FootprintsintheWind.com

I cannot offer you an inoculation against death. But I do offer you an inoculation against the avoidable suffering of death.

:- Doug.

What I want for you:
1. To have the conversation with your family;
2. To have the conversation with your doctor.

:- Doug.

How do we know when we are dying? When ought we bring our 17 Things into play? Is it a per centage chance of survival? Is it time left? Is it when we don’t like the looks of life if we choose what’s offered?

Maybe we just have to face our thinking now.

:- Doug.

We are faced with a powerful combination—we don’t know when we’re dying; we never get to “nothing more we can do.” So we keep pushing the gas pedal. The brakes are not necessary: can’t we coast gently to rest?

:- Doug.

We have tried this at home. The results have been pretty good. Let’s keep making better.

:- Doug.

I’ve had the luxury of two lifetimes, compared to Jesus. Now to Work.

But I have been Working. Observe what that Work has been.

:- Doug.

All culture is idio-culture: home-concocted.

:- Doug.

Identity is in intimacy.

:- Doug.

The system fights back against love. Yet I tell you: we are the system. Moreover: we are the love.

:- Doug.

We are angry about the Ebola outbreak; it has not been handled well. We want to blame. Yet even the scientists, technologists, and doctors cannot humpty put us together dumpty again. Our anger at least in part is because our medical/science god is not magic after all. We are just us helping us. But saying helping is saying something.

:- Doug.

Alzheimer’s is not a solitary disease
It is the dis-ease of being made solitary

:- Doug.

Love is not
What we think
It is

:- Doug.

There is a person
Its body is us
We express

:- Doug.

The words we lose
The beauty we find
The beauty takes away our breath

:- Doug.

Let us be available to people
Inviting
Accepting their expressings

:- Doug.

Unsafe for whom? The nursing home patient or the nursing home administration?

:- Doug.

Love is not normal
Love is not comfortable
Until you dare

:- Doug.

The Divine Conversation

:- Doug.

Conversation is the prime tool to divinize our culture.

:- Doug.

Am I about the humanizing of culture?

:- Doug.

Matter may be related to mother.

:- Doug.

The nurses and CNAs are untapped resources of information, intelligence, and heart. They are the sensitive fingertips of the beast, able to detect, able to handle delicate operations: able to bring meaning and human touch to a mechanical checklist—if we allow them.

:- Doug.

We are not lumps, we are moving.

:- Doug.