FootprintsintheWind.com

A new work in the world is offered to you. None survive the offering; some bring good to those who come after.

:- Doug.

An elder is a person with the power to bestow boons on the generations.

:- Doug.

For some of you eldering will be an active role—mentoring, speaking out, knitting souls—and for others just being peace, love, grace.

:- Doug.

Don’t eat the watermelon whole. Take a wedge, spit some seeds, leave the rind for compost, come back later for more conversing with your watermelon.

:- Doug.

Eldering is a special role and developmental stage available typically after some years. It is a threshold some cross.

:- Doug.

We may not be different from prior generations: we often forget the lessons they have learned and maybe passed on to us.

:- Doug.

Conversation is another way of expressing the interdependence of all, the mutual co-arising, interbeing, feedback, open systems, marriage, parent and child, family, the generations, life.

:- Doug.

Is it essential elders agree about the centrality of conversation? Of flow?

:- Doug.

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get my latest computer install to behave as I wish. It is fruitful to see a “problem” as smaller than I’d seen it before. It allows me to move beyond, to put some issues on the shelf for later. Or never. Relief. Move on. Progress.

:- Doug.

Elders of all people can see the interconnections among us, the flow in which we have our being.

:- Doug.

Life advances etherealizing.

:- Doug.

If community means something I must be the first to reach out and help you.

:- Doug.

Here is holy in our life: Spiral, flow, move, breathe, bump, death, fertility, evaporation, story, etherealization.

:- Doug.

It will not matter a few months from now: something else will be important. So why not simply choose now what is to be important, and still fix dinner and clean the house?

:- Doug.

Life is an art form. For some.

:- Doug.

Eldering is mythopoeia, the work of story.

:- Doug.

Significance, purpose, and place are all about relatedness, about touching the world about, about movement. We live only and to the extent we bump and flow through.

:- Doug.

Wisdom is its own robes and cowl, even when naked and spat upon.

:- Doug.

There are the young-old and the old-old; those who have elected to cross the threshold are elders and sages respectively. Some old-old are merely suffering from disease and falling apart; sages have the same conditions as a sidelight, or even spiritual exercise.

:- Doug.

It’s becoming less getting my message out and more us telling the larger story.

:- Doug.

Elders are fertile.

:- Doug.

The turning can be about death—death of body, death of ego, rebirth of soul. We are about to separate from mere adulthood and seek our initiation into something more we cannot predict.

:- Doug.

Meaning and meaninglessness swirl together in the larger mystery: with these we come to life.

:- Doug.