FootprintsintheWind.com

The task of eldering at least in part is not telling a message, rather hearing a life.

:- Doug.

In illness we as visitor, as sufferer, are stuck in the pain and againstness. How might we free ourselves? The very how might be in the act of traveling elsewhere. Yesterday always fades in today’s new thing.

:- Doug.

How to live? Interweaving, immersed, loving.

:- Doug.

How are our narratives connected, interwoven, and interweaving?

:- Doug.

The road to this one’s being is through her or his stories.

:- Doug.

Can you build and heal? You can, through your conversations, in whatever form. You can become part of their stories, immersed.

:- Doug.

Elders take responsibility, not for outcomes, rather for their own caring for the children, for the others.

:- Doug.

Let us together invent the practice of eldering.

:- Doug.

Let us together imagine acts of eldering.

:- Doug.

Can we, in another’s story, however hard we must work to grasp it, find the threads to stitch us together as humans?

:- Doug.

If we intend to be human we ought to open to hearing what is difficult to hear. Do we have the imagination to take into ourselves the experiences of another? Is this something an elder can learn for the rest of us, as an act of inciting a decent society?

:- Doug.

Here’s an elder in a nursing home, or here’s one with dementia: What could it mean to hear this one encouraged to tell or sing his or her life?

:- Doug.

Fear of the nursing home is a failure of imagination.

:- Doug.

Can living with a nursing home be fulfilling?

:- Doug.

What people get from us is not an experience but a caring for. Longer running, closer to your core.

:- Doug.

What has your life taught you about caring for another and about accepting care? Whom have you met and what have they taught you about being an elder, about the role of the elder in the family and community?

:- Doug.

Eldering is the transformation of aging to something larger.

:- Doug.

Is it the work of the elder to change the world? No. Simply to reflect to us its sweep.

:- Doug.

To meet an elder is to be. Be heard, be seen, be so large as to fill the universe. To meet as an elder is to hear, see, allow the other to fill the universe, and maybe yourself.

:- Doug.

Minor poetry is beautiful, says little or much. Major poetry meets you, changes your being, changes too the poet.

:- Doug.

What it is like to be an elder who meets?

:- Doug.

Look for a lawyer who has a heart, cares, hears you, opens herself or himself to you, takes time with you, protects you.

:- Doug.

What is it to meet an elder?

:- Doug.