FootprintsintheWind.com

Eldering is a gift
much more
a dimensional work

:- Doug.

Whether or not we can converse with a grandchild-elder, we take upon ourselves the transcendence of ourselves.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1802

Falcon, storm, or great song?

I want to be, today, a great song. Some days I storm; some days, not too often, I rise a falcon above all that is going on. Today I want to sing, to be sung. Not so much to get my message out—that is for other days—but to hear. To hear the music of the spheres that passes through me. And maybe that which I might bring forth, however forcefully or timidly.

Please pass it on.

© c 2018, 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

Beyond recounting
elders enrich experience

:- Doug.

Growth
a gift of the years
a task

:- Doug.

If you are going to help people with these conversations, you need to have them for yourselves. Note I did not say by yourselves. You need to have them with your loved ones; and for them. For it is a matter of life and death.

:- Doug.

What did you see in nature when you were growing up that you don’t see today? Fireflies? Bugs on the windshield? Monarch butterflies? People visiting on Sunday? People sitting on their porch? Kids studying bugs? Kids making up their own games in the neighborhood?

:- Doug.

Whenever two or three
elders are gathered there
am I the grandchild

:- Doug.

Crossing above borders
fertilizing beauty nourishing
butterflies

:- Doug.

Poetry gives us
fewer words
to say more

:- Doug.

Up to an age
we seek to add
perhaps multiply
Advancing we subtract
some may even hope to divide
In different ages and different ways
we grow

:- Doug.

The shay disintegrates to
take part in
next’s growing

:- Doug.

Fall apart release your atoms
soul goes to mist spirit to wind
sufficient dissolves

:- Doug.

To be absorbed may be to become larger, more encompassing, more absorbing.

:- Doug.

Medicaid is like Grandma’s choices for putting up fruit: jellies, jams, and preserves. Elder caring lawyers concentrate on preserves: preserving the most of the fruits of your life’s work.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1801

Do some little thing out of doors every day.

Please pass it on.

© c 2018, 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

What if cyborg were only a way-station on the road to health? Adding machine to a human body merely adds foreign breakable to an organic body subject to decline, temporary to temporal. What most of us want may in the end not be super powers, rather to taste our possibilities inherent. Maybe we will not become unrecognizable: maybe we will always see the machine as “not us;” we could start to unfold whom we had not yet recognized as ourselves.

:- Doug.

Can we consult the grandchild-elders?
Can we meditate/contemplate and pray with the grandchild-elders?
Let us bow a blessing to the grandchild-elders; let us receive theirs.
Can we understand the point of view of the grandchild-elders?
Can we hear with the grandchild-elders?

:- Doug.

What is our attitude—our stance—toward the grandchildren-elders? Are we merely dispensing our wisdom on their heads? Or might they be as far ahead of us as we suppose ourselves to be ahead of the peoples of prehistoric times? What if we could partake of their waters and advance ourselves? Might that advance circle back to them, giving them a foothold higher? Could that move us both up the spiral? Can we give them freedom, even beyond freedom from us? Is it about discovering them? Helping us both become us?

:- Doug.

We might converse with the generations by our creativity, our breaking with common cultural consensus.

:- Doug.

The world, the future, runs on numberless multi-dimensional single threads: people are part of humanity all threaded together over our construct, time. Not everyone has every thread running through him or her, but each has an uncountable number and they go on without perceivable ends or beginnings.

:- Doug.

Community theatre is close to perpetual motion: it goes on and on, the ticket sales paying the cost of costume rental and script copies; it all runs on the energy of the people; it also runs on continual moving.

:- Doug.

We’re all in one world, one universe, and perhaps not just all people, bumble bees, and quasars moving this instant, maybe, just maybe, all of us, rocks and animals and vegetation, of all time. And beyond.

:- Doug.