FootprintsintheWind.com

What I’m after is getting people actually turning to one another. In that turning I hear many whispers: relying upon each other; working together; conspiring—breathing together; hearing and being heard; shifting; creating; weaving; dancing; compost heaps heating up; divinity releasing.

:- Doug.

Guardians could mobilize churches and other human-oriented people to provide loving companionship for those who have nobody. But we act as if we have chosen simply to provide a sterile mechanism, devoid of heart and beauty. Can we give this project life and lift?

:- Doug.

We do not meet. Our meetings we design, unconsciously, to come to the point of meeting, then turn away. We use image projectors and darken the room so we do not have to look into each others’ eyes. We set our meeting rooms like stages so we only have to look at one person, and that a public mask. We start with conversations around the meal and just when they might be getting good, we interrupt and call attention to what matters little. We have no intention to mine the jewels from out of our minds and hearts. We make sterile and remove all life from what is possible for us. Despite it, some people do manage to find each other, turn to one another, and get something done. What could we do if we consciously chose to meet?

:- Doug.

To meet is to drop shields, expose our most vulnerable, tender, growing parts, and to risk mobilizing just these. We may indeed fall and die. We cannot be sure how far those immediately behind us get. But we know that if we did not head in this direction, they might not see this direction at all, would at least be delayed by just the amount of our bodies and blood and muscle and heart, and that by just that much, they have a chance.

Putting this in practice is difficult. No one has done it before, so the doors are not open to us, the paths not paved in advance. We are the ones to thrash off into the jungle, to give one set of footprints that might be a path, to meet the beasts who will confront us, try to kill us, and these beasts might just be us. Others will pave, others will build, others will design; for us to push ahead one or two more steps. And then we die, used up.

:- Doug.

Meet and mobilize. Meeting mobilizes.

:- Doug.