FootprintsintheWind.com

The purpose of jumping into life is to find ourselves as intelligent & excellent & creative. We have a fear of dreaming our higher selves—and here is our chance!

:- Doug.

We’re activating a different part of ourselves from when we’re looking for work or a meal—a higher part—giving, altruistic, connected with a common humanity.

:- Doug.

Goals are appropriate for ordering our tasks but not our lives. Nor probably yet our days of which our lives are made.

:- Doug.

The Postal Service is going the wrong way on energy usage: reducing deliveries and encouraging the use of post offices increases the trips made to get the mail from point A to point B. Driving from mailbox to mailbox uses less oil than several hundred people each driving several miles to the post office to pick up their mail.

:- Doug.

Why do we suppose we have to be spoken at to get a project done, to figure out what we’re about as a group, to get closer to God?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 951

The frog says to itself: Oh! There is danger coming! The only escape is hyper-space mode. Here I go! Whew! Never know where I will be when I come out of hyper-space, it’s always someplace new and unexpected. But out of range of the danger.

Please pass it on.

© c 2009, 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

You have something in you, you together, that you are not seeing. It is divine, this something, and it is released not in one person, but in between and among you. This something shows itself in passion and energy and living full tilt, giving all you’ve got, using you up, nothing left over, nothing held back, using you up!

:- Doug.

There is a flow to life. It is not the woo-woo of people who say that you will attract something. It is that life wants to well up in you. When you are a tight little ball, only reaching out to grab for yourself, you are dead and dying. Reaching out to give another person what they want and need as a human turns you into one, too, brings you alive.

Then you see things you could never have seen before. Then you feel things. Life opens its flower in your hand.

:- Doug.

This is the meaning of love: sticking your neck out for another. For nothing in return: just for being human. Just in return for all that people have done for you, whether you see it or not. Just to be human, to show that you are part of the family.

:- Doug.

Here is the offer: give. Give together. Hear each other. Share your story. Be vulnerable. Dare unknowing going. Life will flow through you. Life you can’t understand if you are thinking only about your next meal and how hungry you are. This is about being part of the whole, the larger whole.

:- Doug.

Do the work, then you are paid. Giving comes first.

:- Doug.

I see not sacrifice, not devotion, but total abandon, total throwing one’s entrails into life. There is no other way. Holding back is holding back from yourself and those you love: it is holding back of your whole self.

That is all.

:- Doug.

Only here, only hear.

:- Doug.

What appears solid is not. The earth is made of atoms and the atoms of empty space—and spinning. Here you take your solid stand—and turn to dust. Our best choice is to move, ever move: touch and love. What appears without substance is our substance.

:- Doug.

Pull your hand out of the bucket of water and look what a hole you left, people say, to challenge our egos. Still, beyond ego, beyond water standing in lakes, water streams: here put your hand in and you have forever changed the flow, remade the stream, and your little effort changes all.

:- Doug.

Some see us as Newtonian particles: separate and acting upon and acted upon, wound up and left to run down. Others see us as Quantum flow, moving even those things we cannot touch. Both pictures are true, for one is body and the other spirit to our minds and hearts. We can take hand to them each and both, and become wholer.

:- Doug.

All is flow, jump in! Paddle! Are you simply passenger carried screamingly along, or do you paddle? Paddlers have to work together or they go in circles and get carried where they do not wish, maybe dumped in the drink!

:- Doug.

If we see the world as moving, and movings of movings, and bumping and spinning and flowing, it gives a new view on the idea of unfolding: each is unfolding, not something from ages foreordained, but a welling up, and burgeoning out, and we all are part of the flow, and we all affect it. Some affect it by being passively part of the flow, some by being adjectives, some by being verbs, and some by fighting the flow, being disturbances and pillows and vees in the current, hanging up and crashing and diverting others flowing by.

I like to sit in the back of the canoe and steer in subtle ways.

Peter Senge says we do our most effective work by subtly waiting for the right moment when we know what the world needs us to do. And yet I think we need to meet it with our best strokes: when we do not just passively receive, but impart our own little J-stroke nudge on the paddle.

We have met the current and it is us.

:- Doug.

Life is aflow
I’m inviting you to jump in
And see what you can do

:- Doug.

In what direction is your life moving?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 950

I have no call to be reasonable. My call is to the spirit, to the experience of life that precedes cognition and separation from life and others. My call is to engage people in the life of divinity which exists fully between and among people.

My call is “urgently out beyond the ordinary and the reasonable,” to use Brueggemann’s phrase. These have gotten us where we are, which is ordinary and reasonable, but we need to go to a new place. The place we are is full of pain.

What pain? The pain of being unemployed or underemployed. The pain of being not heard. The pain of being invisible.

What new place? You have the power to make the world better, to turn the world just a bit toward kindness and connecting and moving.

Please pass it on.

© c 2009, 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

If the world is all moving
(And it is)
Then it is we together
So conversation is all there is
& being medium is none there is
And you, little gnat, how you swirl your wings
Does cause earthquakes a world away

:- Doug.

Life is not about sacrifice. It is about living without a sense of me, with only a sense of we—it is our world, our flow, and we have our all to give. We are part of the funfolding. Not because it was there to unfold but because how we turn the cloth causes unfolding just so.

:- Doug.