FootprintsintheWind.com

The purpose of conversation as of poetry is often to de-familiarize us and re-familiarize us.

:- Doug.

Things which just barely touch conversation are in fact the outer edges of conversation, its learning places. Listening, hearing, attending become positive acts of expression: strands inseparable from the knot that is conversation.

:- Doug.

What we are working toward in conversation is a consummation, not a mere cessation. We savor not solely at the conclusion, but throughout. We circle it. It infuses the whole. Here is a wholeness. A wholeness that does not know where it is going—our adventure!

:- Doug.

Can we converse in a way that brings enduring grace, charm, and beauty to our offerings and our receptions?

:- Doug.

When you start to take even one other human as a monster, that’s you, becoming.

:- Doug.

How will you know you are in meeting? Reality tells us we may not know till days or years later. Memory may pop, and you know now what it was. A flash catches you in a later meeting, telling you both were and still are meetings. A word, an echo, a perfume remains, stays with you.

:- Doug.

What makes our meeting memorable is when we manage to round it out. That makes it a meeting. This is why Harrison Owen said that overstaying can undo the meeting. We are undoing the rounding, fraying the threads.

:- Doug.

We cannot hide
who we are
from others
except the others
don’t know
how to consciously
read what we reveal

:- Doug.

Within art is the ethics of goodness, truth, beauty.

:- Doug.

The work is to go on.

:- Doug.

There may be value in staying with the hunger.

:- Doug.

We shrink from intimate because we sense it is of the holy. It is other. Do we remember that holy is other?

:- Doug.

A sadness not to break us
but to hold us
how we want to be held
or were once held
as children
made by it
not unmade

:- Doug.

Conversation is an art
a dark art
we bend to it

:- Doug.

What happens in processing?

:- Doug.

Meeting can be about finding the large in the small.

:- Doug.

However free it be
However right it be
Much costs much

:- Doug.

In the fog
of the woods
I see afresh

:- Doug.

The soul and the spirit, yes
Who and what and more awaken?
They play, they are not lost as you

:- Doug.

Finding our humanity is enough, because it creates.

:- Doug.

Purer arias
Quieter paths between

:- Doug.

Circumference holds the world in her lap, tenderly, loosely, letting go—out. It is her privilege to touch all, hold all, release all.

:- Doug.

When your eyes look
Look to truly see

:- Doug.