FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1388

Your life is a
shining example
to others!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1387

When you visit me
in my sick bed
you are breathing life & health
upon me

When you pray for me
you are stirring the air
wisping around me

When you think of me
movement starts my way

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1386

How to write a poem:
Walk us along the
Flowered & thorny path
Then in the last line
Hand us clippers
From gravity
To cut us free

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1385

Help me speak from my dementia
Since I have trouble thinking
But I feel, I see, I exist
I want to love you
And be respected
Because I am, still
I remember, I remember
The songs, the dances,
The babies
I don’t have the words so much
Any more
But my life
and yours
Are more

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:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1384

Don’t sit down and write a goal for the new year: zero in on your life’s purpose, and live that. A goal is something you can complete, something you can put a specific date on, and then you can rest. You can check it off. Life is not like that: I will complete my life by June 1, and then I can rest in my grave.

More meaningful would be to get your real work rolling out in the world, continually living it, constantly taking up opportunities and choosing course as you go. For instance, work on getting your message to the world: write an hour a night on your book, talk to new people every week, get speaking engagements. When someone new presents a project, evaluate it on how well it serves your purpose: if it serves in a big way, jump in with both feet!

Let goals serve your larger purpose by helping with the little things along the way. Keep your eye on your true essence.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1383

Color deepens
Light suffers
Death of a loved one
Deepens our colors
What then if we die?
Oh, of course, when we die?
Goethe saw light suffering
In colors
If we deepen humanity
Is it because first
Light suffered?
A vessel deepened
Has greater capacity

Not attaining the scale
I’d like is itself
My kiln firing
To deepen
Colors & lustre

Play and dialogue:
Conflict in comfortable
Everyday clothes

Revelation: I fear conflict!
Yet seeding for new growth
Requires plowing under

Revelation two: I fear growth!
So much I keep
My mouth & pen silent

Scale up! Mouth and pen!
Enter the conflict…with self!
Deepen your colors
Speak out!
To spouse, family, world!
First, plow under, seed,
Play & dialogue,
Dance & snow
Relentlessly piling up:
But if you must, War!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1382

Two clouds, snowing
Moving towards one another
Bump not, merge
Become one another,
Intermingle, snow, create
New shapes, emerge
As two or three, or
Maybe stay in their
More than embrace
Still they snow
Still they travel
Unless we look up
We do not see
How alike our conversation
Bump not, merge

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1381

The person who brings the need is at least as valuable to the conversation as the person who brings new ideas.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1380

Conversation arises from the unknowable and indefinable totality of persons, and not from ping-ponging strings of words back and forth. The latter is taking memories, old patterns and fixity of categories and reworking them for this word battle. The former is exposing one’s vulnerable innards to new perceptions…and therefore reshaping. Conversation then is not a technology that can be learned and applied to every setting. Conversation is more an alertness for perception and reception of the new, the unknown, the surprising in the person in front of you. When two or more meet at this level, new persons are perceived…and born. But take care: there is an unceasing movement of the new toward getting mired in old tracks of thought. That’s why conversation is a practice. The watchword is vigilance: stay alert.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1379

Don’t be irritated that spouse, happenings, life interrupt you
These are the stuff of the divine
Reason you are here
Detours are your
Given path

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1378

What age would I die?

The one that is my own. Well, what can that mean? How does that help? It helps perhaps by saying we can let go of controlling it and let it come to us. It will without our efforts.

The question then is one of helping us noodle out how to live for the rest of our days. Will we be healthy? Will our mental powers stay with us? Will we remain ourselves or become somebody new—less or more? Will we be meaningful, feel meaningful, do meaningful? Will we matter?

The question also turns a mirror on the rest of our lives and asks What matters about my life? Our life together?

It also asks how we want to be treated by others: will we be respected? Remembered? Heard? Part of others?

Given that we have no permanency, what then is the purpose of our days, whether many or few? I see it is about the help we give one another, purposely, wittingly, or otherwise: love.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1377

The work set in front of you is at least the first work.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1376

A journey we make together
Dad is dying
The dialysis is not doing any good
Dad is fighting dying but getting tired
Mom and daughter try to ask “the question”
Maybe we can get the doctor
To start the conversation with Dad
And son John is so
Torn to pieces he can’t visit Dad
and son Mark says “Oh, Dad,
You’ll beat this and be stronger than ever”
Somehow this is
A journey we make together

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1375

The problem is not that the work is meaningless but that the worker is: the worker has not worked on the meaning. The worker is left without a meaning to grab onto.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1374

We meet, and then we share. Or perhaps sharing is what meeting is. What and whom do we share? Ourselves, or aspects of our selves. As well we discover and even create aspects of ourselves. These aspects become for the moment our selves whole, and yet are not all of us. We are large, we encompass universes. What and whom do we share—other than this very question?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1373

The day the tulip tree died
I heard no sound
I looked and it was down
It kindly avoided with its 90 feet
Just feet away the building in which I stood
Another day will hold the work of clearing
For this day a silent kind of mourning

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1372

Can you afford to live to a ripe old age?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1371

Let’s make conversation
conversation rich, textured and
opening

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1370

Forget the furniture! That should be our mantra! In a book I am reading a man is recounting how his father tried to get fellow Jews to leave before Hitler rounded them up. What he heard was “What shall we do with the furniture?” He left. They did not.

What furniture holds us back from life? Perhaps I should not start this big project now because I am usually very busy in the month of May. And I have a spring class to teach. Furniture!

Choose the profound, the larger. Choose life! Choose now. Forget the furniture!

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1369

This rain
now caressing
now soaking
now thunderous
brings me
home-like thoughts
of God

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1368

Why do the people turning left get to go first?

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1367

Spirit is the quality we call together.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1366

Our society is in pain
& since our society now practically spans the world
the same pain is expressed everywhere:
violence, robbery, murder, rape, war, terror
we scream, we yell at one another, we see the other as threat
we try to force the other into our mold, into the old ways
all explodes—
and yet…
we are in times of great flux
the perturbance is getting larger, the swings wilder, the ride more frightening
even the ground, the oceans and the weather are shifting
the old, the reliable, the comfortable are going away
(are we too?)
something new (which we protest) is approaching
birth

Please pass it on.

© c 2013, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/341-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com