FootprintsintheWind.com

Fuzzy edges: permeable holy.

:- Doug.

Three questions for elders: Who are you? Bringing what? For whom? Respond, then say Yes, and… improvise again.

:- Doug.

Finding your voice means having a life creating conversation with the world.

:- Doug.

Poking holes can start with asking the covered ones where the pokes will be most welcome: Where is the life in you? What gives juice to your living? What in this world needs encouraging? Of what in the current scene do you despair? Who gives you hope? Which inspires you more: butterflies, sunsets, or walks in nature? Mountains, shores, or brooks?

:- Doug.

It is dawning on and through the elders: this is going to take longer and involve a greater number of lives than we at first hoped!

:- Doug.

Friend, into your perilous cocoon. Then out into your perilous sun.

:- Doug.

So where does the elder find her eldering? Underground, in the shimmering dark, beneath the grey cloth, in the cocoon where the colors are rearranging themselves.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1712

The world may be changing so fast simply because we are resisting it. We have gotten too comfortable. Change must come—and daily—and if it is repressed it may be that it seeps out the edges wherever it can. So it comes at us from what looks like the outside and in superficial ways—gadgets and technology, science and theories. But it is hard wired into the soul and spirit of humanity and the cosmos. We could do better if we answered its call and created our own. Then it would be deep and true and give birth to beauty.

Please pass it on.

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That all makes sense, and it also needs to percolate, season, marinate, ferment, develop underground.

:- Doug.

I am just starting to see that eldering the elders is the process of poking holes in the grey cloth we have allowed to settle and accresce over us.

We have allowed it to build up over us. Poking holes lets in air and light, allows the essence to breathe and grow and expand its health. Our lives have become grey. Our children’s lives have become greyer as they are in the quagmire slogging out their living and raising their brood—and as the culture has gone ever deeper into putting money and accumulations first. We perhaps cannot turn the train tracks, but we can poke holes in the grey, clear a small spot in the engineer’s windshield.

:- Doug.

Then came the vision, the door opening, the light, the sweeping hand and standing shoulder to side, and seeing lumps and grey cloth covering the rainbows and the flying. Perhaps they were butterflies and other critters, including giraffes!

:- Doug.