FootprintsintheWind.com

A Will is first for the Testatrix, second for the beneficiary. The Testatrix needs to have its flexibility: the ability to amend and change as her picture of her family and its future unfolds. A will is for the living.

:- Doug.

I am carrying loves and packages
As I walk along
If I fall
Who shall pick these up
And how
Will they love and carry
To their destinations?

:- Doug.

I help pick up the pieces
Find a home for the pieces
Where do you want the pieces
Of your life to find homes?
I am your Estate

I’m the salvager
The stitcher and mender
I’m your Estate

:- Doug.

Death might still my hand
Yet my voice might yet be heard
And the one I have heard whispering

:- Doug.

What business is it of a lawyer
Meddling with death?
To make whole, to invite healing?

:- Doug.

Death—
Ends a work
Starts a work
Life continues
Stops our tracks
Brings up histories
Makes room
Dumps good with bad
Throws us together
Raises questions of peace, justice, love
How shall we together?
Or shall we?

:- Doug.

I have a tiny law practice
From which my tentacles reach out light years
& with my friends in turn am touched
By so many other universes

:- Doug.

The With-nesses of Long-Term Care:
Disease partakes of the It
Sickness has me
Illness has us
Still, we can have the Healing

:- Doug.

You don’t need a Living Will, you need the conversation.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1132

If meaning in life
is direction of days
we can be here now
for destination is not assured
but
each now we choose our heading

We think the person with Alzheimer’s
slips away from us sadly
but could he, could she
find meaning in a happy day
wholeness in a happy moment
holding your hand?

Please pass it on.

© c 2011, 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

This is a making of my life
This is a doing of my work
This journaling, this poetry, this inviting conversing

:- Doug.

We are slaves! We are not free!

We are slaves to economic kings. To the ho-humness of our lives. To drab colors and enduring what life throws us, be it crime or illness or bureaucratic directives.

Yet neither are we better off taking charge, controlling others’ lives, for surely the controlling has us more than we have it.

Our work, life long, gritty, sweaty work, is to meet life as equal to it, to make our mark upon it as surely as it marks us.

:- Doug.

We ought to do what we can! Instead we live our lives at one-quarter throttle. There is plenty of room for gentleness—but be fully gentle. There is plenty of room for stillness—but be fully still. There is plenty of room for family—but be fully familiar. There is plenty of room for letting go—but fully let go. Touch the world and embrace—let it touch and embrace us. Live as if there would be no tomorrow—for surely it will be true. Live truly. Live fully. Live as if your life depended upon it.

Share your whole being with your family—even if one of you is in the nursing home.

:- Doug.

In law practice we so often think clients come in knowing what they want. We ask, What would you like us to do for you? They might not know, and it might be our task to help them figure that out before we can start to implement. Which ladder is good to ask before we start the climb, for sometimes it is a long way up.

:- Doug.

Poetry needs mystery
Or what’s an inkling fore?

:- Doug.

The poetry, the whole-making: these two steps need to be considered. They are part of life. We think we see all there is to see, we think the picture frame we put around our life, and the spectacles with which we view it, are all there is, but in our moments of being truthful with ourselves, we may just admit that we wish we had been given the instruction manual, that it is all a big mystery.

:- Doug.

We went to a dinner meeting about financial and estate planning last night. Why don’t people rush right out after hearing such a presentation and do something? The answer is really pretty simple: the presentation did not address their whole lives. It was, as these universally are, Just the facts, Ma’am, and there is someone in the audience who is saying, “Well, that might fit them, but not me because….” There might be all sorts of things from more facts (“I can’t afford it”), to people dynamics (“my wife would never go along”), to it not fitting the family, to it does not fit my philosophy or theology, to we are just in a different place and this pulls us in the wrong direction, does not promote healing for our family. To really help people with our presentations, we need to hear and respond to all these voices.

:- Doug.

Our very lifeblood is change.

:- Doug.

Snow is nature’s way
of saying
slow up

:- Doug.

Until we have attained the point of letting the student lead us we have not educated.

:- Doug.

Because the possible
Is larger than the ordered
We disorganize

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1131

We have not yet mastered solitude
Much less conversing
Dull we sit our hands and feet twitching
Or toss inanities clear past one another

Please pass it on.

© c 2011, 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

Seek for
The knitting—
Bones broken
Skin torn
Blood from beat of heart drained away
Child of village estranged

:- Doug.