FootprintsintheWind.com

Being heard
Absorbing another
Partaking of a deepening conversation
We both lose and
Find our selves

:- Doug.

Yes, this is painful
Yes, this is hard
Yes, we can do it

:- Doug.

Expose the wound to air and light so the person can heal.

:- Doug.

Hearing leads inexorably to healing.

:- Doug.

Remember your dying.

:- Doug.

The conversations I invite take place safe from the crisis. Yet they prepare us for the crisis. In a sense they are memento mori (remember dying): memento viventium (remember living) in the face of memento mori. Not so we have a ready answer, so we remember how.

:- Doug.

I believe in the god most vulnerable.

:- Doug.

Caring welcomes; care does to.

:- Doug.

Not success
Seek right
The longer way

:- Doug.

The world is
Opening out
To me

:- Doug.

As we get older our species
Draws ever smaller circles
Community becomes friends
Becomes family—reversing
Our course of younger years
Growth of a different sort?
Growth work that especially
The dying and the demented do

:- Doug.

Which is the larger choice—
The task right and good
Or the project with the better chance of success?

:- Doug.

The experience to give one another
Is our whole and open heart

:- Doug.

Entangling, enlarging, engendering
This is conversation

:- Doug.

If you think conversation is about transferring information from person to person, you’re missing out on four-fifths of its magic.

:- Doug.

I work on people’s wills—their will to care well for one another in and out of nursing homes, in end of life, in families.

:- Doug.

In family conferences conclude by going around the table giving each person 60 seconds to say what our direction ought to be.

:- Doug.

My strength is the long conference…so that we can arrive at more workable options.

:- Doug.

If God has indicated “I want this one,” what is the purpose of our actively fighting the summons?

:- Doug.

If it is wrong morally to shorten life, is it as wrong to lengthen? Is it wrong morally to do inadvertent violence to one dying or to his or her family?

:- Doug.

Conversation goes beyond communication
we can use it to process:
circulating
ventilating
even generating
if we are willing
if we invite

:- Doug.

In probate, I am getting your son or daughter a license from a judge to exercise the court’s authority over your finances to settle them and make them final and complete. There are versions with and without close supervision. But it is your kids who call the shots. They decide how soon it is done and at what level of cost.

:- Doug.

The meaning of life being living and life being larger than any one, we therefore get our life’s most fundamental meaning from serving something in life larger than ourselves.

:- Doug.