FootprintsintheWind.com

People, skills, and projects.

We need to find out who cares. Then what are their skills and strongest interests? Finally figure out where they can most significantly touch the future.

:- Doug.

Ideas are no respecters of rank.

:- Doug.

Do not shrug your shoulders. There is something you can do. Get involved. Help.

:- Doug.

Conversation is the most important thing in the world
Why?
It leads to love—the most important thing in the world
Which leads to working together—the most important thing in the world
Which leads to life—the most important thing in the world

:- Doug.

Here there be life.

:- Doug.

We don’t know how it’s going to turn out. That’s not the point. The point is we were together. Here is life.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 963

We have a finely tuned
Detector of BS
Use it all the time
But did you realize
Just as finely tuned
We have a detector of
Humanity rising, rising?

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

Life helping life has more life
Life multiplies life
We are evolving more life

:- Doug.

When we are bumping, when we are conflicting with a common purpose, when we share what’s important and significant, that’s when we live. It is life we need and life we seek because it is life of which we are composed.

:- Doug.

If we are gathered in a room, milling about, there is little life there. Even if it is a marketplace, there is only slightly more life there. In between these two is a seminar with a stage, a Power Point, a speaker, and hundreds of audience members seated at tables: although they are working on a common purpose (the subject at hand) one is doing most of the work and the others are not contributing to the work at hand—they are merely receiving what the one is sending. They might be processing it, but the whole setting is weak.

On the other end of the scale Open Space is much stronger: people are all contributing to the work. Each person’s ideas, thoughts, expressions, interjections, laughs, groans and banter get thrown into the stew, and all work to make it as nourishing to the whole. Each contributes to the common work. Each person’s liveliness feeds each other’s. And if it does not feed a particular person’s life, then that person is encouraged to get up and move elsewhere, to a place where this mutual feeding can take place.

The feeding of the person comes in the very act of that person feeding the whole. This is not what I expected. It is not that you get a warm fuzzy feeling from having helped: you are directly helped by the fact that you are part of things, and that you are accepted as integral to that larger whole. Even beyond this, you are fed by the very act of feeding: you are essential, you matter.

This life which touches and helps each other is the hallmark of open space. It is getting to work. The work though is the training wheels of not just dead and dying “relationship,” but of the essence of life itself: life giving life.

:- Doug.

Life is that which helps life (so a rock, catching a wind-borne seed, sheltering it and bringing it water from its very shape and how it meets the ground, is alive). The business of life is helping life—nothing else. If we are harming life, or neither accepting nor giving help, then we are no longer alive. Life is flow. Flow helping flow.

:- Doug.

Life is
helping life

:- Doug.

Events can be centers
when two meet—an event—
centers might arise
persons are centers
centers might be persons
this is the way
conversation births persons

:- Doug.

Maybe
the whole
creates the relations
the relations create relations
and the whole

:- Doug.

The great adjective
relates
and thus
creates

:- Doug.

The whole creates the centers which create the whole!

:- Doug.

What can we do to improve the service to humanity call the practice of law, now? What can we do to improve humanity, now?

:- Doug.

More life is conceived
When life meets life
So invite!

:- Doug.

Open Space is simply people getting to work.

:- Doug.

This new does not fit the old categories. We must find new ones.

:- Doug.

The vee points toward wholeness.

:- Doug.

The river is
narrowed widened slowed
quickened
by edges branches rocks
river is edges branches rocks
as well as water
flowing is
the river
The whole—ever—more whole
ever swirling new centers
centers
including centers
birthing centers
birthing whole

:- Doug.

Comes to us
At once
Meets us
In everything
At once
That’s why
We don’t see
G*d

:- Doug.