FootprintsintheWind.com

Now may we carry this awareness of the silence into our day.

:- Doug.

Profundities abound
Silence, mistakes
Who can say?

:- Doug.

Let us look at the same thing so we may together converse.

:- Doug.

Some parts of you will never be able to keep up with the silence.

:- Doug.

Our reflections can address What is it we are about, now? They can also show us a threshold: a dying appropriate if we are to become elders.

:- Doug.

A conversation needs a ground for being. For that it needs at least these two: It needs an energy. It needs a subject for that energy. Shared. An open door and a desire to step through. One of us must give some color and fragrance to what’s on the other side of the door so the other will want to step.

:- Doug.

Stop talking so much! Converse!

:- Doug.

We need both slow and fast, gentle and strong, for a good massage. So too for our thinking.

:- Doug.

The fast boat covers a lot of surface but misses the worlds below.

:- Doug.

The media are scrupulous to search out those for and against. At times this feels like endorsing each as of equal validity. Some incisiveness is also needed, would you agree? Ought we give equal time to the lie as to the truth? To hate as to love?

:- Doug.

Dying is perhaps a time to ease, to clear, to calm, to gentle.

:- Doug.

There is always to be found more depth; ever apt to be rewarded is our reflecting.

:- Doug.

More times than we would guess are ripe times for reflection.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1687

It’s seldom a question of knowing when to say when, but of working it out. When I write a poem there are a hundred right ways to say what needs to be said. My primary urge is to express the thing new to me. Then I want to say it well—so you will want to pay attention—and so you will carry it further. Because of these hundred right ways there is no perfect wording, so I have to choose to say when the end has come, when to let it go on its way. When it comes my time to die, perhaps it will be like this.

A word too far in a poem
Can undo the life it brings

Please pass it on.

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This thing you call God is too small. Anything you could would be. It is “another god before me,” a “graven image.”

:- Doug.

I don’t much say “God” because that affixes a handle—leads us to think we know—and therefore are bigger than this.

:- Doug.

Perhaps it is bigger than that.

:- Doug.

For me there is always and only conversation.

:- Doug.

The times they are a-hatin’. This people is a-dyin’. A few of their hearts are a-stirrin’.

:- Doug.

I go back and look at old files because they are there.

:- Doug.

The disconnect is from me: having thought about these things and others not—perhaps they never had the inkling these were subjects for reflection.

:- Doug.

Honor your insights
Notice the longer view
O elder

:- Doug.

The red lights are scattered along your path to be med(itation) lights.

:- Doug.