FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1293

Sharing giving helpful
even loving
is how I experience the world
Enormous
doing what it wants
filled with people who help
& make it friendly
listservs for lawyers listservs for CPAs
software forums
stoplights to smooth traffic flow
court clerks supermarket checkout people
kindly older folk
surly burly road workers
delivery people
business owners
bosses employees clergy
nurses doctors butchers bakers
rains sun winds fire thunder
even if they don’t know it
helping easing
making it all work
for this there is an African word
ubuntu

Please pass it on.

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Sandy Hook is not for me a question of how to respond: we must mourn, we must keep silence, we must respect.

It is a question of what is at root, what is my role, our role in the massacre? What have we accepted into our lives, did not raise our voices about, that made this possible?

Violence in video: games, television, movies. Violence is in our culture.

Separation everywhere: failure to ask how a neighbor or acquaintance is doing, one person per car, people in a group at the restaurant with their attention buried in an electronic gadget, all in the face of more people around us every day. Seeing others as objects standing in our way, rather than the path to our own souls.

Guns and mental illness: yes, these things contributed. But why? Were we so concerned with individual desires and avoiding contact with humans who had a “condition” that we forgot our own humanity was at stake? To respond only to guns and mental illness now would be to keep our response at surface level. Can we reach deep within so we find ways to reach out, to make ourselves vulnerable, to be human with the humans around us?

What do we choose now: violence, separation, or something that contributes to our pain; or vulnerability and not knowing and humanity? Can we come home to our whole selves?

:- Doug.

What do we want to create together? In this community, and around the question of end of life caring conversations?

:- Doug.

The fullness of living
the mystery of meeting
the embrace of breath taken away
tears & toil & dancing:
these are the essence, yes?

:- Doug.

Friend, I want to stay close to you today, close to your peace and your silence. Let things flow over and around me, a pillow in the stream, sometimes a vee, sometimes an island, rock or otherwise.

:- Doug.