One large gift
One large gift of conversing—and meeting—is gathering. Whom and what do you gather?
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2334–Whipping cream disappearing
Footprints in the Windsm # 2334
That a conversation moves from a café at 3:15 to outside time and space for its partakers is the office of meeting. That a conversation moves from two distinct individuals to a blurring, blending, swirling of the lines separating them—like whipping cream disappearing in chocolate—is a flag of meeting.
Please pass it on.
© c 2024, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
Easily attend
Three things you can easily attend—1. Is your friend up in the mouth or down? 2. Is your friend using high energy or low? 3. Is he or she trying to connect with you? Remember also to attend yourself on these questions.
:- Doug.
Align your mood
Do you intentionally work to align your mood (positive ←→ negative), and your energy (high ←→ low), with your friend?
:- Doug.
Not consciously held
Conversation is not simple. It is not an equation. It is not even a negotiation. It is a leaning in toward an unknowable complexity. By another complexity. It takes experience that is not consciously held, imagination, and guessing. So the morals are centered in good will.
:- Doug.
Unexpected directions
Try taking conversation in unexpected directions—to find what you can find—of each other.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2333–By you too fast
Footprints in the Windsm # 2333
Listen to hear! In your words flowing by you too fast, sometimes yours, sometimes your friend’s, are soft tiny flecks of worth. Pan.
Please pass it on.
© c 2024, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
Vulnerable validator
Perhaps it helps in coming closer together to not be the idea guy (guilty!). Rather be the first follower—the vulnerable validator.
:- Doug.
ineffably effective
The power in the ritual of conversation is both ineffable and effective.
:- Doug.
Designed to change
If ritual is designed to change a situation, our attention is called to assess the “situation” and then to “design” the change.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2332–Participating = creating
Footprints in the Windsm # 2332
Participating
in the conversation
means you are creating
Please pass it on.
© c 2024, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
How to heighten our sense of responsibility
The work of conversing and meeting is to effect transformations—beneficent ones—of the two, the communities they touch, the worlds they move within and move. Tom F. Driver writes of this in The Magic of Ritual, p 174: “life is not something to be treated. . . but something to be enacted. . . . The clearer case is moral: when we understand ourselves as agents active in a world made up of other purposive beings, our sense of self and responsibility is heightened.”
:- Doug.
Moral critique
Conversation and meeting should be subject to moral and intellectual critique.
:- Doug.
The place that touches each
The liminality of conversation contains a bit of incorporation: we are brought into the play of this “time” of coming together. This we can expect, because the jet of separation enters the domain of the together. The liminal is the place that shares in each by touching each.
:- Doug.
