FootprintsintheWind.com

“If Mother ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” is because mothers are great at socializing whatever is going on—bringing it to Us.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1126

September 11, 2011—
After 10 years, what learned?
Have we learned to go shopping?

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

Your words are as a butterfly to me, a creature of rare beauty and value. If I speak too soon, off it flies, its beauty gone with a breath.

:- Doug.

Let us move toward the level of poetry. Poetry calls our higher out, makes us stop and think, at least, What does that mean?

:- Doug.

The money part needs to be attended. This is the Joe Friday level, just the facts ma’am, and is necessary. But we need to get beyond the facts. Joe was a caricature, even when we first saw these shows. He was a good guy, trying to do the world a good turn. Yet if we stay here, we stay in kindergarten. We never grow.

:- Doug.

What is the very heart of our culture? How may we work on that heart?

If the core of this world is competition, our heart is money. Our center is empty.

Naming it goes a long way in the right direction. Misnaming the beauty and higher things in our heart as, say, emotion or other names implicitly pejorative limits their ability to do good. So a second step is to un-name higher aspects.

:- Doug.

Significance is found in the eye, not in the thing itself. So it is that ordinary touches and motions can have more than ordinary significance. Changing Mom’s diaper, cleaning her, can be ordinary or an act of love.

:- Doug.

Among the things that go on in families, there is something of more than ordinary significance.

:- Doug.

In ignorant space
The open space of not knowing
Of not knowing being
Can we courageously here attend?
Is this courage little?

:- Doug.

It’s good to be
attending you
attending you
it’s good to be

:- Doug.

He said to his father who wanted to go, maybe there’s still something for you to do. Wonder if that thought is of our age, and if rather there is still more for us to be.

:- Doug.

It’s good to be
in the presence
of an elder
to attend

:- Doug.

Humanity divinity
Closer relations
Than rhyme-ety

:- Doug.

To see wholer
To attend a wider horizon
More there is than eye can see
Yet can be seen by humanity

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1125

About me ocean
Trees stand in white pacific
I go to shovel

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

It’s teen music—it’s supposed to irritate!

:- Doug.

It’s good to be in your presence
We’re always in your presence
—It’s good to your presence to attend

:- Doug.

Elder Care Law is about the proposition that everybody has something to give, and something to receive. In giving love we receive something. Even when it seems we are being fought, there is a bit of peace hiding there somewhere, and wholeness.

The emphasis is not on the person doing the caring, but on the whole system, the ever larger nested wholes.

:- Doug.

What does it mean to gather a healthy family around an elder?

:- Doug.

The ground upon which we walk
This ground
This ground
This ground
Is Holy

:- Doug.

The songs you hear
the poetry in your mind
the beauty before your eyes:
none of this originates with you,
alone
The poetry is not mine
it grows from
my roots and tentacles within
the whole

:- Doug.

The nest you’re in
is within another
There is always a larger land about
with hills and waters and paths
to explore
Open

:- Doug.