FootprintsintheWind.com

Shall we extend our middling years, or grow ahead?

:- Doug.

After this, love requires of us more work.

:- Doug.

Eldering involves work: on ourselves, our families and friends, our communities small and large: all with love.

:- Doug.

Eldering: growth and service.

:- Doug.

The great discomforts of aging in our culture are not what you might expect. Rather elders are being cast aside, not honored nor even seen, told to concentrate on what is failing and being taken away and never on what is developing.

:- Doug.

Effective loving take us a step or two beyond tough love: not only saying No, but guiding to a self-vision of possibility beyond Yes and No; beyond I am doing something to you, to equals together exploring where love takes us, you affecting me and me affecting you.

:- Doug.

Stance: effective loving places demands upon me and my eldering.

:- Doug.

Elder or middler? Many want to push older people to become just older middlers. Is that good for elders, for our society?

:- Doug.

It pays to get old—it pays others more than us. If we choose.

:- Doug.

If we’re 60 and better, what’s better?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1655

The bright robes
Around the sidereal systems
How do we see
When they are in
Every direction about us?
The Hubble can see
So might we, if

Please pass it on.

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Meeting God, discovering another, loving—none of these is one and done.

:- Doug.

No one can understand everyone
We can only keep opening

:- Doug.

Annoy enough people and eventually you will find a few who will even so try to help you.

:- Doug.

These words are mine—and sometimes the thinking!

:- Doug.

Creation—peace—is an interminable process—whether our species survives or not.

:- Doug.

What game is God playing? Or is God a performing artist?

:- Doug.

Keep on eldering us!

:- Doug.

We love pictures of elders doing things we do—say, golfing and sky diving—largely because it helps us stave off our fear of aging. Yet there is at least a third way beyond eternal middle age and falling apart: vital nurturing of younger generations from our deepening wells.

:- Doug.

Eldering as calling, as movement, as joy.

:- Doug.

As a poet-caring lawyer my task is not to learn more and more about less and less; rather more and more about more and more.

:- Doug.

You can begin discovering what you think. Only converse. With yourself. With others. In words, movements, writings, painting, traveling: becoming reveal.

:- Doug.

This idea of a counsel of elders is capturing my imagination. We cannot wait for institutions to figure it out—they are too busy, and stuck in the hospital-warehousing model. We need to work with the elders themselves (ourselves!), and families, among other entry points, to see new ways to live as elders. Then we will demand this of the service providers, we will seek out the enlightened ones.

:- Doug.