FootprintsintheWind.com

Much as they say otherwise, people don’t want to change much. Get a bigger paycheck, finish all the tasks on that list, relax once in a while. Maybe that’s not so bad, and maybe that’s what it’s all about. But make the world over? That they leave to someone else. Is there anyone else?

:- Doug.

Conversation is love made audible—and thus, visible.

:- Doug.

If we want a better community and world, we gotta converse.

:- Doug.

What is my work in life?

:- Doug.

The French revolution was about universal rights of mankind; the revolution of our age is about universal participation.

:- Doug.

Pick any two—
Your servant hears….
Your friend hears….
Your son hears….
Your lover hears….
—without ceasing

:- Doug.

Conversation produces fire.

:- Doug.

When people converse, they risk fire.

:- Doug.

The bush that flames & is not consumed
We can be
Bringing fire to our world
Together

:- Doug.

Myriad voices
Telling stories
Whose voice?
Maybe ours
Maybe God’s
Voices unheard
Yet heard

:- Doug.

Because each star was at the center of the exploding universe it remains at the very centers while the others rush away from it. Each star. And so each person is the very center of the universe but mistakes him or her self for the very center of the universe. From center we start and to center we return. It is given to us to see there is only one center and we are it.

:- Doug.

There is a natural desire to communicate with the more, the all there is, whatever the symbol “God” represents for each of us. This back and forth that changes each of us is central to the human experience, and so we crave it from the realities larger than human. “God” can take in through this channel, but is it possible there is a larger portal? Is it possible that our methods of praying and meditating and contemplating are strangling our own hearing and opening ourselves? Can we see a larger “God” and then a larger pipe? Can we see a larger pipe and thus a larger “God?”

:- Doug.

I wonder if while crawling down my window the lady bug gets light headed.

:- Doug.

Conversation produces
Something more

:- Doug.

Do you read a book to get to the end of it, or to receive what it gives?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1104

Where do your fingers reach?
When do your ripples complete their run?
Did your footsteps begin before you?
Do they come to rest on another’s feet?
—Whose depths might your words, skipping, sound?
—The stream starting with your tears: who will cry?
—Say for yourself, for all of us:
I am porous; cosmoses flow through me
eons caress, give birth, call forth in my core
—Who will put muscle to our dream?
—Which generations will be moved?
—Where the end in time?
—When the reach in space?

Please pass it on.

© c 2011, 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

I am attracted to the idea of God being the cosmic vital flow of history: this speaks to me both of an immanent God and of a transcendent God. It says to me that God is larger than a personified object, and is subject and a force.

Hard to grasp,
difficult to find words
and yet personal:
the one we cannot get our arms around
but a child can

God is the omega that attracts us together, is purposive and generative. I do not know if that means the purpose is that I become rich or that X becomes healthy again; but I can see that it means that the world comes to revolve around love.

So then I can see a truth to the idea that we are here learning: we are learning to love so that those here in this world may love ever increasingly. We are less learning for another world to come but this one to be nurtured.

:- Doug.

If we were in a black hole, how would we know it? Are we perhaps in one, just slower moving than the ones our scientists have identified? And if so, if in fact time is itself compressing as we are being compressed, or if for the simple reason that all about us is compressing at the same rate as us, would we until the end have any idea of what was happening to us? Would we continue to live our lives, do our businesses, love and marry and have children, care for our elders, have controversies, go to court, and elect leaders, until the very end, unknowing?

:- Doug.

If we want to take conversation to a larger scale, one way would be through turning it continuous, continuity both of time and space. In time, we converse at first continually, later continuously: first three times a week, later it is the ever refreshing mist on our face from standing by the waterfall. In space, we converse with those within our ambit as we trace circles through the world of time and space; they likewise circle and converse: and in seven degrees of wheeling the whole may be infected for good.

I do not know what this means in practice; I must test it out to see. I think it means to continually open the significant conversations. I think it means to open them kindly with whomever I come across. I think it means all with an eye out for that mist on my face.

:- Doug.

Even those who will not act can converse and thus inform the gathering for the world.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1103

How would you die? With your family gathered around your bedside, holding hands, speaking quiet words, or with someone leaning over you compressing your chest, giving you injections and electric shocks?

Please pass it on.

© c 2011, 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 you don’t go to sleep to an alarm, why would you want to awaken to one?

:- Doug.

Does our way of living lead to a fuller way of living? If so, continue.

:- Doug.