FootprintsintheWind.com

Since few have seen God and talked about it, all we have are metaphors. I have been working to throw off the old metaphors and get a larger, truer understanding. Yet all I come to are new metaphors. Although those can help, eventually they too need to be left behind. Crutches, vehicles, and then traps are metaphors. God without images is the old advice. No easier today. No more in line with human desires for a handle and a picture.

:- Doug.

If you are terminally ill do you want to be treated for cure or for care?

:- Doug.

Sensitize your ears
Sensitize your heart
Be in touch
With
All there is

:- Doug.

Experiment with and cultivate your singing.

:- Doug.

In the 1950s we saw machines as labor saving devices, things to do for us. Today we have machines extending our reach, enabling us to do new things. Humans dislike idleness, ever do.

:- Doug.

Let’s look among us for the uncommonly good.

:- Doug.

When is death when a loved one has dementia? When the personality disappears? How much of it? When the body disappears?

:- Doug.

Who’s doing it well? Follow that one.

:- Doug.

Help families make room for a good death.

:- Doug.

Let us be sharing stories of people dying well.

:- Doug.

Who and what practices allow people to die well?

:- Doug.

Questions being more pregnant than answers, having all the answers makes you infertile.

:- Doug.

If to reach me you speak to me from common ground, how then does God speak to each of us?

:- Doug.

We can be growing up about God.

:- Doug.

How then shall we live as we die? How then shall we love them as they die?

:- Doug.

To reach me
Speak from the heart
Speak from experience
Speak from common ground

:- Doug.

What’s divine can speak to us through our skin and our feet and fingers and the seat of our pants as well as through our heads and our prayers.

:- Doug.

By being so busy, I have been blocking what’s divine around me. Changing my line of sight brought my eyes back home.

:- Doug.

Today, some thoughts and words have flowed. That is good. They come from my intention to be open and relaxed for a time.

:- Doug.

There was a phrase in one end of life study report I read this morning: unrealistic expectations. Families have unrealistic expectations about what can be done for their loved one at the end of life.

We can say that whatever we weak humans do or withhold of our technology can be overcome by God. We ought to send what help we can. But what is help? Help with life, or help with suffering? What if they conflict?

You cannot overcome the conflict by simply saying do not interfere with God, because that pretends the conflict does not exist.

Our unrealistic expectations are that Dad will get better: see, Dad is rallying. Yet those who have seen these things times before know this is a common stage of a common path with a common goal.

We are afraid to speak truth to one another, to share what we are reading in the handwriting on this wall. So we hold out unrealistic hopes and we shut our minds to what is in front of our eyes. Do we ever refuse reality? Here we do often. Is life ambiguous? Of course. Do we do wrong by forcing someone to fight beyond what is realistic? What is realistic? Do we inflict suffering on others and ourselves?

:- Doug.

Curious resonance: be curious about others, speak your center to mine, let us see what pulsates common among us.

:- Doug.

No guarantees: only curiosity.

:- Doug.

It’s harder on your family to not have the conversation.

:- Doug.