FootprintsintheWind.com

Making memories
how sweet the sound
of packing a suitcase
when nature
is stripping you
to bone
and waning breath

:- Doug.

So much grey
so little silver
snow and deep up on the roof
but fire in the hearth?
Dare we inquire after morsels?
Old we have aplenty
elders but few
Shh who might some of us
barely notice wafting
up the flue
becoming ancestors?

:- Doug.

A poem once written
is an unreliable
arrow on a sign
rusting
telling which way you
went
but not the valuable stuff

:- Doug.

Are you Google
knowing without knowing
Are you a Google lawyer
knowing answers and hows
lively and responsive
without touching
All those years
lived without living
All those lives
you have strummed
without having the chords
reverberate to your spine
Have you watched
without watching
that sap that flows
in that family
and yours
and that richer stuff
that courses
in root system
Have you been without being
what precisely is your worth
and for how long and for whom?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1970

But you have a much larger gift you can give, or at least offer. However it will cost you. It will be a condor from out of nowhere sinking its talons into you, carrying you away, over the abyss. You have not found this gift if you do not scream.

This offering is called reflexivity.

This is where you turn the view upon yourself. You eviscerate yourself. Reflection is seeing the event from a distance, from an overview, recounting history and prediction.

Reflexivity is working on and being worked by how this event changes you and you it; and how your client is changed, and changes the event. It is a circle where cause produces an effect, and the effect produces cause. A spiral. You and your client caught up in it together. Caught up in life together.

This is poetry. This is making.

You may think I have been speaking prose with you this afternoon. Yet the language is somehow more. There is a hint of the lyrical. You too can speak and write poetry.

Please pass it on.

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As elder caring lawyers we are privileged witnesses. We also may find a profound responsibility to witness for our people. To mirror. To open. Maybe there is a different room over there on the other side of the looking glass.

:- Doug.

Don’t die with the TV on.

:- Doug.

Wonder how felt change in consciousness relates to reflexive writing?

:- Doug.

And Moses said, “I don’t need to raise no stinking stick. God will part the waters.” And Jonah said, “I don’t need to preach to Ninevah. God will turn their hearts.” And Noah said, “I don’t need to build an arc. God will provide.”

:- Doug.

I set before you death and life. Choose. Choose well, for you choose for the generations.

:- Doug.

Do more not-done-ing.

:- Doug.