FootprintsintheWind.com

It is now.

:- Doug.

To my good friends–

Spreading our touch more widely: interesting twist on that in reading from Bohm and Peat’s Science, Order, and Creativity. I have jumped ahead and read some stuff about Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry. I am taken with the notion that the growth here comes from adding the same shape at ever smaller scales, so that the same grows in the direction of smaller. Kind of like my notion of peeling the onion from the inside. Here it is additive: as the shape is repeated in smaller parts (for instance, adding a triangle or outward vee shape to each straight line, and then to the sides of the vees in turn), the shape grows outward. If done three-dimensionally (or as these authors point out, someplace between 0 and 3 dimensions, probably in fractions of dimensions, say 2.78 dimensions), on a living, growing basis, pretty soon more and more points outside the shape are drawn within the shape. Add to this picture the notion of tendrils and filaments, and pretty soon the whole world’s gossamer is throbbing with conversation. If the tendrils are seen as fractals as well, they are growing tendrils, too. The tendrils are fed from their roots as well as from their tips where they connect with others. Flow fractal flow.

So that means engaging conversations wherever and whenever I can. It means taking conversations deeper, to more meaningful spaces, and seeing what opens up. It means encouraging others to do the same, whether by simply seeing how good it is and can be, or by asking them to help spread their tendrils of conversation. It means enlisting others. It means enlisting in others’ movements to add fractal dimension for both. It means shaking people up, bringing persons into being. It means connecting through you, tendrils everywhere. It means not moving people, but touching persons. It means touching the living gossamer, weaving it thicker, weaving it more alive. It means opening a living space for the tendrils to meet and grow persons, ever-changing ever-new persons, sparking nodes where tendrils touch.

Sometimes when the tendrils touch, the sparks they produce are arguments and fights, and these produce a different person from when another tendril touches and sparks say a sexual fire or a tenderness. All are valid, for all exist. Flow fractal flow.

:- Doug.

A fractal conversation

We can grow in conversation in
fractal dimensions.
I’m not sure what
this means.
The closer we draw in
the more
the patterns repeats
and grows
we grow with the pattern and
each other.
It does not happen just with
whole numbers
and whole persons
but with fractions
as well
fractions of dimensions
fractions of conversations
the heart grows many
strings
tendrils
from which conversation can
pluck
infinite tunes
fractional dimensions
in conversation
the other person is
not wholly other
not wholly me
we are not one
and
we are not two
someplace in
between
we grow
as we draw our self-same line
more and more are
drawn inside
till an infinity
are within
a smaller and smaller
drawing.
Fractal conversations
a living field
generating persons
of infinite dimensions
interplaying.
Decreasing, finer scale
includes more
You can change your world
you can change this bit
this little bit
perhaps again
hope
small scale change
smaller and smaller.

:- Doug.

Each generation has the task of devising a conviviality for its time. Ours must find a way to relate to each other when the flood of history is toward hiding apart from each other.

:- Doug.