FootprintsintheWind.com

Artfully ought to include heart-fully, yes? Or we’re not human.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2373

Enjoy your tears
Here the garden is watered
Wipe not away your seed

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

A brush
spreading
softly tickling
persons
spreading us about

:- Doug.

Can we let go of what was unavailable to us? Let that pounce on our conversation? Word opens to feeling opens to surprise.

:- Doug.

What are the questions of conversation?

:- Doug.

We ought spread the contagion—of persons.

:- Doug.

Conversation, ritual, meeting, and maybe flow are each the intersection of two lives. No more may be said. These are necessary for humanity to advance beyond survival.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2372

Underneath your persona—where you are maskless—is your Indra’s Net. Reflected there is your mother holding your real face in her two hands. Reflected there is your mate. Reflected there are the many persons and people, great and unnoticed, who figure in your life, including the person with whom you last conversed. Reflected there are a hundred, hundred voices. Own your net of lucid gemstones. When you meet a new person you lightly touch a smooth or sharp or jagged facet of yourself—whom you can be, whom you are, whom you can grow into, at any number of life moments remaining, whom you can aid.

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

The Last Hot Chocolate is exploratory—searching for answers and mainly questions.

:- Doug.

Why converse? Shake off my blinders; wake up my mind; shiver my spine; cry; laugh; come close.

:- Doug.

Conversation is elusive, subtle, nuanced, varied, brutal, complex, and chewy.

:- Doug.

In conversing, do we shift from me thinking to larger overviews? Shift pronouns to the inclusive “you?” Take time out of our talking?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2371

Sleep long and prosper.

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

Flow is a clue to enjoying conversation. We should enjoy our conversations. Ritual is a roadmap into and around within the thing you’ll see, do, be, and want.

:- Doug.

Csikszentmihalyi’s flow is centered in individuals; Turner’s communitas is centered in culture or society; maybe conversation is centered in the two of us.

:- Doug.

Persons need, and are brought forth in, conversations of brain, feelings, and will.

:- Doug.

We get remade in the indeterminacy of conversation, not as new persons, but as new persons together. WE are gathered in the abyss.

:- Doug.

Too much hubris there is in a target—as if you knew where the arrow would land! All we can control—what a word!—is what we do till we release the string. See? Eugen Herrigel taught us—at book length—how much and how little is wrapped up in that lifetime of moments of notching the arrow and stretching back. Play together—with some one or two others—play in direction only—let loose your landing place—let direction find its arriving—each moment a garden of possibilities—each blooming just when our gaze calls to it.

:- Doug.

We haven’t seen each other practically the whole of our adult lives. We have stories to find out, warp and woof and guitar strings to finger and tease.

:- Doug.

I’ve been in too much of a hurry to resolve my writing—to make sense of the conflicts and complexities brought up by any two or three worldviews. I must learn to allow things to ferment and fester.

:- Doug.

If there are no ways we can guarantee a conversation, a meeting, or a good conversation, what are we to do? Are we, like the good fisherman, to bring our best rods, reels, lures, line, choose the best times of the day, the likely waters—and then? Keep putting our line in the water. Not grow discouraged when “the fish are not biting today.”

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2370

The sky returns to blackness
Always returns to blackness
But the stars!

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

We ought to be different
and difficult
versions of ourselves

:- Doug.