FootprintsintheWind.com

A man told me that at his age he and his friends talk about these end of life questions, but “It is too early to make any decisions.”

Well, not really. Now is the time to figure out personally, What do you want to do before you die?

And medically, How do you want to live the last paragraph of the last chapter of your life: hooked to bleeping machines, or in your home, or at your cabin in the woods? Do you want to be alert, or in la la land, or alert with pain at a bearable level? Do you want the last person you see be a doctor or nurse or your spouse or child or pet? These kinds of decisions then are the key ones.

These decisions will help people who love you make the specific choices when time for reflection is short.

:- Doug.

End of life conversations are not difficult; they are just ones we think we are not ready to have.

:- Doug.

End of life is not hard choices, but good ones: joy, meaning, love.

:- Doug.

Life is not a choice of open or closed.

:- Doug.

Heroism is not off or on.

:- Doug.

What are the roles of elders? Mentor, encourage, grace, guardian, ….

:- Doug.

So our task is to raise the level of personal heroism we can tolerate.

:- Doug.

We are each about as heroic as we can stand.

:- Doug.

We the cause of me
a web, a sea

:- Doug.

This is an exploration together of what it can mean to be human.

:- Doug.

Floating in a web
all of us are a-spinning
I release my grasp

:- Doug.

Care is from corporate
Caring is from the heart

:- Doug.

There is a higher calling in being an elder than just being older. It is a threshold to be crossed or not: a value to be added to the world.

:- Doug.

Most of the time we let life make us. Don’t grieve that. Make life.

:- Doug.

Life is much and less. All and nothing.

:- Doug.

Life might be what we can make it be. Only that.

:- Doug.

Is there meaning in the raw, or is it only a human creature? This might be the same question I asked about “the meaning and meaninglessness behind inviting, freeing, engaging? Maybe beyond loving?” Meaning might be a small thing after all. Life and death and bodies and infinity might be the all there is, the “meaning” and “meaninglessness” of it all. Can I accept this stretching?

:- Doug.

I would like to go someplace profound; at the same time, my mind is jumpy, wanting to get on to the tasks of the day, serious or trivial.

:- Doug.

He tapped into anger and hate and proved how far those can take one.

:- Doug.

To the one end: possibility, infinity, freedom, dream, god, spirit, thou. To the other: necessity, finitude, shut-in, prison, stomach, decay, death, animal, it. We live between, often in a cultural slumberland, a lie, thinking we are free while chaining ourselves to the common, clothing ourselves in the usual stories. We might live between, naked in the storm, seeing and hearing what is really there. What is really there is moving, loving, conversing, intercoursing.

The really real is just this dreaming animal among animals and gods, working it out.

We cannot clothe ourselves in armor nor in colors nor in scents nor in sweetness nor in hate nor in accolades: we must meet. There is no defense to meeting for our task is to be totally frankly vulnerable in meeting.

:- Doug.

He has no respect for himself: that’s why he has no respect for others.

:- Doug.

Dying need not be a distressing time for it can be profound.

:- Doug.

And the elder began to see, the young elder dimly, the seasoned one more clearly, death: more precisely the freedom of death. To know we shall die frees us to stand in the face of anything.

:- Doug.