FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1775

I am the ground saying, “Rain, you can storm and I will still be here, calmly receiving.” I am the storm saying, “I am furious with you, I storm at you.” Again I am the ground saying, “Storm, you refresh me.”

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1773

The wind is my brother
To carry me along
Carrying my voice out beyond my carrying

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1772

I need to be more open with my mysticism. And it is beyond mysticism to intimacy, inmost to inmost, elusive to elusive. This is getting closer.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1771

Sometimes things want to happen all at once. Maybe if we let them….

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1770

We said “I don’t know” to one another. We accepted and confessed to one another weakness, even vulnerability. Then we got to work. Open, then work. Then we had to accept that closing would inevitably come. With it despair. It was all flowing into each other. We saw. We see. We fight. We embrace. Flame and cool water.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1769

A friend who has stage 4 cancer is dying. He has just provided the grandchildren a special swing in a park. He has also told me that he feels he is getting thinner and thinner, blending with the wind. This is what eldering is about.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1768

If the world is partially how we perceive, then we do have a claim to decide for it.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1767

If the question you’re working on is soluble in one lifetime, it is not large enough to fit your worth. Bigger questions. Working on you.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1766

Maybe you have the last puzzle piece
To enable us to see
What was invisible until now

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1765

Westward westward ever!
Clearing, fighting, taming, populating!
We came exploring
Young people doing young people things
For freedom religious and political
Creating something new and again new
Settlements soon cities
Fighting the indigenous
We stayed on and created industry mighty industry
Science, agriculture—O the huge farms!
Feeding the world
Our inventiveness and sweat youthful!
Sending our youth back across the eastern sea
To say “Bully!” and “Nuts!” to tyrants
Hoping idealistically to bring an end to war
And now a new frontier requiring daring…
Elders!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1764

What today will enliven me and let me say the day was well used?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1763

Rilke’s widening circles
carry so much
I just saw
Falcon against the sky
solitary, ever on the hunt
Storm the turning of all the sky
Great song the cosmos singing
Might all of us
interweave
all these
as we shift our focus?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1762

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1762

Begin with the end of your mind.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1761

This chill winter day a little woodpecker is climbing the maple tree, tapping at it. A cardinal flies off quickly to another tree. You live here all year, this is home. The robins and others migrate away in colder weather. An elder in a nursing home communes silently with the bird visiting the feeders outside his window. What do they share in their unspoken language? Than the worlds we think we live in daily, there may be more subtle.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1760

When young
there is plenty of time later

When seasoned
time washes

Time later
starts to course into
time now

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1759

In your wind we are wind
blown to be!
In your thunder we are thunder
startled to be!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1758

Dying is a time to come close to one another, to round out our togethering. We cannot know what that will mean till we get there, and yet we do. We can practice this part of our dying this day by seeing one another, saying the moment’s truths, arguing well, holding hands.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1757

Grands can start re-scoring our games. Rate the beauty of the arc of the pass. Praise the extension of the player in that catch. How well did this player help other players perform to their best—whichever team they are on? How did this person improve? Point up the beauty and grace of execution. Currently the Olympics demonstrate scoring technical and artistic elements. Subtle nuances evoke deeper humanity. In this way grands can help the grandchildren become ever more aware.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1756

As we become elders, we become less and less, more and more. Less physical, more real, expanding, more diffuse with each breath, a morning mist blending into the sunlight, floating on the breeze. Often mist-ified, sometimes mist-ical.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1755

An elder may hold back something of the story: allowing for the hearer to discover; allowing the story to cup its power.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1754

About the divisions the country is feeling: It is natural there be differences of opinion. We need to recall that there are many more of us now, each with strongly held opinions and even ideologies. Every community of people needs two things: stability and growth. These are opposing needs. If we grow, then things do not stay the same. If things do not stay the same, we are not the same as we were, we risk disappearing. On the other hand, if we do not grow, we fall apart through attrition or lack of fresh blood. So we need both, we need to include both. Beyond weighing one against the other, beyond balancing one with the other, including and honoring each. It is normal, it is healthy, it is necessary.

Here is the thing about those two: we must keep the two conversing. We must keep conversing. It is the only thing that works. Or we kill all of us.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1753

Grandchildren should be seen and especially heard.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1752

I have left meetings “blown away” by the power of what was shared. Life after may not have changed perceptibly, but what passed through us was profound. Could this be akin to what a first peoples person means by “powerful medicine?”

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