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Elders are a dangerous breed.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1742

Elders live messages not authorized by the dominant culture.

Please pass it on.

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Careful. Soon you might hear “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the…elders.”

:- Doug.

Elders show us a broader range of choices.

:- Doug.

Elders: the flowering of improbability, complexity, and variety.

:- Doug.

Elders as agape.

:- Doug.

Elders affront the world: why are you still here? Still telling us these things?

:- Doug.

Elders: complement of human life.

:- Doug.

Elders challenge the world’s habits.

:- Doug.

Elderly is a four-letter word; elders earn respect.

:- Doug.

Because they have vision long, wide, and deep, elders are capable of the universe.

:- Doug.

An elder is a transformer as well as a transmitter of humanity. She thinks about what she has received, molds, adds, deducts, invents—all from a capacious worldview. Possible world and good emerge here.

:- Doug.

Elders are popcorn, turned inside out, larger now.

:- Doug.

Elders hold the secret.

:- Doug.

Only old things can come out of goals. Imagination is foreclosed.

:- Doug.

We live in a world of mutual influence. I influence you influence me. Thoughts influence you influence thoughts. All flows, all grows.

:- Doug.

Pain for the grandchildren, promise for the grandchildren.

:- Doug.

Storytelling our way to eldering

:- Doug.

Order is emergent.

:- Doug.

We cannot control the world
We can touch

:- Doug.

When we hear ourselves say, “Now is not the time,” we do well to look deeper: it is evidence that fear is at work in us. We can face our fears and say “Now is the time” and find it was not so difficult as our fears made it out to be. Here is our opportunity to get past the debilitating fear that keeps us stuck.

:- Doug.

Are you domesticated, house-broken, or are you yet wild?

:- Doug.

There is nature’s order—an emergent, co-arising sort of process—and humans’—usually shorter-sighted and imposed.

:- Doug.