FootprintsintheWind.com

I want profound conversation.

In open space or any other good conversation, beings are helping beings bring life to a larger whole. That’s why we see new things emerge. Lectures get one thing; people working together another; hearts and passions and commitment still more. Choose.

:- Doug.

What do I think? So far, I think: humans are flashing, sparkling; they are verb not noun, and the verbs are multitudes of synonyms for love; they are who they are in meeting and conversing and do not exist elsewhere; they are probably always in conversing, even when they do not recognize it.

In each of us are reflected all the others, met even if unmet.

:- Doug.

Who is a human being when mind and memory are out of the picture?

:- Doug.

What if what arises were the universal I? Among us we find we engender intimacy and action that touches the most personal and most in common.

:- Doug.

The I am moves.

:- Doug.

Look for the I am.

:- Doug.

We must become vulnerable to intimacy. With each other, for it is the I that lies within us, that is common to us, that is the I am there that I am there in all the living world.

The world is intimate because I am intimate.

The yard I observe through my windows I go out to, I am there, in the scene and the seeing, it is a picture of myself, and not a depiction only, but a place in which I find myself, wholly, there, even as I sit here, seeing.

It is not the words, it is the being there. This may be how G*d sees our scene.

Intimately there.

:- Doug.

We are not whom we thought we were
Nor whom we might have wanted to be
Yet here we are and we may then
Find new selves in meeting birthed

:- Doug.

Just because I know how significant meeting is does not mean I have worked out how to do it well, yet.

:- Doug.

Persons grow out of meeting: meeting-relation is the primary thing and the persons secondary and generated.

What this leads me to is that the person is not the brain, the brain is not the person, and that more fundamental than the person with whom you can hold hands is the holding itself—meeting-relation.

So we do not work on our relations with someone, our relations work on us. More profoundly still, our meetings birth us—both of us.

The most profound thing we can do is meet.

If we withhold ourselves from meeting, if we stay at the superficial or even artificial, if we we are too weary to try to meet, we cauterize ourselves from life, we die, we die, we die.

More importantly if we offer ourselves for meeting and invite others to meet, we risk being born, we may just confront life, might live!

This is something real, tangible, physical. It happens. It is backwards from how we have trained ourselves to look at the world: so it is invisible to us. We see a tree, but we do not see the seed from which it grew, nor that into which it is growing. It exists in this form today and we have tricked ourselves into thinking that is how it always was and will be. We see the river but not the streaming. We see the skin of another but miss the person inside, and especially miss the being inside which is available to birth us anew.

So it is with the person who is in the embrace of Alzheimer’s: she is stream not unchanging. She never was unchanging, but now the process has become visible to us, maybe because the direction has reversed. We can have a relation, a meeting with this being. We must be careful not to project our expectations of persona on this being in whose face we stand: this is not Mom from 15 years ago, nor even from 15 seconds ago. Ever see how emotions flit about the face of an infant? Ever see the same thing in this new old being’s face? Be here, only now. Open yourself and become vulnerable not only to this being, but to this meeting. Let the meeting shape you both. Let the stream carry you in its arms. Drop the tethers and float freely.

You risk becoming someone new. You risk finding life you did not expect. You risk in this meeting surprise.

So this is much more than remembering the person in the embrace of Alzheimer’s is a person. It is finding them a being in process, yourself a being in process, and the process—meeting—forming and birthing you both. It is more than finding who you are beyond your mind, going all the way to your genesis: meeting.

:- Doug.

What I like in my reading is meetings which carry me, progressively send us, writer and me, to explore new living territory.

:- Doug.

It is the relationship—the meeting—which is real, the genesis of self and same. Self and same are the same word. All stems from meeting, like the smile of the Cheshire cat, last to go, first to come. So too person and mind: person comes, then mind develops, then memory, then language, and in Alzheimer’s we have the wondrous gift of seeing them peel away to reveal person and love’s meeting.

:- Doug.

This is my life day
—shouldn’t they all be?—
a day in which I will live freely

:- Doug.

I may have a crinkle in my eye
but am as serious as a
slap in your face

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1001

It is autumn: tell us when you see the last robin.

Please pass it on.

© c 2010, 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

Retire? I have too much to do!

:- Doug.

We are of the ground material of the universe. But not as we appear.

:- Doug.

Are you your little finger? Are you your bank account? Are you your job? Are you your work in the world? Are you your mind?

:- Doug.

our riddle
touch our gossamer strands
thee
me
the all there is

especially when
one of us
is held in
the arms of
dementia: our brain
shriveling
away from us

:- Doug.

Our meetings have three stages fine
and we can learn to do them well:
A beginning,
A muddle,
A bringing forth

:- Doug.

What is organized that is getting in our way? Where could life be intensified? Where do we throw life away, ignore it, find it withering?

:- Doug.

We so want to organize things in our society. Hone in on a goal, something that once for all times solves the issue confronting us. Yet the issue confronting us is impossible of dissolving because it is life itself. The only way to address it is to address it from the inside: to be part of the process of renewing and intensifying life.

:- Doug.