FootprintsintheWind.com

What do we want in our death? Meaning. Value. Capstone.

:- Doug.

Converse with your family now. It can save your death.

:- Doug.

This is precisely where the family voices prove most valuable: we get various points of view, so we can make more rounded decisions. The conversation now makes the conversation later more united, more peaceful, more focused.

:- Doug.

Having the end of life conversation may be just as important to your understanding as to your family’s: You have wrestled with some of these questions so that when the actual question arises, you will know how to start picking your way through the woods.

:- Doug.

We’re getting older. How is this news we can use?

:- Doug.

We are entering a profound age.

:- Doug.

By this age we’re all walking wounded. We get to be real.

:- Doug.

The move into elder caring has afforded me opportunities to do profound things: for instance, be present to life and death questions. Also to be my real self: I can be caring and pause to let others sink in.

:- Doug.

Elders are about fearlessly finding our wisdom, eliciting others’, putting it to use.

:- Doug.

Pick a small part: don’t try to teach about the whole of life.

:- Doug.

What do I want to teach the world? What did I come to bring? How can I know? But I can. Step in the direction. The poet knows.

:- Doug.

Conversation is about loving. Larger worlds. Engaging.

:- Doug.

Can we let three breaths settle in us before we respond to another? Otherwise this is going too fast for us.

:- Doug.

Why is it we usually wake up in the middle of dreams? That we often do not recall the beginning or end of a dream, only some snippet from the middle?

Dreams don’t end. They do not need to end. The do not even have an end. They only need to be lived. The value of dreams is in being in them. Like life.

:- Doug.

Can we yet do the bigger than life thing?

:- Doug.

What could it mean—for what I do next—if the whole world were a conversation?

:- Doug.

The bull in the china shop knows not how to put the pieces together.

:- Doug.

“It” releases
The arrow flies
To the heart

:- Doug.

Only time will tell—Only God knows: We use these phrases almost interchangeably. Do we see some equivalence?

:- Doug.

Does this politician appeal to your better side or your worse, your higher or your lower? How do you feel after listening? Angry? Uplifted? Loving?

:- Doug.

Allow the other person to be a person.

:- Doug.

We jump to be heard: we run over others’ words and thoughts. It would get us to a decision faster if we jumped to hear—and affirm—the other, before we spoke our mind. Faster, and we all hold it fast.

:- Doug.

My heart is often at war. I have the choice to drop more to silence. I can choose to teach hearing one another, starting by making efforts to hear others.

:- Doug.