FootprintsintheWind.com

Take Names: When you are advocating for your Dad at the nursing home or doctor’s office, get personal. Find out the names of the people who are providing care.

Not to know whom to sue or complain about, but to be human, to put a human face on Dad and you and them.

Not just the doctors: the nurses, the aides, even the person who mops the floors. All are providing care for your family, all know things you don’t, and all have some ways to help that can surprise you.

Use their names when you speak with them. Write them down so you remember.

As Ira Byock says in The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life, “Befriend them if possible. Tell them about your father—what name he likes to be called, what he did for work, what he loves most in life—and bring in pictures of your father in his prime. Let them know you appreciate their care, and thank them for things they do to engage and pamper your father.”

:- Doug.

For most families you are being a burden if you deny your family the opportunity to care for you in your greatest crisis-time.

:- Doug.

We perhaps need to choose: choose with whom we converse. Just had a call from a polling organization and I chose not to take the call. This would be a surface level conversation, and it would take me off my work for today. Good choosing. But then we need to choose on purpose those with who we will share our deeper, timeless selves. Our spouses, our children, our grandchildren. Our clients as well. With whom do we wish to share delight?

:- Doug.

Is relatedness more of the essence than conversation? It would be easier. But we need to work at it. Conversation is that work. We need to work at it if we are to enjoy its fruits.

:- Doug.

Depth is timeless
To explore humanness
go beyond the ticks of clocks
lightly hold your eyes
on the mysteries
of relatedness

:- Doug.

How are we alike?
Alike is of our deepest humanity
Alike is of out deepest mystery

:- Doug.

Wheels within wheels. The days spin round and come back to 9:56 am every day, the weeks spin round and come back to Sunday, the the months spin round and come back to January. Our lives spin round and they are all going someplace it seems. It seems.

:- Doug.

With one another, let us look for openings to speak spirit.

:- Doug.

You don’t always need to hear something in meditation/contemplation. Just sitting is enough.

:- Doug.

Fog hugs

:- Doug.

The between
living
moving
maybe intending

:- Doug.

You
can’t get there from here
there are such places
light centuries
away
and hidden in
a subatomic wave

:- Doug.

Streaming changes
the course of
all it touches
So between
intends

:- Doug.

It’s time we grew up about God.

:- Doug.

Whatever you say about
Whatever you picture about
You are limiting
God
Still these are
Some of

:- Doug.

We are not earning
the hugs
for the hugger
is yearning
to hug us

:- Doug.

We are true agnostics. There are many big things we do not know of God.

:- Doug.

We set a goal and we set our minds and hearts on a particular outcome. Our story may not end till lifetimes after our own. Outcomes are not ours to own. We are wise when we hold outcomes—and goals—lightly.

:- Doug.

“God” can be shorthand for “something bigger than us.”

:- Doug.

When a thought comes by in meditation/contemplation, simply say “Next!”

:- Doug.

The term “directive” in the phrase Advance Directives goes too far. First it seems obligatory, when what is going on is in the nature of a request: help me, use your best faculties to figure out what’s best for a situation I never expected to face when I cannot make known my wishes. Second it assumes that we know what we want in all settings. We do not. We cannot. We need your help to gather information and wants and desires, dreams and hopes, possibilities and needs and then choose a series of tentative steps forward. We need a better term, something along the lines of Advancing Conversations.

:- Doug.

Death is not a failure. Death can be a coming home, or a relief, or an end of suffering. Death can be a culmination, a whole-making, a healing. Death can be a fulfilling. Death can be welcoming, friendly. Death is ever a mystery. We don’t know what death is. For some unknown reason, we all do it. There is often good in it.

:- Doug.

If we think death is a failure we should all give up.

:- Doug.