FootprintsintheWind.com

Can you transform uncertainty, doubt, and vulnerability into a capacity, yours?

:- Doug.

Ancestor now
I have no name
to you known
simply groundlessness
supporting your ground

:- Doug.

When we become an ancestor we become of the generations. Perhaps this is a way the messaging finds its ways.

:- Doug.

A client is dying in her sleep. She has been sedated to the point that she will not, cannot, be conscious of her dying. Is that what you meant? Not being able to do the work of dying?

:- Doug.

A step further: We have an extra 30 years, those of us in this generation. We have a responsibility to the community of the generations. We cannot know how: even so we must craft this story, bend humanity’s conversation.

:- Doug.

Ancestors are those who go out ahead.

This is disorienting. We think of ancestors as those who were before us, back there in the past. Yet they lead us. So ancestors are both behind us, and they are ahead of us. They are beneath us and uphold us. They have gone on ahead, call us upwards.

:- Doug.

We cannot know the message: only we must be part of the messaging.

:- Doug.

Retaliation makes us less free.

:- Doug.

And?

:- Doug.

Ancestors are called upon to let go of their messages, nay, required. Elders have a story to be told, a story to leave behind. Both carry the story, groundlessly.

:- Doug.

Beyond eldering
to ancestoring

:- Doug.

Your verse will be lost
the melody lasts

:- Doug.

Bring humanity more in touch with itself.

:- Doug.

You cannot say it all. Nor can you grasp it all. Only listen to see, look to catch scent, touch to savor, taste to hear.

:- Doug.

Many of us are old; some few of us might become elders.

:- Doug.

I feel I have reached peace, equanimity, with this insight. I can now describe the course: We have an extra 30 years, those of us in this generation. We have a responsibility to the community of the generations to do what we can to bend the arc of humanicity.

:- Doug.

Meet the grandchildren; meet our death and loss; meet our responsibility; muddle around with the message and what gets in the way; come back to Campbell and community; restate the perennial problem of bending the arc of humanicity; it is about community: conversation.

:- Doug.

So the course can be gently guiding us to the realization that 1. We have a responsibility to 2. share the message that 3. we only dimly (if at all) see ourselves. But therein is the message to us: if we do not share our part, we slow the development of the story.

We are in fact in the midst of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, going through the bottom arc, sometimes in one threshold or the other, going through the tests, fleeing, sometimes stealing the elixir. It helps, perhaps, to know that the community of the generations surrounds us, aids us.

Does this end our quest? No, I suspect it sustains it. Humanity is on this quest, humanity may be the quest.

:- Doug.

We cannot find the message but only be a part of the messaging of the community of generations.

:- Doug.

The community of the generations
holds the story
you blindly help to tell

:- Doug.

Rely on the community
of the generations
for we only tell
a part of the story
and this blindly

:- Doug.

Calling forth through story a higher humanity.

:- Doug.

You can fight the pain. You can befriend it. You can give in to it. Or you can meet it without giving it a hat of any color.

:- Doug.