FootprintsintheWind.com

Uncertainty is the friend I never liked
Surprise an unruly breaker of my plans
Until I saw freedom, possibility, creativity
Planck’s constant is
Just enough surprise

:- Doug.

Dear young grandchild of mine, what do you see when you watch yourself? How do you move through life—quickly, questioningly, thoughtfully?

:- Doug.

What is the presence of this open space? What energy, moving, geometry?

:- Doug.

How then shall we serve…in the way that uses our true gifts?

:- Doug.

In inviting and freeing and opening: for inviting is horizontal, freeing is vertical, and opening creates the plenum and asks us to fill it.

:- Doug.

All the energy in the universe. It must exist here as it exists elsewhere. The space we look through just teeming with energy and possibility. Emerging, arising each instant. Full of dark energy and dark matter. How can this not be exciting?

:- Doug.

Each instant a new universe created! Boiling up. Free to move in any directions. Indeterminate. Not pre-assigned to any state at any time.

:- Doug.

This beautiful day
I am sacrificing to
Get a client to tomorrow
It is all as it
Ought to be
Perhaps I can now
And again glance its way

:- Doug.

A vision
& not a proof
have I
& it
has me

:- Doug.

If you die today
And then are revived
How would you now see?

:- Doug.

What used to frustrate me—my jumping-around mind—now calms me, for I find I can let the jumping go, can observe it, see beyond it.

:- Doug.

You have a choice. You can choose to be loving and generous. Which did you just choose?

:- Doug.

How many years in my life is less important than how many of those are meaningful. I get to define meaningful. Of course, I would like more meaningful years.

:- Doug.

Why do you want to retire? Some people retire because they find no or little meaning in their jobs.

:- Doug.

What areas of your life hold for you the most meaning?

:- Doug.

Yes, people should have the right to create new conveniences and businesses. Are they the only ones we should help? Might they actually be able to help themselves and need less of our help? Might they have a responsibility to share?

:- Doug.

What of this notion that we hold that people of money are worth more as humans than those with little? Does not that baby have the right to live: to be supported even though she does not bring in any income? What of the aged in failing health—does he have the right to sufficient food, clothing, medicines, shelter? What are the rights we have to life simply because we are exemplars of life itself?

:- Doug.

The picture I am seeing is based on Meg Wheatley’s hope arising from the midst of people sharing their pain: what if we regularly convened truth and reconciliation commissions in our communities? What if people publicly told their pain? What if those who caused the pain were invited, and invited to share their own pain? What if people revealed their humanity in their tears? Could this start conversations of hope? Surely it is not hope we are after but setting to work…together?

:- Doug.

Can we suggest truth and reconciliation between: doctors and elders? Rich and poor? Hospitals and Medicare beneficiaries?

:- Doug.

Who commissions our Truth and Reconciliation Commission? We can.

:- Doug.

If we define successful and failing—even good and bad—solely in economic terms the majority of us we condemn. There is no inherent wrong in sharing wealth. And much inherent right. There might be an inherent human right to a certain economic livelihood.

:- Doug.

Our divisions in politics, religions, race, whatever, wound us much as if we were part of genocide. Could we reconcile as well as the South Africans?

:- Doug.

Genius is more readily recognized in the unschooled because unexpected. The person of learning trusts less in himself or herself its flashes.

Even more so transcendent moments intruding upon our ordinary days go unseen because any clear night of the year we could look up and see the stars.

:- Doug.