FootprintsintheWind.com

What are the challenges and joys of eldering?

:- Doug.

Why would any wisdom want us to be smaller than we could be? To be servants and not explorers, dust and ashes instead of creators and makers, to be plodders rather than dreamers? We are called to the highest we can imagine, to stir our collective blood and together to do.

:- Doug.

When our death is upon us, what shall we do? How shall we meet?

Shall we be drugged, or so tired we do not meet well?

Shall we be joyful, grim, with friends and lovers, alone, with book, music, stillness?

:- Doug.

Our main dialogue is between individual and humanity: how do we live together when we see ourselves so separate?

:- Doug.

One major dialogue is among challenge, ability, and willingness. We can scale any of these up or down. We can bite off little or more; we can engage skills long ago mastered or those still a mystery; we can walk towards or away. We weave ourselves into a complex fabric called “us:” you, he, she, me, blood, meaning, flesh, wind, stars, and in all this our work is ever more complete humans, and ever more complete humanity.

:- Doug.

Do I really want to sleep through my death?

:- Doug.

Can death—Dad’s, Mom’s—
enrich our lives
—& theirs?

:- Doug.

Had a conversation recently that did not go as I would have liked. I needed to be stern, but I did not temper my sternness. How can we be gracious and stern at the same time?

It probably comes down to being loving first. Conversational and open second. Persevering third.

Only take Let’s work together for an answer. Keep looking together.

Worth a try.

:- Doug.

Once I struggled to bring my business and my world work together. I used to lead a workshop called “Quit your job, get on with your calling.” I found that lots of people share the frustration between making a living and doing their larger work. It is not so much a matter of passion but of getting outside yourself, a matter of getting on to whole-making. Once we figure out how to make our calling consume our life, we can live.

:- Doug.

There is no such thing as “the Greeks.” There is a man buying skim milk and eggs for his supper. May we ask if the austerity demanded of him is proportionate to the benefits he received during the bubble days? Or did some other person—a speculator—take all those profits and even today eats steaks and makes deals?

:- Doug.

To seek after success
Is an undertaking selfish
& lonely

:- Doug.

What are the questions we should be asking about elder years to get us where we want to go?

:- Doug.

Receptors on the ends of circuits
Collect the energy from the air
Turn it into life
These same receptors wave to me
Lazily in the afternoon breeze
Call to me the job gets done in being here
Just like these leaves on the trees

:- Doug.

Meditation and contemplation are not about coming up with something to think of for this time: they are about the reverse. Relax. Easy has it.

:- Doug.

How will you be heard if there is no one to hear you? How will you be heard if you do not hear those near you? Hear the heart.

:- Doug.

Helping people be heard is the spring from which to flow.

:- Doug.

Self-disclosure is one step removed from being heard, is done with the hope of being heard, and this lifts us. The spring of our hope is being heard.

:- Doug.

The wind is ruffling the leaves in the tree
But today not mine; I am observer only
Some days it blows me along in front of it
Or rushes by me and I run to catch up
Often it stirs only within me so you do not see
When ought I accept the wind?
When stir?

:- Doug.

We can tell stories—our first hand, lived stories all the way to parables. We can become stories—as people did with marches and sit-ins in the 1960s. We can show stories—such as inviting journalists to see the daily miracles happening among us. Stories can be used to bring cultural change.

:- Doug.

What is the work I will want to be doing when I am dying? I do not want desperately to be trying to cap off my chapter, nor coming up with an apt final word. I want to be giving a gift of a good memory, a gentle parting. In a way, the picture of the hand pulled out of the water is just such a gentle thing, and therefore comforting.

:- Doug.

The lens some people are holding up so distorts that I can barely recognize our flag. The stripes are gone and all the colors gathered together, the stars have expanded to fill the whole (maybe because some of these folks think they are one of the stars). The red has become pervasive, the blue is considered invasive, and the white is gone. “Better red than dead” they shout at the other across the way.

:- Doug.

Potent disjunction
Disjunction: disparity, diversity,
wholeness, fullness,
roundness
Potent: possible, powerful,
wholeness, fullness,
creative
Our family: potent disjunction
calling us forth

:- Doug.

With my life I will buy happiness
With my life I will do what I love
Is money happiness or what I love?
With my life I choose the larger

:- Doug.