What good will you be?
What good would you like for your having been on this planet to amount to?
:- Doug.
Archive for the 'Conversations' Category
This red ribbon
This red ribbon
is not the gift
nor are pretty pieces of paper
—it’s in shared glimmerings of life
The gift is the
heart of the giver
:- Doug.
family & life & dreams
At this market we are selling
completeness and wholeness of
family & life & dreams
:- Doug.
The edge of this sea
The edge of this sea
Is before me in mists
I can tell it is vast
& will carry us rowing and splashing
To new and lively shores
:- Doug.
Why a dump truck Will?
Why do you want a dump truck Will? If all you want is to rid yourself of stuff then Who gets it and How should matter little. If it is important who and how, then you owe them to think through how and how much and what and when.
:- Doug.
not the road less traveled by
It’s not the road less traveled by
that makes all the difference
but the taking
:- Doug.
at any moment complete
Who can say when the end
of a human life will be
or therefore its middle?
We think we know the beginning
But each life is at any moment complete
:- Doug.
A Will is a way of nurturing dreams
A Will is a way of nurturing dreams—those of your tribe as a whole, particular ones of your children and other beneficiaries. What do they dream? How can you help? What do you have—especially besides things?
:- Doug.
Loneliness
Loneliness is our greatest suffering. Therefore the work of elder caring is critical.
:- Doug.
power of storm
There is power of storm
in conversation
the power of life
Here are consternation, tears,
sweat, births, madness,
drunkenness, rain, surrender,
absence, lightning, emptiness,
sacrifice, thunder, deaths,
all the rest of the
wholeness we call life
seeded in conversation
the storm of life
:- Doug.
not to defend yourself
The object is not to defend yourself, but to bring wholeness to our midst.
:- Doug.
as in a letter to a lover
You can be whole when you empty yourself and give it all—all—away, as in a Will, or a letter to a lover, or a prayer of your heart.
:- Doug.
Here we are ripped open:
Somehow life and love and surrender and courage are part of the same ball. Of course they are: they are part of life, part of the really real. Yet they are keys to it, doors to life.
This looks to the outside world like crazy-making, and to those of us inside like whole-making.
:- Doug.
All is tied together by love
All is tied together by love: love calls us to courage as surely as love calls us to surrender. Surrender is unto death. It is not to subservience, but to life and to new nascences.
:- Doug.
We are nothings and everything
We are both nothings and everything: some day our carcass will become but food for other creatures great and small, and yet, and yet, the universe was arranged just so as to bring forth us!
:- Doug.
Where disorganization comes in
This is where disorganization comes in. We cannot plan our careers like someone in a novel plotting the move from City Council to Senator to President in twelve ever more prosperous years. If we keep our eyes and hands and hearts open, we can meet friends and life itself. Yet this takes courage for we know there are tears and sweat and many little deaths and the larger death. And if we are attentive, we see that there is life coming out of the rotting leavings.
:- Doug.
