FootprintsintheWind.com

Some people like conflict, want to beat down other people. This kind of conflict, being meaningless, needs to be avoided. Or called out for what it is, but that is a different sort of conflict—it is conflict about conflict for fight’s sake.

:- Doug.

Conflict sometimes calls us to stand up for something. We should not shrink from this kind of conflict.

:- Doug.

Life sometimes does not tell us it is an emergency until we are into it.

:- Doug.

Real life’s pay off is in stretching.

:- Doug.

The failure of justice is the swelling of fear.

:- Doug.

We’re all by natural inclination conservative—expending as few resources and energy as possible to get what we want. And we are all at heart liberal—generous and loving of friend and stranger and those in need. This is psychological inertia: preserving what we want to own; keeping in motion all that life gives us.

:- Doug.

Just be present for: your self, your family, your friends, those near you, G*d.

:- Doug.

Whole-making gives us the answer to “Saved for what?” It tells us that whole people have a work to do, to make the world better. That is what we are saved for—for a work that is beyond our little selves. Saved is a word that easily pulls us away from the world, while Whole pulls us back in, for a greater good. If you are saved, you are on your way to whole and you make yourself more whole by making others and the world more whole.

:- Doug.

We don’t really want to attain a goal; we want to attain the limit.

:- Doug.

We can get tight in the little ball of Oh poor me, I sacrifice all day long and never get any thanks. Well, thanks is not the name of the work we are doing, nor is sacrifice. What it is is moving from our smaller to our larger, out into community, into meeting, into life itself. Thus, work in community disorganizing is precisely in the center of this work.

:- Doug.

Did Jesus die for our sins? Yes, for our separations, our fighting against love, our wanting to be just ourselves, little and tight within a wad, rather than as large as we can be.

:- Doug.

Estrangement is a word that fits very well what has been going on in our country politically in the last few years.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1108

Generations ago, in a land foreign to us, lived a man with his wife and three children, 2 boys and a girl. Their lives were not easy. It was difficult work planting on and gathering from their land barely enough to eat. But the man had managed, with the help of his wife and sons and daughter, to build a small house. Sparse it was and rude, but they were thankful for the shelter from the weather.

One day came a man from another land. He did not speak the first man’s language. The new man had friends like him, and they were just a little stronger of will and more in number than the man and his wife and three children. The new man pushed the family out of the house, and put them to work for him, growing his crops and tending his cows and pigs and chickens.

One by one, the three children left the land as they became old enough to see what was happening. The wife died, and the man’s heart broke open. He too died a few years later. No one knows what happened to their bones.

Seven or eight or eleven generations passed. A son of a descendant of one of the three children chanced upon a record of what happened. He went to the lands of his grandfather, but was not allowed on the land. He brought suit against the descendants of the new man, for they were still living on the land, and had built factories and shopping centers there, as well.

Who should be entitled to this land? Whose land is it? Who should be allowed to visit this land? How would you decide the lawsuit?

You, you children of Europe, you whose parents came from Spain and England and France and Germany and Ireland! Who is entitled to walk among you, to own land here and be your neighbor, to have a right to cross the borders you have established? Who was here first? Those from South of your border? Those in the reservations you have placed them on? Whose fathers and mothers have been nourished by this land, been children of it? Who are the original people?

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

In this sense, Jesus was dying for us all: to show us how far a human can go, aspirationally can go, in giving all for a larger humanity. We are all we can be when we give all we can possess for others.

:- Doug.

There is something more!

We don’t have to stay stuck in Dollars and Numbers and to do lists. There is beauty and truth and goodness; there is something which pulls us upward and toward others.

:- Doug.

Give your very all to find your very all.

:- Doug.

I’m a lawyer-person who helps people extend their touch beyond the reach of their own hands and times. In truth I simply remind them they have this power and encourage them to use it.

:- Doug.

If these are things which excite you, you don’t seem very enthused.

:- Doug.

I’m looking for three dimensional people. Who wants to talk to a sheet of paper?

:- Doug.

Driving, I was trying to get a sense of being in the presence of the always present holy, but the greyness of the day was the overarching thing for me. My attitude seemed grey, too. I saw some beautiful yellow trees, and some beauty in some one other thing (don’t remember what, just now), and those were a reminder of holiness.

It may be that I am expecting too much—I am expecting to fly or feel at home or something, and I just feel normal. Well, normal is holy too. I do not have to be ecstatic to live a particular day. I can find the holy in the meetings of the day—had a good one with my barber, about nothing of much significance, so that too was holy, sacred.

:- Doug.

That’s a horsefly of a different color!

:- Doug.

I choose to not detach God from the world.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1107

Are you seeing any patterns?

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