FootprintsintheWind.com

No longer fully overcast
clouds are pulling away from one another
and between—O between!—
an opening here, an opening there
and in them a deepening
deepening blue, and I—my spirit—
flies again and again into that deep
out from my torso
into the blue, as it becomes indigo
then violet
then welcoming black

:- Doug.

Like much else in life, our messes and imperfections might just hold our greatest.

:- Doug.

Pure conversation is not about you. You’ve got to wriggle yourself out of your me, I, ego. It’s not about what you say, nor hear, nor do. It washes through you, you wash through the conversation. You and the conversation and your Thou all semi- or more permeable.

:- Doug.

Can either of us koan?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2218

I fear I fear the page so many friends who play with me and I taking one or two by hand at a time may leave my other dear playmates behind, leaving us sad and lonely. I’ll come back for you and we’ll play a new and fuller song!

Please pass it on.

© c 2023, 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

Here
in this conversation
offer your self
so divine oneness might
whisper through your strings

:- Doug.

What says this conversation
within the conversation
within the conversation?

:- Doug.

Can we live more than one lifetime? In a conversation? We can.

:- Doug.

What if, in conversing, our messages were not the conversation’s heft?

:- Doug.

A musician carries the music spirit in body and pulse. This conversation carries its music spirit in your bodies, in the conversation’s pulse, and in its circle of flickering shadow and light.

:- Doug.

Conversation is more than communication.

:- Doug.

Like my grandson’s basketball game: it won’t matter which team won or lost, but whether he gives it his all to the extent circumstances allow. So to each conversation. Sometimes, rarely, you both open, receive, and give your all. Other times, one or both of you can’t or won’t. Go on to the next one, with your new all, freshly.

:- Doug.

I must show it is possible, and invite my readers, to invent new ways for each of them to converse.

:- Doug.

William Stafford held that violence is a failure of imagination. Depression too is a failure of imagination—one is stuck and cannot imagine a way out, or only one way, a way that does not work or is too difficult to try.

:- Doug.

Maybe not everything is in conversation. Even so, it carries the spirit of conversation. And the encompassing spirit of meeting.

:- Doug.

Point to writers like Schafer and Alexander and use their method to tease out of readers new conversations.

:- Doug.

Your conversation is a microcosm. And a macrocosm. Of you.

:- Doug.

This is not a work of unfolding to the buyers what any of us knows but of circling about the territory, tracking to its den. It is also not about how we become better at conversing. Perhaps how we become better persons through conversing. No. That also is too small. Conversing we become persons. Conversing we. Period. Same thing. Bigger conversing bigger persons. Smaller, nastier conversing, smaller nastier persons. As you converse. . . .

:- Doug.

There is this thing alive in you in me
It is The Quality Without a Name
Heron stands in waters waits for bass

:- Doug.

Poet is spirit
with an upbeat

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2217

Anti-woke is racism in cloak.

Please pass it on.

© c 2023, 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

Just when I’m so prosaic
When there is no juice
It’s time to let my poet out

:- Doug.

Silence
Lets the other in
Secures our relationship
Gathers clarity
Opens stuffy places
—stay with me
—say nothing for a spell

:- Doug.