FootprintsintheWind.com

Our search for a leader or an organization is natural, but misplaced. What we seek naturally is another to spark our ideas back and forth: a playmate and a space through which sparks can become visible. The misplaced part is because this can be any person.

:- Doug.

What would you be willing to do to help your family come alive now?

:- Doug.

How young are you?

:- Doug.

What questions could this family ask which would start us on a game of hide and seek?

:- Doug.

The questions we ask prod us to look, to create.

:- Doug.

Don’t solve problems,
invent new ones!

:- Doug.

I work with caring people
some of whom are
elders of our tribe

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1247

The results do not
It’s engaging that matters
I did not get my way
We found ours

Please pass it on.

© c 2012, 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

Thinking clearly with our hearts.

:- Doug.

Elder life is a question without an answer.

:- Doug.

Life is a question without an answer—and we are asked—in our faces asked.

:- Doug.

Questions are central: for one they challenge us to engage outside our skins. Two, they challenge us to do so together.

:- Doug.

It is difficult in family long term care settings to see any larger truth, let alone make sense of it. What to do when we are blind?

Maybe we can ask of one another:

What else do you notice?
What is possible now?
Tell me if I have heard you right….
Tell me a story about why this is important….
Have there been times when you saw things differently, saw hope?
What do we believe is true in this situation?
What are our assumptions?

Essentially: 1. call a time out and 2. ask for bigger eyes.

:- Doug.

Our modern medicine has not made our maladies disappear; it has only made them last longer: made chronic what used to be acute.

:- Doug.

So how do we profoundly, strategically, madly let to in a family system? We get hung up over what without question we believe is true. It is not true. What is true? I do not know. You do not know. We’re all, every one of us, every day making it up, guessing, testing what might work. So what if we throw out what’s not working and test out something? Even that we ought to discard.

:- Doug.

How may we yet
Be about
Rounding our lives together?

:- Doug.

Solutions
People are selling
Solutions
So small!
So small!
Can we not think larger
What is good among us
What might be?

If you spend all your time
Making something smaller
Making problems
So small!
So small
Are you
We could be
Growing, growing

:- Doug.

Is no try
only receiving
in meditation/contemplation
maybe life, too

:- Doug.

For the greater part of my life I’ve fought myself.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1246

Already
coursing around and
through all peoples
So we need not tug
against humanity
only call it to
eddies, currents,
streams and life
of the great flowing
This sea
is for something

Please pass it on.

© c 2012, 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

Would you rather be successful or amazed?

:- Doug.

It’s a terrible thing to waste our elders.

:- Doug.

Our elders: a resource we’re wasting.

:- Doug.