Turning is hot, sweaty, heavy work. Pitchfork in to the compost, lift, let in air and moisture. Difficult too: because we are not done when we are done, but have to wait for the little people (the organisms and bugs and chemicals in the mix) to do their work. While we go on to other things, sleep and cogitate: Working together, and sometimes we see the others.
:- Doug.
We live in a money-people continuum. It is not (nothing in this world is) is so much an opposition as a stretching toward one pole or the other. And it is so entangled that one person cannot hope to untangle it, help it make sense—but all of us working on it can. That is our hope.
Opposition suggests our hope is in working together, collaboration, Bernie DeKoven‘s coliberation. Turning together.
The money-people continuum tugs each way. Provide for my family and help others. I have little enough and my heart goes out. That problem seems far away and with little effort I could help. It will take extra effort to help and I will know I helped. I don’t have the answers and I have some of the answers. Tug here, tug there. Energy spent, energy generated. Love here, love there.
:- Doug.
Don’t concentrate on looking for little things to solve, things where there might be money for yourself, things where the work is simple. Look for the complex, the things others shy away from, the things you might want to shy away from. Look not for the technical issues, but for the heart and future questions.
:- Doug.
Interview your elders: What is life about? What does it mean to be an elder to your tribe, to do the work of eldering?
:- Doug.
Law is a complex weave of possibilities, risks, costs, feelings, interests, people, and vagaries, among other threads. It is not therefore a vending machine: money in/product out.
:- Doug.
What’s the most important thing I can make happen in the world? What biggest thing can I invite into the world? What’s the most important conversation?
:- Doug.
We have laughed about meeting our enemy and finding that “he is us.” We laugh because we recognize the truth. So my work—our work—is culture change. We believe so many things that are not true we must start imagining things that seem impossible. Culture change is our work. Culture change is my work.
:- Doug.
Do just one big thing every day—something to make the world bigger, more open, more engaged, more creative. Don’t leave your plow standing at the edge—get in the field and plow! Turn over one row, or at least one clod!
:- Doug.
We hold in our society an often unstated assumption that wealth is the ultimate good. Yet another assumption is possible and possibly better, that good is the ultimate wealth.
:- Doug.
We need, we need, to see the divinity, the holiness, of each other. We need to open to each other. We need to grow. When we shrivel others, we shrivel the world, the future, our grandchildren’s future.
:- Doug.
If you would see me
You would see me differently
Said Jesus, Because your glasses are different now
:- Doug.
Nor poems of logic
Nor of persuasion
I write reality
What is there
For us all to see
:- Doug.
Two lovers lost in each other’s eyes
Worship is loving divinity
Worship is in sitting together
:- Doug.
We are our world. We are also our divinity. My image of divinity currently seems to be an all pervading presence. We are in and of divinity. But more than that, divinity is all there is. Divinity is not a “he” who is our “Nobodaddy,” our Daddy Warbucks, our personal magician, puppet, nor puppet-master. Divinity is powerless as Bonhoeffer says God is: suffering with us. Always with us. Responding. Not solving, but with us, for us. With us is more powerful than power.
Hear you in this the first shall be last, the meek shall inherit the earth?
:- Doug.
Who is stealing from the poor? The Bible that the thieves spout so fluidly convicts them, but they think it speaks of someone else.
It goes beyond buying sweat-shop athletic shoes: it invades our oil infested lives. We buy beef from Argentina: how did it get here? The fertilizer that fed its feed, of how much oil was it made? We complain about the cost of gasoline for our vehicles, yet our government subsidizes the oil companies who pay off the sultans who stole the oil from their own poor. We buy strawberries from California, yet grow good ones here: how much oil is in your strawberries?
The world is entangled, and so it is hard to figure out what comes from poor folks’ oil lands and how much was our own labor and ingenuity. But that fact convicts us too: we cannot as easily as we do dismiss as not us the Muslim dying of hunger in an open sewer in Indonesia; we cannot so easily speak of a terrorist around the world when we saw our own police terrorize our poor and hungry in New Orleans…and we did nothing.
We are an entangled, engaged, related world. None of us is separate. The way to open our hearts is to open our minds, our eyes, our front doors, and go out and meet the people who with us are our world.
:- Doug.
The question is
Do we think with our closed wallets
or our open hearts?
:- Doug.
Giving attention
That’s what meditation is
Contemplation too
Beyond paying: expecting
No return
Going beyond returning
Walking where the stream flows
Watching, giving attention
There is always
Something worth attending
Something beyond
:- Doug.
Why is your first action
To make me into villain
Talk to others
Gather ammunition
Rev up your anger
When you could have
conversed with me
& set it all right?
Is it our rugged individual times
Have we trained ourselves
To see antagonists all around?
:- Doug.
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