FootprintsintheWind.com

To be lost is to be entering the between in I and Thou; to sort is to be in I-It.

:- Doug.

Finding a final answer is not the seasoned ending.

:- Doug.

to revere the between
this conversation’s role

:- Doug.

Is that indeed what conversation seeks: that the world perpetually seems fresh and young and old and wise?

:- Doug.

This is some good progress. The thing about it is, I do not know towards where. That might be good: It tells me something else I do not know about conversation. Maybe even we.

:- Doug.

If attention is narrowed perception, how then can we ever get a large enough perception to find reality?

:- Doug.

Possibilities of what happened:

1. A great boy is experimenting and causes an explosion. After a bit he tires of the thing and wanders off to new mischief. The question is, What sort of boy?

2. Another great boy makes an explosion and stays with it, feeding the conflagration, stirring. Same question.

3. The explosion, or singularity, happens like oily rags self-combusting, only this “time” without oil, without rags. The shards continue going out, colliding randomly without end. The question is: Is there a why for the explosion?

4. A great magnet of sorts, more ethereal than physical, draws all forth and out, and if you logically follow it where “you” have been, you arrive at an explosion, a singularity, leaving you with a question: What sort of magnet?

5. It all never started, will never end either: It is like a perception in, or manufacture of, your mind. You see Mom as good, some other sees her as the personification of evil; there is no way for you to ever know if the color I see as the deep blue of the sky is the color you take in from the same sky. The question raised is: Is there a reality? What matters and why? It is all random and absurd? Where is love?

:- Doug.

Negotiation is an expression of a need to come together, to find one another.

:- Doug.

What insights I gain now are not to be weighed. Received. Added in. Grown. See what and whom they bring.

:- Doug.

You are giving yourself to me in these few minutes. It is my responsibility to offer myself to you—fully, without reserve, with abandon.

:- Doug.

If we “sell” by having the other sell themselves, can we use this principal to find Thou in one another? How are we to do that? We can ask one another, “What does it take for us to find the person in one another, for you to open to me and for I to open to you?” “What is common between us?” “You’re probably asking yourself, ‘Can I trust this person with something as private as this?’ I’m asking myself if I have the courage to truly open up to you. And then I say, ‘Here and now are only the two of us, and in a hundred years the risk makes no difference, but the discovery might make a difference.”

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2185

Dialogue is sacrament. It is an engagement that binds upon the participants an obligation each to the other. It is thus a visible or audible sign of the grace between. This grace is mystery to be sure, but an everyday possibility.

Please pass it on.

© c 2022, 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

Love is not what you feel
Love is what you do
Despite what you feel now

:- Doug.

There is something real when persons gather.

:- Doug.

We’re so fat these days from trying to feed our scrawny souls.

:- Doug.

Can meaning be made for, or found by, more than two? Can meaning be meaning for me if it means not me, this me? If I must mine the meaning, work it, to make it mine, then is it of lesser worth than that arising between you and I, just these specific two of us? Can meaning be made for, or found by less than two?

And yet in my writing, in my dreaming, don’t I seem to try?

:- Doug.

Instead of analyzing what the other person says—instead of combining something of yours with it—could you find the person? Could you enter their essence? Could you become the between?

:- Doug.

Voices
allow betweens
once & only
making conversation
making persons you and me

:- Doug.

We grow out of this placement, among these people, in the betweens of this people, not simply out of dirt and stars. We cause this place to people. It is what we do, and our responsibility: responsibility to the place and to each person.

:- Doug.

We have an opportunity, not so much to draw people into spiritual conversation, as to venture there with them.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2184

Do you enter
into relation
or do you shape the door?

Please pass it on.

© c 2022, 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 because we grow out of a common universe does not mean we are all one and same. We humans developed separation. Separation may be an art form. Separation so we may join together, collaborate.

:- Doug.

We are not merely inserted into this world as aliens, but grow out of it as foals from the donkey. We belong here though we kick our heels and refuse our work.

:- Doug.