FootprintsintheWind.com

We humans are related to one another: we carry each other back together. We carry each other in heart and in action; we bear the seed from our fathers and mothers to our children. We may be simply the conduit for the carrying and bearing, and that may be to say, we are the loving.

:- Doug.

You are the lake; I am immersed; we are together.

:- Doug.

Father implies some relation, some symbiosis.

:- Doug.

Are You and I immersed together as in a clear lake? Are we symbiotic, attached, together?

:- Doug.

If we did things to save taxes we may no longer need those things. This is true these days of estate and inheritance taxes. It is sometimes more true as we grow in age.

:- Doug.

I live in a world of words: of things I think are before me; of actions and movement I think are happening before me. I do my work by moving words around, reorganizing them. I do my work by conversation, some little of it with words and movement.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1380

Conversation arises from the unknowable and indefinable totality of persons, and not from ping-ponging strings of words back and forth. The latter is taking memories, old patterns and fixity of categories and reworking them for this word battle. The former is exposing one’s vulnerable innards to new perceptions…and therefore reshaping. Conversation then is not a technology that can be learned and applied to every setting. Conversation is more an alertness for perception and reception of the new, the unknown, the surprising in the person in front of you. When two or more meet at this level, new persons are perceived…and born. But take care: there is an unceasing movement of the new toward getting mired in old tracks of thought. That’s why conversation is a practice. The watchword is vigilance: stay alert.

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© c 2013, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/341-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Give us conversations whole-finding.

:- Doug.

Maybe there comes a time when the books are no longer efficient means of developing one’s work, and the road then becomes engagement, meeting, conversation, participation in the life with others: do, learn, develop.

I now disagree. Books are ways to expand our contacts, meet new people faster and deeper. But doing the work is the primary work.

:- Doug.

Tennyson Woolf writes that in his group work he works at getting people to let go of having to make a change immediately. That is a hard sell, but a good objective. We are in a too agitated state of mind and that leads to instant decisions and probably the waste that we used to say haste made. What if we reflected more? Would we really be eaten by our competitors? Are they really someone with whom we war, or are they fellow humans who love and deserve to eat? And do we deserve more than we can use when other humans are starving? What are we about?

:- Doug.

What is good? Can we invent more?

:- Doug.

Seeing is an intermediate step to seeing. We see a rainbow. We see a pot of gold, a promise, a loving. Again we see sunlight and water droplets and prism effects. Again we see beauty and colors and colors blending into invisibility. Again we see…. Seeing is an intermediate step to naming, and naming can be an intermediate step to seeing more…if we keep our feet moving.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1379

Don’t be irritated that spouse, happenings, life interrupt you
These are the stuff of the divine
Reason you are here
Detours are your
Given path

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© c 2013, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/341-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

What we see enables us to say and to do and to see…again.

:- Doug.

How could we make and take and partake the world of aging for good?

:- Doug.

The idea that we participate in our world and can make of it what we may, and that we can be conscious and on purpose about this activity is evocative for me. It calls out for work on the idea itself and on what we might do with it.

The idea itself: How might we invite others to take part? What might be the methods of participation we could develop, invent?

What we might do with it: What are the activities of humankind that could be advanced? Conversation. Collaboration. Working for good of others (altruism and its science of compassion).

This barely touches these subjects. How might we drill deeper, chance upon cooler waters?

Friend, into our purposeful cooler waters!

:- Doug.

What can we make of the treasures, promises, and possibilities of our aging?

:- Doug.

What is the advancing work and worth of our years?

:- Doug.

We cannot expect that our meanings are shared by all or even most—all are creating while we are creating. But we can expect that numbers of people will share meanings with us, and we may hope that some will act upon them, to the betterment of the human project.

:- Doug.

It is clear there is much we do as humans to mold our world—to create it—and that is good. Highways and cities and gardens are human creations out of the created. And yet there is more, for there is meaning we put on things and people: Lincoln and Hitler. There is more to creation than electrons whirling through emptiness, flesh and brains and automobiles.

:- Doug.

When will we begin to see the good as the leash holding back the better? And us? While still seeing the good as good?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1378

What age would I die?

The one that is my own. Well, what can that mean? How does that help? It helps perhaps by saying we can let go of controlling it and let it come to us. It will without our efforts.

The question then is one of helping us noodle out how to live for the rest of our days. Will we be healthy? Will our mental powers stay with us? Will we remain ourselves or become somebody new—less or more? Will we be meaningful, feel meaningful, do meaningful? Will we matter?

The question also turns a mirror on the rest of our lives and asks What matters about my life? Our life together?

It also asks how we want to be treated by others: will we be respected? Remembered? Heard? Part of others?

Given that we have no permanency, what then is the purpose of our days, whether many or few? I see it is about the help we give one another, purposely, wittingly, or otherwise: love.

Please pass it on.

© c 2013, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/341-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

We need to move from seeing the meaning as over across from us with created things between, to realizing we can and ought to make the meaning ourselves. This is our participation in creation. This is our higher calling. Not just making creation better, but making a better creation.

:- Doug.