Gnawing dark beast
In conversing two things: We bring a little of our other into ourselves; we let go a little of ourselves. Perhaps this is fire and death. Perhaps this is a gnawing dark beast and a seedling.
:- Doug.
In conversing two things: We bring a little of our other into ourselves; we let go a little of ourselves. Perhaps this is fire and death. Perhaps this is a gnawing dark beast and a seedling.
:- Doug.
I seem unable: —to find any animals who don’t have some conversation; —to claim for humans a higher animal state, but only find those animals more closely resembling us; —to hold only humans have emotions or feelings.
Holding these notions is ultimately not significant. What is is to find one another, to create our one another. Conversing, we create not things but persons. It almost seems we are adding layers to the onion, blood to the human beasts.
:- Doug.
Your direction through the door
—what you’re gaining
what you’re losing
what you’re facing—
slices you a wedge
when opening to you
the all around bursts
:- Doug.
These very conversations
These swirling bodies, minds, souls
Are how we transcend reality
:- Doug.
Your friend is your adjacent possible.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2320
Water to water
rain to rain
puddle to puddledust? hardly!
fire from fire
storm from storm
birthing from waterswe commit
we commend
we come fromus from us
person from person
breathing vapors we
water based creatures
eat water based
creatures becoming
hydrogen hydrogen oxygenwet while alive
mysterious while alive
maybe also afteryou spit
in my face
making me wetter
wet your kiss
sloppy wet mineon waters born
we die dry
except the eyes
Please pass it on.
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We are a part literate part oral culture. As long as we have vocal folds we will be oral. If we can listen we may hear our oral forebears, our oral selves.
:- Doug.
For the bright snow
against the brilliant blue
I must all my thanks now sacrifice
:- Doug.
Some use a string
to find their way returning
I seek a thread
to find a way into
the forest’s dark and bright
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2319
Just as a toddler looks into the face of a puppy or horse or elephant and squeals, having seen himself, so you too can look in the face of your friend and see something new in yourself. You probably ought now to squeal.
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
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Let us learn the language of story telling that we may feed our many.
:- Doug.
Our friend is a well opening underground to a rushing ocean, a roiling river, a boiling cauldron. Into our friend we drop our visions, fears, possibilities, our souls, spirits, dreams, knowing—without proof, knowing—that they will be returned to us infused.
:- Doug.
Can we—you and I in conversation—take a little from here and put it there, and so change this? Is unfolding a big thing?
:- Doug.
It is just barely possible that we seek most the mysterious, the thing just outside our reach, the temptress fading into the mist, the prairie dog chattering and disappearing below ground.
:- Doug.
I am not trying to prove it
It is the other way around
:- Doug.
Patch Adams has decided to be silly as a way of life. Can I find my way there?
:- Doug.
Some sneezes are wet
Some coughs are dry
Finish this poem, or try
:- Doug.
Is she another person outside this setting?
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2318
The flower, the poet, and the sausage: One way to compose a poem is the “natural way, in which a poem is born from within itself….” When Phil pointed out this Bashō quotation to me, I wondered how a poem could become from within itself. I played with this. Maybe the haiku is borne out of the meeting: the meeting of the flower with the poet. The poem is then a third thing. A poem is neither flower nor poet. I point my index fingers toward one another a nose-length away from my eyes. As they approach, a sausage appears and hovers between them. The flower and the poet come near, they meet, and the haiku hovers there. The haiku is the sausage. Phil reminded me not to watch haiku being made.
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
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There is not one story—within every story there are always more.
:- Doug.
How does it affect one’s thinking to be left-handed? Your hand always immediately covers what you write. How would that train your memory?
:- Doug.
At Quaker Meeting today, one member stood and related about meeting with a friend. The friend had had a massive stroke a few months before. The two women sat, one speaking, the other not. The one with no words had eyes alive. “I experienced radiance,” this member reported. What a wonderful friend to notice this radiance. If I was the one without words, I would want to give such eyes.
:- Doug.
Maybe a pattern-seeking animal is a pattern-making animal. If so, ought we be seeking non-patterns, such as the random, the stochastic, the guessed-at? For instances: the music in the wind’s vagaries, the way some birds fly sort of with the flock, sort of not, the route of smoke on a still day? Let’s go farther and further afield from those. In looking in these places, we are even now looking for a pattern. What is a non-pattern? It has to somehow exceed the question of What patterns are we incapable of seeing?
:- Doug.