FootprintsintheWind.com

We are caught in the age-old quandary—how do I do my calling and still eat? So we put the emphasis on the wrong syllable and choose to go after eating. Being a good steward means doing our work in the world first and the rest comes second. People have need of us. They have need of the best of us.

:- Doug.

Domestication of our
Imagination is our
Incarceration

:- Doug.

That is the issue is it not
Will we keep doing daily things that here us got
Or do the things that need be done—
To meet our neighbor, world & G*d
Do we work for good & true & right
That which calls us to our light
Or that which earns a buck?
To either god we sacrifice our life
This is the human issue age to age
Do we housebreak, domesticate
What would have been our higher way?

:- Doug.

To live inside God’s imagination
Is the only possibility
Until we see we are invited
to step out beyond our own
We who are afraid to do little
of what our own imagination offers

:- Doug.

There is a place in conversing where you and they cease all separateness and become one moving. This is where we turn the world.

:- Doug.

This conversing is of the gods!

:- Doug.

As poetry is the work of moving, so conversing’s work is moving.

:- Doug.

You wait in vain who wait for power people
To accept your invitations
Invite without ceasing
Invite the voices unheard
Invite the ones on our margins
Invite those who share the care
Invite & keep moving
& if you’re moving well
Some in power will accept
& come to what is now Our party
You wait in vain who wait for power people
Cede them no veto
Invite without ceasing

:- Doug.

In conversing
divinity

:- Doug.

I offer you a world new
of your own making

:- Doug.

Here is my offer. What’s your invitation?

:- Doug.

There is a magic here, here inside in our imaginings and our poetics and our wisdom. Will we set it free? Will we remain timid in its face? Can we just try once?

:- Doug.

Divinity converses:
not with us,
but in our conversings

Listen beyond the words
to the tune
of our
conver-sings

:- Doug.

I offer you this truth, that in between us is a truth, hidden in a veil and an enigma that bears the terrible name of work. And that truth is that we have available to us divinity which is imagining and creating a new reality not connected with our old.

:- Doug.

Poetry to me is the work of telling the truth, telling the seeing. Maybe it is the pointing to the seeing, to the thing seen.

:- Doug.

Together we can generate new reality.

:- Doug.

Who are the people I’m among? For it is here that I must work.

:- Doug.

I offer you generative new reality.

:- Doug.

It’s not so much a magic question we need to ask, but to seek out the person within the person, the genius, the wise one, the one touched by the larger than life. So it is a matter of approaching kindly, stumblingly if that’s the way it comes out, but with the desire to find something, the something of great value in this one.

:- Doug.

If I knew I were divine, how would I engage people in conversation? I would ask them questions to help them see their divinity, their creativity. I would ask them how they would change the world if they could. I would ask them what they could do today to help.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 948

We do not so much have divinity within us but the other way round.

The mystic used to search within for divine forces. No more! For the mystic is within the divine. The creative unfolding whole, is conversation, is divinity working; the mystic has a role—standing in the face giving, accepting offers, extending invitations, helping the whole well unfold. The mystic is midwife: witness to blood and screams, holding hands, waiting, cutting cords, cleaning up, sharing, smiling, crying, resting. All midwife the whole: the whole births.

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

Conversationally divine we are.

:- Doug.

If you knew you were divine, had divinity’s message in you (or had won the Nobel peace prize), what would you ask people? How would you engage them in conversation?

:- Doug.