FootprintsintheWind.com

If you want to grow happier, grow older. Or at least have a near-life experience.

:- Doug.

Dull!

:- Doug.

Bring imagination to meet conversation.

:- Doug.

Imagination is combination of the stimulus of outside events and two or more inside movements of fantasy.

:- Doug.

This is where the near-magic happens.

:- Doug.

Imagination has been so strangled out of everyone in or touching nursing homes that the blood flow is restricted all the way to the head.

:- Doug.

To have a chance at staying out of a nursing home: have at least one daughter.

:- Doug.

The nursing home, like war, is a failure of imagination. For surely nursing homes as presently constituted are a war upon life, dignity, worth, and our parents and husbands and wives.

:- Doug.

Before it becomes our turn, let’s fix nursing homes.

:- Doug.

Politicians in full force scream mode are merely one superego preaching to another superego preaching back. Civil dialogue cannot happen because there is no one home. What can crack those monster edifices is a single word, truly spoken, by someone home.

:- Doug.

It is humanly possible to do more than we think. Consider computers and the Internet: we daily do things that 20, 10 and even 5 years ago we would have never thought to do. So our thinking is not our limit—we can do more than that. Even our dreams are not the limit, for it is dreams bouncing off dreams, ideas off bananas, yesterday’s frustration off a child’s toy—and these are not limits but launching platforms. Do and it will come to us—yes, plural—the more the more opens.

:- Doug.

We are people taking care of people.

:- Doug.

Around every spiral another can be drawn; the fun thing is it is all one.

:- Doug.

Families facing nursing homes: we might be of help.

:- Doug.

Not outside, nor inside: we are part of, inside, G.

:- Doug.

Conversation is radiational, spreads by igniting, is suggestive.

:- Doug.

This exploring, this looking over the edges, this is important work. This journaling and reading and meditating/contemplating and this poetry writing is world work: world engaging, world expanding.

:- Doug.

I have discovered I am not immune to the aging process. So I’m probably not immune to the part about dying.

:- Doug.

In conversation we are not merely talking; below the surface we are thinking; perchance becoming conscious—knowing together. The question presents itself: How and to what end are we thinking together? To get it done is one answer; to generate the new is quite another.

:- Doug.

Our way of providing “care” for our elders stems from the culture we have cultivated—rugged individualism has grown up to become everybody rely on no one else, buy everything we need—right down to someone to change our diapers.

:- Doug.

What levels/powers of thinking have I found so far? T₁ Thinking; T₂ Reflecting; T₃ Thinking together (consciousness begins); T₄ Reflecting together; T₅ Generating; T₆ Thinking with the cosmos, the whole, absolute creativity. This last is a step on the spiral from where I had been before. It is fun to think of this as a spiral, and that helps resolve the powers-levels quandary.

:- Doug.

Pianissimo is still percussion.

:- Doug.

I take a rest time
With this electronic device
It steals rest time from me

:- Doug.