FootprintsintheWind.com

Are you dying? might be a good litmus. If no, fight. If yes, wrestle.

:- Doug.

We can explore what our messages might be by asking those downstream what they learned of us, by asking ourselves what we learned of those upstream.

:- Doug.

Major poetry is a felt change in consciousness
Major lawyering is a felt change in consciousness

:- Doug.

Death is the mystery
Dying is the work
For those coming after

:- Doug.

What is the possible value of our ending?
To our culture?
To those who must not yet end?

:- Doug.

Softly.
Be the gentle

:- Doug.

Let me in my dying say yes to how living and dying is, without arguing with it, without agreeing with it. Meet, converse, wrestle: turn.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1947

These days find: the tender, kind, real part of the ones you meet; open this part in yourself to yourself and them: in our human core, adjectival as we are, we turn one another in an unfinished dance.

We will again shake hands
but will we be this real?

Please pass it on.

© c 2020, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Humanity—more right or skill? More received or developed?

:- Doug.

I do not want to fight my death
nor give in to it
to wrestle with it, turn, be turned

:- Doug.

Our task is to make our meaning so that the grandchildren will see a way to make theirs. It is made when you wrestle the things that are.

:- Doug.

Allow
what life might come to you
of the life now meeting yours
Meet
what clues of this life are opened for you
Welcome
the dying this opening invites you to

:- Doug.

Can we tell a story worth hearing? What echoes from it?

:- Doug.

With witnesses things last.

:- Doug.

Elders cannot know what they are teaching. If they know, they are not elders.

:- Doug.

Life is mystery to meet

:- Doug.

At least we have an extra day this year. We won’t get old as fast!

:- Doug.

If I told you you will die from it. Those who meet it die with it.

:- Doug.

Life is the mystery

:- Doug.

Never a poet harm
Never a poet love
Never a poet be
Never
Aiee! It’s too late!

:- Doug.

The call of the elder may just be to live life as it comes to us, thinking in our every day of the later and earlier ones and our responsibility to them, knowing our own failures and successes are all part of the wrinkles of life, of what gives the wonder to it.

:- Doug.

Not as some doctors seem to see people as mechanical or chemical machines to be sliced and pilled into shape, elder caring attorneys get to see people as people, to meet them as they live their lives.

:- Doug.

Allow the claim to live in service
to life
which has served us all along

:- Doug.