FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1678

You are not that powerful
Another’s pain is greater
But not greater than your power of being with

Please pass it on.

© c 2017, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Care is from corporate
Caring is from the heart

:- Doug.

There is a higher calling in being an elder than just being older. It is a threshold to be crossed or not: a value to be added to the world.

:- Doug.

Most of the time we let life make us. Don’t grieve that. Make life.

:- Doug.

Life is much and less. All and nothing.

:- Doug.

Life might be what we can make it be. Only that.

:- Doug.

Is there meaning in the raw, or is it only a human creature? This might be the same question I asked about “the meaning and meaninglessness behind inviting, freeing, engaging? Maybe beyond loving?” Meaning might be a small thing after all. Life and death and bodies and infinity might be the all there is, the “meaning” and “meaninglessness” of it all. Can I accept this stretching?

:- Doug.

I would like to go someplace profound; at the same time, my mind is jumpy, wanting to get on to the tasks of the day, serious or trivial.

:- Doug.

He tapped into anger and hate and proved how far those can take one.

:- Doug.

To the one end: possibility, infinity, freedom, dream, god, spirit, thou. To the other: necessity, finitude, shut-in, prison, stomach, decay, death, animal, it. We live between, often in a cultural slumberland, a lie, thinking we are free while chaining ourselves to the common, clothing ourselves in the usual stories. We might live between, naked in the storm, seeing and hearing what is really there. What is really there is moving, loving, conversing, intercoursing.

The really real is just this dreaming animal among animals and gods, working it out.

We cannot clothe ourselves in armor nor in colors nor in scents nor in sweetness nor in hate nor in accolades: we must meet. There is no defense to meeting for our task is to be totally frankly vulnerable in meeting.

:- Doug.

He has no respect for himself: that’s why he has no respect for others.

:- Doug.

Dying need not be a distressing time for it can be profound.

:- Doug.

And the elder began to see, the young elder dimly, the seasoned one more clearly, death: more precisely the freedom of death. To know we shall die frees us to stand in the face of anything.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1677

I’m human—that’s all the credentials I require. I notice what I notice.

Please pass it on.

© c 2017, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Evening: a now for the sun
to lay down the day

:- Doug.

Some people are trying to put on the brakes.

:- Doug.

The job is to nudge from necessity toward possibility.

:- Doug.

Animals live in necessity
gods in possibility
humans on the continuum between
neither stomachs without dreams
nor spirits without stomachs

:- Doug.

He is stuck in a clenched-teeth vision—of himself and us.

:- Doug.

POST is limited to 4 things precisely because medical people in an emergency do not have time to make nuanced calls.

:- Doug.

Infinite tugs at finite
In our times at least
We must lend some grasp

:- Doug.

We mostly sacrifice our spirit to our body—or at least I have. In today’s terms, we build a business or accept a paycheck rather than get on with our calling. Yes there is need to feed the critter, but must we fatten it? Flatten its dreams? Its very deific? Necessaries forever yes, but infinity is also necessary. This is Buber’s “with It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man.”

:- Doug.

The reality is a winged spirit with feet stuck to earth.

:- Doug.