FootprintsintheWind.com

To our good friends–

We are together to converse. It will go some places neither of us intended. Some of this will be through Bohm’s ideas of similarity and dissimilarity, which are pretty similar to Howe’s correlative thinking. It amounts to relational thinking: how is this related to that?

We have to somehow get beyond thinking, do we not? For thinking is about analyzing and getting handles and limiting and defining things, and we need constantly to move beyond that if we are to grow.

Conversation then has the effect of moving us beyond thinking or at least thought (that is to say, beyond past tense historical thought) to some new field, where we can do relational thinking, where we can be drawn beyond. Beyond thinking or beyond normal ways and patterns of thinking? Still I think there is something beyond similarity and dissimilarity: what? Perhaps creativity. At least an opening. Perhaps awareness. Perhaps possibility. Is that all?

Is that all? is a wonderful question. It can bring us up long.

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

This morning I read a few of the notes in On Dialogue and The Miracle of Dialogue. I was thinking of my vision of the flowers of JOB. The long fluted flower, something a hummingbird could really love to get its beak into, is a drawing down and in of the lines of a continuum, down to a point at the base of the flower. Here at the center is the point where things begin to open out, inviting the hummingbird in at the same time. Where does the flower end? At the end of its petals? Wherever on the winds the molecules of its fragrance are transported? On the wings of the hummingbird which the flower borrows to allow its pollen to fly? In the nectar that flows in the veins of the hummingbird, becoming hummingbird? Or is the hummingbird becoming flower? Where do any of end and begin? Is not the air which Jesus and Gautama and Muhammad and Lincoln and Schweitzer breathed still around to be breathed by you and me? So then maybe we are the coalescing of the one whatever it is of the universe into nodes of the same? We are centers of the world, opening out, like the flower that describes the continuum. And where it opens out, it opens out to the all there is. Here joining and opening and being meet, here in the all there is. Here we all are unique and connected. Where does the flower end?

:- Doug.