larger view
We can take a larger view of the world; if we do, we are of the best of our species.
:- Doug.
Archive for November, 2008
unreachable desirable
If we set up a desirable
& then make it unreachable
What have we got?
This we have done with money & success
limiting each by Competition
saying this strengthens each person
seeing it does nothing of the sort
only casts out all but the few
frustrating, sending them to drop out & drugs
What is our true desirable
what is already reachable?
Collaborating cooperating helping
each other along
eating & walking & loving O to loving!
:- Doug.
cover a lot more ground with our eyes
We can cover a lot more ground
with our eyes than with our feet
even more with our imaginations
:- Doug.
Ask from either side first
Ω 1Ask one side or the other about: What leaves them feeling alive, engaged, contributing; or Their heartbreak. This helps us find that about which they care, which is their divinity. From here we move out again to purpose and action:
In worship today
In worship today
all the sounds
children fidgeting
people coughing, snoring
comings & goings
traffic in rain
all demonstrate
God in everything of life
life in everything of G0d
The rim is part of the circle
the rim is large
the swirls tell us where
:- Doug.
I have a purpose
I have a purpose
but no goal
purpose opens for me the gate
to wide expanse
without barricade
ever more is possible
:- Doug.
Why I am a lawyer
Why am I a lawyer? The reasons why today are not the same as the reasons I approached it. It is not that like the writer of Ecclesiastes I am sated, but that my pictures of reality and people and how I might help have changed. At one time it was about keeping money from the tax collector, or creating and preserving wealth for people. Now I have a wider view of wealth and a longer view of the role of Wills and particularly what people do for each other, even when they are generations apart.
How hard it is to think about, to picture, people seven generations after me. I have seen and met those two generations on. I can picture babies being born, screaming at the indignity of it all, primally asking to have their needs met. I can picture men and women working together and hope that they are working to help each other. But what their faces look like, what challenges they face, how they meet those challenges, how they center their lives—these are things difficult to see clearly.
So why am I a lawyer, today’s take? To help people communicate with other generations. To help people meet and be met by a world fundamentally wanting them. To help people get through the details so they can get to the living of life.
One long second
Human life is
Not a brief instant
But an enduring now
Plenty of time
Beyond time
To do what we can in
Large ways if we choose
Everyday ways for sure
—With capitals—
To Live, Laugh
Ever to Love
Why am I a lawyer? To work with people at the business of working with people, at finding what works, what gives life smooth handles, what encourages whole life living.
Why am I a lawyer? To help people fulfill themselves, to see their purposes larger and get on with those purposes.
Why am I a lawyer? To share myself with my friends. To give gifts of myself to others so that I might live large in and through them.
Why am I a lawyer? To bring peace to the world, to resolve irritations and irritate the resolutions, to bring the world to peace: wholeness, fullness, amplification. To encourage people to get along, to let difficulties go so they can grasp the smooth handle. To be among my friends and make their paths easier.
Why am I a lawyer? To bring love to the world: love for family, God however conceived, community. Love for all humanity, all life, all the world. Love in forms weak and strong, seen and unseen, realizing the unrealized, which is that love is what we live within.
Why am I a lawyer? To be in and of the world, helping it work. Helping us work. To conspire together—to breathe together, to bring, to a world often seen as dried out, spirit. To give each and all wings of imagining and dreaming.
There is more yet to say, and I do not know what it yet is. Law is about peace and intercourse and more, more, more.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 908
Footprints in the Windsm # 908
Obama is metaphor for me: He is a metaphor for dialogue and engagement of everyday people in the work of the community. Beyond engagement to invitation. I do not expect him to solve the country’s ills—I do not want him to do that. I want him to ask me. I want him to ask you. I want him to invite the best and brightest—those on the street, those in the factories, those in the midst of life—to help. And in that sense, his presidency, which has not even begun, is already a success: he has engaged people who never thought themselves political, he has energized a whole new group of people. True, it has only been in the electoral and political process, but that is a start, a teaser. Hopefully they will stay active. Hopefully they will care. Hopefully we will all care enough to work together on this world.
Please pass it on.
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Will we ever satisfy the needs of all?
Will the way things are ever satisfy all needs of all? No. That is the reason to keep working to fill all needs. The more filled, the more created, and these needs are the reason to go on living.
:- Doug.
Disorganization is life
Disorganization is life. Life’s business is to disorganize what it touches. Life moves; life reproduces; life reacts to its environs: in all cases life disorganizes. Community Disorganizer = Community life bringer.
:- Doug.
Communicating in Wills to seventh generation?
How can we communicate, how do we communicate, to the seventh generation, in our Wills? What do we have to transfer to them? In the seventh generation our stuff is rusted, our houses turned to dust, our footprints upon the earth no longer traced; and yet, and still: we were here. What real gift have we to give these our grandchildren?
:- Doug.
Meet meeting
A meet meeting is one precisely fitting, right and measured—commensurate—with the juice of life. It flows, it heats, it turns, it cools, it heats again.
:- Doug.
Juice of life
The juice of life:
flows through conversation
Absolutely essential then is that we meet:
meet often, meet well, meet purposely
:- Doug.
Do I see conversation and cooperation at work?
Where do I see conversation and cooperation at work in my life? The telephone—between lawyers and between businesses and between people getting things done. Coffee shops where people are selling, playing, learning, combining, intercoursing, recruiting, finding one another. Emails and blogs and social networking sites. Apparently even spam emails and pornographic commerce on the Internet. Community organizers inviting. Social entrepreneurs conspiring. Wills and Trusts communicating through the generations: letters to my grandchildren.
Doing the work is not the main focus of life. The main focus is deciding where to go, reaching agreement on what to do, inviting others to help, exciting each other, becoming part of something larger. This we all do, this we do everyday. We look to the future. We look to the past. We tend and console, we do the work of the day, we enjoy talking with one another—not just passing the day but something real is going on as well. We are meeting. We are secreting the special juice of life. In some societies we stand so close as to smell each other’s breath, each other’s life force. In others, we do it with pictures in the mind, stories, songs, games, orders, speeches, videos, memos. All this paper, all this noise, all these bytes are but carriers of the juice of life.
Once we notice that this is true, then do we possess another truth, another good, another power? Does this reach beyond the other, embrace it, hold it? Does it have the power to direct the first? Is fusion more power-releasing than fission?
What then can we say? When we see this truth, to grasp it and use it: do we have responsibility?
In this responsibility can we seek out its joy and its love?
:- Doug.
What if we recognized the power of the heart?
What if we do already know and even feel the need for other people and for collaboration? What if we found a more lively word? What if we sought out each other for what we already know we can give each other? What if we went out into the world with the expectation of finding one another?
What if we recognized the power of the heart to get work done? The broken heart?
For me the what if means I am not going to meet people with my fists clenching in anticipation, I am going with my arms reaching to embrace. It means loving people—as they are, where they are—not even wanting them to engage the world. Yes, I need to stand for what I stand for—but I can invite and hear.
Invite and hear. Listen to my own heart. Listen for love. Invite and hear.
:- Doug.
each drop a prism
This morning
on the way out
rain water was clinging
to the bottom of the clothes pole
each drop a prism of greens and
golds and browns
flashing as I walked
towards it and the sun
These are the kinds of days
in which we can dream….
:- Doug.
