FootprintsintheWind.com

When somebody’s heart really opens
That heart carries us all
Across the threshold

:- Doug.

What’s on the inside
& What’s on the other side
Touch each other—and us—
In a way full of wonder
Best reached are these sides
By holding hands
Hold mine?

:- Doug.

You’re afraid to meet
Because you’re jaded
By all the meetings
But as far as the miracle of birth
Is from oppressive 9th month
So far is meeting from meetings

:- Doug.

Find a way to write like your larger Self. If you have a poet within, give license to your poet.

:- Doug.

This is what I want to do—I want to take people to that deeper place, the place within and without, that thin place where they can touch our sacred.

:- Doug.

This country—any country—is about people, not ideologies. Ideologies are things. You cannot eat an ideology. An ideology will not love you. Get worked up about what matters.

:- Doug.

Is future orientation cultural? Is it best? What might be better? Would you agree the job is to place ourselves in the whole context (which means literally, plaiting together), to see what is truly here?

There are two forms of Now which our cultures work from: 1. the Little Now, or Weak Now, and 2. the Big Now, or Strong Now. The Weak Now is the one in which we live ignorant of the past and the future, or at least not caring about either. This is the Now of the drug cultures and the poverty cultures where it is all about feeling good for yourself each instant. You are getting blotto or sexually stimulated or holding your babies to your breast and this is all that exists or can ever exist. You do nothing about anything but let it wash over you. The Strong Now is one in which the past is acknowledged and where appropriate revered and the future is something upon which to work in the present; all of that, plus the pleasure and pain of the moment enter in and form one larger whole. You hear the call of the past, you hear echoes of the future, you are in the face of what is. You take in, you reflect, you act.

:- Doug.

Spirited conversation,
Spirited community

:- Doug.

We are in the center of a dark place, compassed about with a hard shell. We know there is potential—potency—in us. So we usually run about in here, sending out roots and shoots here and there and finding ourselves held in. We could meet the shell—and find beyond it a larger world, and beyond that a larger world, and more. This is where we are today: a germ of a seed, with a nourishing world about us, which we think to consume. But if we look, but if we look! There is a larger world still, and it is sometimes called heart, or another person—mother, father, spouse, child. Beyond is a larger world still: among, community, will, intention, possibility. And beyond that even larger: source, ground of being, the threshold of plenum, one. And out there within that, reaching out from there, from hearnow, are hands: our hands, working, loving, giving with abandon, repairing and perfecting the world, light-making.

:- Doug.

We can attempt to birth the baby before its time, but that’s an abortion. Either the baby dies, or is sickly. Our conversations need to become full term.

:- Doug.

How long? How long does it take to drill a well? Till you get to the fresh water. How long to meet each other?

:- Doug.

I’m thinking our problems
are because
we think they are problems

:- Doug.

Maybe we have to live with something in order to know it, even to get it to trust us! We become, we are, our question. Only then does it open to us. Touch, taste, smell, hear, move within, and only last see—get a body sense: Let’s get our feet on the ground before we start running.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1052

Be open, be empty, bring love.

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

Perception happens. When it happens from the field itself all truly shifts.

:- Doug.

Children are diversity. For us adults they bring a fresh perspective, and especially wonder. From wonder love, from wonder creativity, from wonder hope.

:- Doug.

This takes us places
Here we have not been
This we have not done
To this we are not accustomed
This our seminars lack
This our discussions avoid
This, not that, produces—
Intensity

:- Doug.

It’s not only important that we connect with one another, but how we connect: the closer to the bone the better.

:- Doug.

When you miss diversity, you do not simply miss what already exists, we miss what could be.

:- Doug.

Is among just more between, or of a different order? Here is a clue: with among you have different angles, and in fact you have the arising of angles in the first instance. Between is only back and forth; among gives you infinite choices of angles. Between you can only have receive and give; among you can be a bounce point, a catalyst, a filter, even a bystander.

:- Doug.

The Whole Grid:

:- Doug.

Ghettos are a failure of imagination. Imagination has failed those living inside and those passing it by and maybe especially the blind who come in to fix things.

Stuart Kauffman, on page 60 of Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion writes “when the diversity…is high enough and the ratio of reactions to [individuals] is high enough…. the emergence of collectively autocatalytic systems becomes a near certainty.” In my words, when we have enough diversity leading to enough reactions, the group is self creating to a near certainty.

Or the opposite: suppress the diversity and the creating of the group and therefore the individuals within it is suppressed. When all we see is hopelessness, hope dies.

Here is where the ghetto insight comes alive: because it lacks diversity by definition, it lacks the creativity, the imagination on the inside. From the outside, people do not get enough diversity to make anything new happen either.

The start of a response? Bring in diversity. Open the windows, doors and especially skylights.

:- Doug.

Groups constrain and energize their members This is evident when someone is ostracized from a group, whether through subtle or overt means. But it also works with those staying: as a question and everyone works on this and not some other. This energizing brings forth the persons from the group.

:- Doug.