Your special opportunity as a friend
Your special opportunity as a friend is to invite deeper conversations, to bring up the questions others are tiptoeing around, to name the elephant in the room…and then to take people to love.
:- Doug.
Archive for May, 2012
First years, last years
What’s the same for first years and last are soft food, help with walking, incontinence. Might a difference be in our rhythms? Infants are constantly going, their arms and legs and faces a continual moving picture. Oldsters seem to be learning to slow, to love, to ponder.
:- Doug.
You can bring hope
When people are in a tizzy, you can bring a listening ear. You can raise their sights. When we are surrounded by mud, it is hard to lift our eyes and see that the sun is shining, that there are alternatives. You can bring the hope of alternatives as your act of love, as your act of service, simply by asking the question about alternatives.
:- Doug.
Your most profound question as an act of service
What is the most profound question you could ask yourself as you think about end of life? How is that an act of service?
:- Doug.
The last three days:
The last three days: Who is there? What is the work you are doing? Is it all about you, or are you eldering your children and grandchildren?
:- Doug.
The question that heals:
What are your areas of discomfort? “What ails thee?” This is the question that heals.
:- Doug.
“They know what I want.”
You cannot know what you want until you meet it in conversation. Here you discover and form. “They know what I want” can be avoidance of the questions.
:- Doug.
Introduce people to their anomolies
My work is to introduce to people their anomalies. Once identified they can remove the burr or make it more comfortable. Perhaps a better word is surprises, or dissonances. How do we find these anomalies? Be ever alert? Where you stumble is your gift? Hold up what I have seen they have not? By naming expectations?
:- Doug.
If you think you might die someday….
If you think you might die some day, what are you willing to do to make that better for your children and grandchildren? When?
:- Doug.
Magic and Mystery
Magic answers to the call of your voice; Mystery answers only to its own. If your religion is magic, then you call upon your god as your servant; if what is holy to you is a mystery, it is sovereign in itself.
:- Doug.
When we are dying, how can we help our family?
When we are dying, what can we do to help our family? What does my death teach them? My life? How profound can we be for them?
:- Doug.
To speak of a right to die is silly
To speak of a right to die is silly—as if we were not all going to die. The right we want is the right to the kind of death we want—gentle, noticed, felt.
:- Doug.
A right to our own deaths
We should have a right to our own deaths. Yet we are stealing it from one another, throwing it under our wheels, or simply not knowing how to give it to one another.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Wind–Poor would you have us?
Footprints in the Windsm # 1251
Poor would you have us?
Cut us off from bringers of wealth
cast out those with new ideas,
strange ways, patterns outside ours,
bar our borders to
tired poor huddled masses,
crawl into your bed, nurse
your own wounds, and die.Let us open to mystery, wonder
to what together we might make & do.
There is within each worlds of
wisdom, experience, energy, vision &
visions, good & evil, youth &
eldering, things to speed us &
things to slow us, & with these
we can weave, O, we can weave!
Please pass it on.
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Naked is the best armor
Naked is the best armor
Your secret parts show you’re human
Vulnerable you’re a friend all protect
:- Doug.
Communication does not explain conversation
Communication does not explain all there is to know of conversation any more than moving your arms and legs explains swimming.
:- Doug.
