FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 990

How do we infuse joy and love into nursing homes? Into humanly declining abilities?

We have a distaste for seeing people losing abilities after a lifetime of being more. Perhaps it stems from fear of, and therefore a wish to put out of view, our own decline. This might frighten us more than death.

Had an email exchange last night with a friend about this question. She said “I think the letting go of who our family members are while they are still present with us may be more challenging than letting them go after death.”

She spoke of the absence of rituals for this kind of a loss. Might there be some value in developing some rituals for this?

It is a reversal of the development process of babies, and perhaps not so much a reversal but a completion of the bell shaped curve of life.

What rituals can we devise to celebrate the graduation of a fully-functioning adult into loss of those functions?

Please pass it on.

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Buber says (I and Thou, p 10) that the work of an artist, my work!, my life!, involves sacrifice and risk: sacrifice of the endless possibilities for just this one now; risk of my whole being—if I do not do my art aright, it is broken, or it breaks me. Heed this.

:- Doug.

They call me an artist with small groups: because they can do something wonderful!

:- Doug.

We are not separate
Something about us that is together—
We are not fully ourselves
When we separate ourselves from others
We are one
There is one life
& that life is sometimes called God

What do I mean? What do I see?
Salvation is no individual thing:
It has to do with all of us

If there is one of us left behind
We are all left behind
When one clod is cut off from the continent
The continents are impoverished
We must take up our role as part of each other,
Others as part of us.
For if we say it matters little to us if
Some bum or criminal is left outside
We have not love
We have not life
If we will not meet, we are not met
If we meet not, we are not

Salvation is no individual thing,
It has to do with all of us.
The world is larger than
The horizon we cast with our physical eyes
There is one universe, many tunes, many
Rhythms, many palettes
Each tone and shading is necessary for the
Whole work to be
A broken bowl holds no nourishment
A lap gone away nurtures no babe
If the world does not work for one person
The world does not work
Heaven is what we do here
For all of us

:- Doug.

Touch one another.

:- Doug.

If we think of living questions and story fields as words to describe the neighborhood in which we move and live, and look for how those questions and fields can be good neighbors, we can increase the life of our world. If we see the urban or natural neighborhoods as metaphors for these question and field neighborhoods, what then? We begin to see that inserting our own questions and touching the fields by building them up, we are enlivening, we are part of what exists. We meet. We meet the fields, the questions. In this relation we both exist.

What I am looking for words to say is that there is something larger in which we exist. Our being comes forth out of this something larger. It needs us and we need it. It needs us for the life we bring to it by strengthening its life, by teeming within it. So our role is to meet, to live, to add life to all the others and this larger.

This something larger meets us as a field, as questions: faces us, draws us, sends us, asks us.

We are not the centers so much as touching the centers, affecting them. We can bend the forces of the fields, we can concentrate or dissipate them.

:- Doug.