FootprintsintheWind.com

There is more to life than logic, Dollars and numbers.

:- Doug.

My thoughts are enfolded in your thoughts
Ours in ours together
Speaking, we unfold

:- Doug.

Sometimes, the end of life conversation is difficult because we do not know what options are open to us, when we might say enough, about what subjects we might converse.

:- Doug.

We have a human desire to meet—self, others, divinity. The mystery is we can meet all three in each.

:- Doug.

Not always will we be heard
Just so
We from heart must keep speaking and hearing

:- Doug.

As much as we conceive life
Life conceives us
Calls our actions together
To stretch itself
Conversation and we conceive
Each other
Conversation calls us together
Life is conversation

:- Doug.

The planets & the stars
The butterflies & the cars
If we are not here for all
The universe, then who?

:- Doug.

Salvation is not an individual affair. It is nice to attain union with divinity, but what good does it do for the others? If you do not actively love you are only a tinkling chain. If you do not grow the realm of divinity, what good are you?

:- Doug.

There are those who see God as the absolutely known. They have “him” pinned down, circumscribed, pictured. This works for them. For me, I must be more open. I am comes forth in mystery, vulnerability, responsivity.

:- Doug.

Meditation/contemplation is time invested in the universe, in the mystery.

:- Doug.

O Elder!
You generate centuries!
You generate me!
You generate us!

:- Doug.

Consider what might be a God’s-eye view of our lives and our families: a pearl upon a strand. Can we see death as a chapter, not an ending? There is one life, and it lives on.

:- Doug.

Your birth and death are each prelude to what happens next—for your family, for our tribe, for humanity.

:- Doug.

For the family, birth or death of one of its members is a chapter, an event to be marked, yet not a beginning nor ending. Something is lost and something gained: through all, the whole grows. How does your family grow by you having passed through?

:- Doug.

Conversing is whole-making. The person conversing is healing…and a healer.

:- Doug.

There are tragedies out there in health care. In a world that says it is about care, how much caring is there?

:- Doug.

Have you had the end of life conversation? If not, when? How will you begin? Whom do you love enough to have the conversation?

Whom among your clients and patients do you love enough to help get this conversation started? No, to insist they start it? To help them start it?

Why do you do anything, if not for love?

:- Doug.

Breathing together, we enact family, we enact together.

Breathing together, we learn the other person, we enter their inside, their way of thinking, being and feeling.

Breathing together, we realize that we are one, that even if we don’t think exactly the same, we are still one and we can love the other person well enough to respect their wishes.

Breathing together, we can see that our differences are not for keeps. Our alikenesses are for keeps.

:- Doug.

The answer to How is Be.

:- Doug.

There is in doing much ego. Thus there are two fields of doing, the vacuous and the plenary. The vacuous derives from It, the plenary from Poetry.

:- Doug.

Conversation is how we come into our own, into our one.

:- Doug.

If everything is moving, God is the moving, without the “the.” This could be true.

:- Doug.

Life jumps, falls and stumbles; rarely does it run a straight line and never for far. Linear progress is reserved for textbooks but not life. Look to your own life: did you at 16 or 18 or 21 plot that you would be here now? Straight lines are edited in later, but not evident in our days. Life is more gathering clues along the road not knowing which are clues, constantly trying various ones to see what fits, if anything.

:- Doug.