregated world, will propagate wars and disease and famine and dangerous weather.

Even beyond that, our children need to learn how to find out what is the highest and best and to aim for that. We need aspirational education: we need to teach children, no we need to encourage children, to create good, true, and beautiful worlds. If our children find out how to dream or envision, humans as a species can flourish. We are at the extinction/thriving crossroads where we can choose.

:- Doug.

What do we want? What do we value? What’s most dear? What is our highest and best?

:- Doug.

Thrumma, thrumma
Humma, Humma
Let me hear
The beat
Let me feel
The rhythm
Let me sing
The melody
Le me
Connect
Engage
Be part

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 892

True meeting requires spontaneity, actually meeting, willingly accepting who and what is in front of you and meeting the challenge with what arises.

I saw meeting as a way of life, spontaneously seeing what emerges, curious, loving, excitedly and expectantly watching, waiting, clasping, sending heart forth to heart.

This is an easy way, like telling a child a bedtime story (which is the genesis of my thinking), and being alert for escape routes and new places to go, people and animals to meet, life to greet, flying to enjoy. Stay, play! Explore, but even bigger than explore. Beyond explore. Life is to enjoy beyond explore, to play, to see what is possible!

I am saddened when people do not want to come out and play. What can we make? Is that all? Is there more? There is always more! With people there is always more, for we are divinely creative. Yes?

Invite play.

Come out and play! Come and play! Come play! Play!

Here is a bridge, there a cloud, the shade of a tree, the lapping of water, a hole in the ground. Here is story, our story, a larger story. Here are the makings! It is safe. It is home. It is ours to create!

Wow! Life is about playing! Who woulda thunkt?

Please pass it on.

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Think whimsically!

:- Doug.

Community makes us whole.

:- Doug.

If you are a child of G*d, then you have G*d’s seed planted in you. How does it appear in you? Do you honor it, cultivate it, pay attention?

:- Doug.

Poetry is about experiencing life from the inside. For me, the inside includes other people, conversing, inter-coursing.

Poetry is about the inside and the inter-side.

This insight helps me see that my work is not moving the group along, not moving to any place, but seeing what life there is to be heard, now, what life can be teased out into the open.

What I long for is to be reflective in public, to carry the sensing of these pages into inter-course, to evoke when with others.

It partakes of dream, of doing, of staying with people where they are. I may want to take them deeper, but they are where they are. Mine is only to observe and report and stay.

So stay is strong and profound. Stay with the inter-side. Stay.

:- Doug.