FootprintsintheWind.com

What do you want for this child?

:- Doug.

A veil is a lens
to magnify the mystery
to focus light & give relief to shadow

:- Doug.

And the learnings will go on, and the work will go on. There is no one way that solves all of life. There is no avoiding the work. The way is work. The way is finding what must be done. The way is uncovering, ripping, poking, finding the way. There is always love to be done.

:- Doug.

We each and all have a contra naturam, contrary nature, bedeviling our creativity, giving it push back to take to roots and heartwood. This part breaks out worst in human cruelty, criminality, and mayhem. It can be suppressed and ignored; it can also be the flint striking our heart, setting our good fires loose in the earth.

:- Doug.

We are living an ancient story. I have been living an ancient story. I brought my hopes to the adult world and experienced failings, wounds. I experienced burial under the concerns of raising a family and making a living. Now I am seeing not just a larger picture but my original life force. Failings, dyings, reawakenings.

:- Doug.

There is no way to do this work: rather look the persons in front of us in the souls. Find the poke holes and places ripe for ripping. Ask questions. Tell stories.

We all go through failings, deaths and reawakenings. The kinds of questions and stories we can raise are the ones that look for thin places where soul and spirit are near the surface: tender ego bits; hints of hubris; masks; shynesses; secrets; slips.

:- Doug.

I have long had this notion that the essential part of me is piled over: I have a deep desire to let myself out. I cry out with but muffled voice. I have thought, but not much consciously, that someone else did this to me. Remember the story of the house fire and the babe in the buggy, piled over with bed clothes? Yet now I am beginning to see also I am doing this to myself: putting on masks to earn a living, to fit in with people at church and workplaces, at school, in law. Some people are giving me inklings they feel the same. The way out from under? To pay attention to the muffled voice; to throw off the foreign stuff. To recognize we all have mufflers. We all contribute to the piles on each other. We can help our original voices be heard.

:- Doug.

We do not engage. We fear life. We fear losing our life, but we fear life more.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1169

Culture cures culture kills
What’s ours up to?
Listen to tones
Is our public debate
Full of hate and bile?
Or do we value
Being gracious to all?
Do we fear loss of Things or
Do we open & share what we have
Who they are?
When it is so ill can
Culture cure?

Please pass it on.

© c 2011, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Even though we slip,
Yet can we live

:- Doug.

I have this thing I must give:
Conversing with life
Engaging with life

:- Doug.

The calliope plays
busyness sings to us
round upon round
so we lose our sense of where
& whom we are
will we get off & away
walking our true path
or will we stay & ride some
more until the music winds
down?

:- Doug.

Tear my heart from out my chest
Implant in me a coeur working for
The world

:- Doug.

I help people do the work of aging.

:- Doug.

What is the work of aging?

Perhaps it is harvesting our wisdom, finding meaningful ways to pass it on, fulfilling our lives by emptying out to others all our good. What is the work of aging, and what can it be?

Our culture makes the work of aging into a clinking shell of itself. Aging becomes retirement. Retirement is sold to us as endless golf and trips to exotic places on luxurious ocean liners. We sit by the pool as piña coladas are brought to us. Absent are heart to heart talks with grandchildren, and the whispers around the death bed. Present are tinkling bells meant to cover over the distant low tolling.

But here I am nearing 65 with fresh and lively ideas of how to bring my real self into my work…at last. Would that I had 30 more years to put it into practice! And maybe I do! But I can also transmit what I have learned, and not so much what, but how I have learned it, to my grandchildren, and they can get to real living sooner.

They of course have their children to raise, their food to earn, their scars to acquire. But there are those who early teach the world. So there is hope that these might each become one of the whole-finders.

What is the work of aging?

:- Doug.

I want very much to find wholes in people, to help them find their wholenesses, to do their work of aging.

:- Doug.

Aging is work. Together.

:- Doug.

I have stopped selling Wills—it is conversing around them that is most telling—& that’s where I concentrate. Wills then flow from conversations.

:- Doug.

Flowing from heart to head to hand
Is rare among poems; rather tugging
This way & that these three it work
—& by it are workéd—pure

:- Doug.

Woman has a sacrifice unwitting
With time she numbs & accepts chain on chain
Deadeningly different from
The fountain of creativity
In her living soul
Which every moment sacrifices
All her creatures
Never knowing when she will run dry
But trusting

:- Doug.

Speak our lives
into flower
orchards making apples

:- Doug.

A lawyer can be a technician
A lawyer can be a healer
If I must choose, I choose whole-tracking

:- Doug.

Even beards
lift toward light

:- Doug.