FootprintsintheWind.com

The term “directive” in the phrase Advance Directives goes too far. First it seems obligatory, when what is going on is in the nature of a request: help me, use your best faculties to figure out what’s best for a situation I never expected to face when I cannot make known my wishes. Second it assumes that we know what we want in all settings. We do not. We cannot. We need your help to gather information and wants and desires, dreams and hopes, possibilities and needs and then choose a series of tentative steps forward. We need a better term, something along the lines of Advancing Conversations.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1301

Sitting in the mess
Not stirring
Might let the water clear

Please pass it on.

© c 2013, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/301-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Death is not a failure. Death can be a coming home, or a relief, or an end of suffering. Death can be a culmination, a whole-making, a healing. Death can be a fulfilling. Death can be welcoming, friendly. Death is ever a mystery. We don’t know what death is. For some unknown reason, we all do it. There is often good in it.

:- Doug.

If we think death is a failure we should all give up.

:- Doug.

Bigger than that
Ever

Divinity
Humanity
All there is

Look larger
Every minute
At every
One
Thing

I don’t write poetry to be poetry
pretty lines, literature
I write poetry because that’s how
the events need
to express themselves

:- Doug.

So slowly, so lazily the snowflakes
came: I could almost count them
Now a gust drives them nearly
parallel with the ground—but they still
make it to their rest
Now thousands form a swirl a hundred yards wide
Again they lazily—not quite as lazily—come
toward me; and I ponder
if they are telling my life

and a tree, from fifty feet up, sways
asking in response

:- Doug.

We are living kaleidoscopic lives: bits and pieces keep rearranging: bodily needs and experiences, love, hate, boredom, overwork, people strange and familiar, loves, could-care-lesses, excitement, interest, strange news, people reaching out to us electronically, food, weather, spirit: all coming at us in a jumbled, ever moving picture show, and we wanting to be met and heard.

:- Doug.

We are now in a pluralistic society, even a confused one. This works! calls one voice. This over here serves our society better, calls another. Each has followers; neither wins. Even the concept of winning suggests pluralism and hegemony. Yet this might just be a phase, and there might be another or others to come, like seeing the common stake and life’s blood in all our diversity. We could work on that.

:- Doug.

From our accumulated joys and tears we can mine good for the next generations.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1300

How would we recognize family when we saw it? What gets in the way of it? What makes ready for it? For we can only ever really make ready. Make ourselves ready, open the space, invite. But grace is ever present and favors a prepared soul, a prepared between.

What would be a prepared between? Emptying ourselves of what the conversation should accomplish, or even be. Emptying ourselves of shields, of ideas of who starts the conversation, or where it leads. Emptying ourselves of our selves.

Stepping into the between. Choosing to accept any and all offers and invitations. Choosing to be vulnerable. Choosing to let go of outcomes.

Valuing being together. Valuing whatever happens. Valuing whoever comes and whoever stays away.

Resolving (and renewing our resolve) to stay for as long as it takes, and not a moment longer.

Please pass it on.

© c 2013, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/301-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

These busy days
have me oscillating
to a higher tone

:- Doug.

This is all I can say about God: is.

God is.

God contains at least all that is: wind and stars, storms and love, planets, galaxies and horses, thoughts and concepts and things unthought.

Is.

:- Doug.

What if in prayer, God were praying to us?

:- Doug.

A thought on the picture of God we carry around: This morning I was thinking that God pervades all and us. Interesting root word, vade. It means walking around, and per means thoroughly. It is related to wade. God is wading around in and among us, in our compost heap, perhaps, helping it work. Like a grape stomper, or like sunlight and ubiquitous micro-organisms making the heat.

:- Doug.

There need be no against
Against is created in our minds

:- Doug.

What is worth doing?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1299

Our right work is each other.

Please pass it on.

© c 2013, 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

I awoke this morning with thoughts of Zorba: Boss, you gotta live! Get into this thing called life! Dance! Love the one you’re with!

:- Doug.

Today I saw that I do not matter in the sense that my ego and my little life are part of something larger, and that I can hold myself much more lightly. If life gives me pain or disability or incontinence or loss or death, then that is what life brings and I accept. It does no good to fight it and try to get back something that is lost for ever; it makes sense to work on something that can be gained or restored. This is not mainly because it is logic but because it is freeing.

:- Doug.

In the meeting
the meeting is
in the opening

:- Doug.

Take away
the words in the middle
is not
the creator of
life & existence
is beyond their cause
is life & existence
is

:- Doug.

Conversation is not only telling another
nor yet only hearing the other
it is as well readying for the two way opening

:- Doug.