FootprintsintheWind.com

Take the lead: frame the conversation.

:- Doug.

Remember to live while you’re dying. Memento vivere dum mori.

:- Doug.

This is the dis-ease—
dying under extreme medicalism
This is the antidote—
Imagination

:- Doug.

Just try to help
And don’t try to help

:- Doug.

a bright red cardinal
sitting in my maple of a winter’s day
focusing my whole world
a lens
through

:- Doug.

Dying hooked up to beeping machines
is a failure of imagination

:- Doug.

It takes all the imagination
together we can muster
to live fully
when we are dying

:- Doug.

Let’s imagine
days full
of living with one another

:- Doug.

Is it about how long you live
Or how much you live?
How would you make your days
Full of life?
Some prefer quantity because they
Can’t imagine
How to fill days with life

:- Doug.

It is not right to give up
We need to sustain Mother’s life
But give up what?
Beeping machines, blood draws at 2 am,
Strangers changing her diaper?
Holding a grandchild?
Recognizing her husband?

:- Doug.

There comes a now
For me to give up cure
And work on healing.

:- Doug.

We look through the window
And know there is an outside
Larger than the window shows us

:- Doug.

Do everything is a disease of the 21st Century:
It is cultural
We think this is what we should ask
For a loved one: we don’t want to give up
So instead we give anguish

:- Doug.

Lead us into conversations whole making….

:- Doug.

Perhaps there is spirit in every book.

:- Doug.

When the human soul lets out its pain
It closes its wound, becomes again one
The human soul has ability to heal

:- Doug.

Suffering:
Barrier often
Bridge possible

:- Doug.

To share a pain
Is to share humanity
And birth hope

:- Doug.

Our earth is ailing,
coughing, innards in turmoil,
skies inflamed, running a fever:
we each are nurses called
to give a healing human touch

:- Doug.

Not so much global warming as
climate destabilization

:- Doug.

Consider: polarities share the same line.

:- Doug.

Because we stand
on the same ground
Reflect, reconcile, hear

:- Doug.

You want to fight me
I am like you
Because of this
There is a place
Where we can meet

:- Doug.