FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2404

The organizing principle of our times is economics. Politicians vote for jobs over all else. Churches seek to run like businesses. Children and young adults are sent off to schools to learn what they need to get better paying jobs. What if the organizing principle were, as it is for the Diné, beauty?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2403

Find more betweens.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2402

Give byss to your friend
A bottom on which
To find rest

In conversation
We
Arise larger

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2401

Ritual relies heavily on gestures. Gestures stop our words, slow them, inspect them, blow them open, all with guttural resonance. We open our mouths, our bodies, and out fly roaring bears and uncountable soft flutterbys.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2400

Conversing (and especially meeting) uses words in a way differing from the way they are used in reports and books. We use them in ways closer to bone, skeleton, core. Words have no fingers with which to grasp. In conversing and meeting, words seek to shoulder us off balance.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2399

No work of poetry is ever fully done. No work of writing. No work of living.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2398

Two squirrels playing on the tree
round and up and down across
this one waits for the other to catch up
that one bounds out to limb to startle
does the same one chase as yesterday?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2397

Frankl pointed to prisoners in the camps who became worthy of their suffering. Can you point to when you, together, became worthy of your wrestling with this conversation?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2396

Drink in these miracles of conversation: First that living beings exist. Second that these know others like them exist. Third that living beings want to sink into one another.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2395

A child’s giggles
Soften my face

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2394

One cannot be human alone.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2393

What is a story from these months you will tell years from now?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2392

People are background; persons are foreground.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2391

Once I met them our new
neighbors became knowable
friendable

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2390

But art won’t let us go
It won’t take us where we want
It will leave us dumb

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2389

I welcome you into my heart
Where do we go
Now that the door is open?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2388

Fifty years before
the bar it took
me to discover
the reason came
in hugs

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2387

Life goes on
In the next person

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2386

When I look out at my back yard
I see activity
Grass playing with light
Maple leaves catching a breeze
Sending sugars up ever down
To make woody parts
To feed roots
Roots deciding, roots reaching
Roots negotiating with mycelia
When I look at you across hot chocolate
I could see if I tried
In a thousand ways
Your essential parts at work

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2385

What have I understood of conversation that I am using?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2384

To go forth
To meet the unknown poem
With my pen tip
Is better than
To shape burger patties
Other days the other making
Is life

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2383

As I grow replete in years and start to gather a cadre of doctors around me, do I seek to make them my friends? Better do I seek to befriend? Even, do I seek to converse with them, to meet?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2382

We have in our friends more lives to live—how can we spare any more time on this one? “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

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