FootprintsintheWind.com

Our impending death
Carries with it all
Life, grief, hope, action, dying
It touches the quick
Of our existence on this earth
We can touch others
We can push them to help them
We need to try almost anything
Find tears
A dying whisper tells the life
Modern is an excuse
To avoid being real
There is only one I,
One life, one shining
Tears shine

:- Doug.

Sadness knows
Joy is not separate
Sadness embraces Joy

:- Doug.

Life is good
Sneezing is grand
Loving is wonderful

:- Doug.

Ahh, Friend
Rhythm, Ground
Sadness, Wholeness
Fullness, Completeness
Allness
Mine

:- Doug.

This is about intensifying life. If we have eyes to see: life is between, among us. It continues even if one dies. One cannot have life alone. Could this be true? So to intensify means meeting, intensifying at least one other.

:- Doug.

To what will we give our hearts? This is a more profound question than it might seem—it is so central, so coeur. Where is my heart wanting to give itself? For in giving we intensify our hearts.

:- Doug.

Move into the rhythm
listen for the beat of life

:- Doug.

Where did we humans get the idea of straight lines, rectangles and triangles? Surely there are none of these in nature: they seem to be human constructs.

:- Doug.

Here is what was missing in the angry screaming sessions they called town hall meetings this summer: people did not think things could be better. They did not work toward that. They merely clung, screaming, to their little twig. This is probably not even good conservative philosophy. But if we start from the premise that we can make things better, there is hope, and we are already starting up the hill and out of the slough.

:- Doug.

We can make things better.

:- Doug.

Open Space: The luxury of people who really care and time to work on something that matters to you.

Can a need be a luxury? This is something we don’t get often, but truly need. We need it if we want the world to be better.

:- Doug.

The pond seems glassy, the few leaves on the little maple are still hanging on, little air is moving. Cool, damp and grey. A loan bird lands in the far ask tree, then moves off to the West.

:- Doug.

Come to me, life
pass me by or
carry me in your current of
the all there is
I wish to strain not
to find thee
babies smiles, traffic loud
allow, allow
float with

:- Doug.

Fifteen words
Where is life in this?
What most needs intensifying?
Who is here?
Will you?
Now?

:- Doug.

Of what are we conscious if we are no longer burdened by memory or even mind? Is there more to see? Have we asked people who have gone before us?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1004

I’m inviting people to a larger view of the world and their role in it.

Our view of the world is consumerist: we see our role as buying and consuming things so that others might also consume things. This is the highest and best use of humans in our secular belief system in the early 21st Century. What I am inviting people to is foreign to this belief system: instead of eating up our resources and grinding up people, let us see that we are better about giving ourselves to each other. Out not in. Giving not eating.

Our task is to meet each other and get to work: get to work repairing and making whole the world. At any time, we can only be part of what we might unfold, and yet we are not even the part we could be. So let’s invite people to dive in, to give their highest and best—their imaginations and blood—to the task of engaging each other in our world, to the task of engaging the best of each of us.

Please pass it on.

© c 2010, 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

Listen to see: fullness.

:- Doug.

Get busy with what is most deeply in our hearts and go from there.

What is most deeply in your heart? What would you like for our world?

:- Doug.

We are this One. Our task is to live this One into more personal-ness, more fullness.

:- Doug.

What is most deeply in our hearts is what adds fullness to the world, fullness to life.

:- Doug.

Move into the moment—move toward the plenum.

:- Doug.

Open space is committee work with some differences: it is done intensively, in compressed time; the people there are the ones doing the committing.

:- Doug.

Trying to get ahead of another, say in traffic, and much competition is anti-one and therefore anti-life.

:- Doug.