FootprintsintheWind.com

Not as some doctors seem to see people as mechanical or chemical machines to be sliced and pilled into shape, elder caring attorneys get to see people as people, to meet them as they live their lives.

:- Doug.

Allow the claim to live in service
to life
which has served us all along

:- Doug.

Ask your children what lessons they learned of you, if it must be in a story you write only for your eyes.

:- Doug.

What do I have to teach? With what reach out 300 years? I may never be given to know. My children have said I taught them some things, and in hearing it from them I do not recognize it as my own. What did my parents teach me, what did yours teach you? We risk preaching in extending our intentions to teaching.

:- Doug.

Do not banish plurality for the sake of certainty.

:- Doug.

It’s not about having the answers, nor perhaps even the questions.

:- Doug.

It’s real
when skill, strength, competence
you start to lose

:- Doug.

It has to be specific, this eldering, yes? We need to meet in a particular place-time, we need to meet actual persons. We will not agree on everything important: we must wrestle.

:- Doug.

We study how things have gone, we get a long view, we move beyond “Be nice, be yourself.” We no longer know who our self is. We don’t know what nice is. It will be diversity, wrestling. Show up, pay attention, tell truth, detach? What is truth: instead, truing?

Instead: find your own long view, gather yourself into the laps of the ancestors.

:- Doug.

Ought we even have a message, or is eldering more subtle, more profound than that?

:- Doug.

How differently would you live
if it were
laps all the way down?

:- Doug.

Maybe we’re not standing
on the ancestors’ shoulders
rather held in their laps

:- Doug.

Now we have a non in-person world. Which means? We need to be more one on one: more personal.

:- Doug.

Call up your grandchildren, tell them a story. Tell them about a mistake or failure in your life. Ask them nothing.

:- Doug.

When you catch that old time rhythm
When you hear a bit of rhyme
Now’s the time for your practice of poetry

:- Doug.

He holds them in
His second-class thrall:
“Be nasty first”

:- Doug.

Dessert is
Vacations
Work well done
Humanicity well loved
Out beyond easy and first answers

:- Doug.

Dessert first
But
What is dessert?

:- Doug.

Mystery
not for solving:
wonder through

:- Doug.

There are many things about which to wonder but they seem to get in the way of our wonder-work.

:- Doug.

A good death? Will I like death? Can anybody ever like dying? Many in great pain long for the quiet of death, the rest of death. For them, the pain is the dying.

It seems logical that we can like dying. We can teach with our dying. We can learn. We can be fascinated. We can experience. We can be present.

So often, we hope. So we are focused not on what is happening, what we have, but on what comes later. Good or ill, it is not here.

:- Doug.

Something is developing. Not quite a felt change in consciousness: perhaps a felt change in unconsciousness.

:- Doug.

He’s making me think
but not in words
not images
in the ground beneath
in the air breathing

:- Doug.