FootprintsintheWind.com

Trust the conversation
Trust the people
Trust the strangers

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

In reading a wonderful book, Kim Stafford’s Early Morning, one of the things he says Bill and Dorothy Stafford taught their children was Make sure you talk to strangers.

This is good advice. It is paranoid to teach children to avoid people. After several generations of telling our children to never speak to strangers, they are dangerous, we have internalized it.

So when someone offers to connect, we fear. How are you going to find friends to share the laughs and tears with, to go to for help, if you do not talk to strangers? How indeed can we find friends if we stay away from people? In conversation’s terms, how can we ever become real if we do not meet?

Even in our scary times, this is good advice. For how do we overcome the terror except through each other?

:- Doug.

Is your work a work of importance?

:- Doug.

Rather than work in the econo-my, we need to be working in the econom-us.

:- Doug.

What are some of the best conversations? What makes them better than the worst or the inconsequential?

:- Doug.

What are the mysteries of dialogue? Just how can we be born?Why do we shy away? What pulls me on? Deeper levels of intimacy or thinking than are possible for one person—what is possible when 2 or 3 meet? Is it about intimacy? Is intimacy too broad a word, like trust?

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

What is intimacy? I got the intimation (!) or inkling this morning that it is a stand-in word for something else and more diverse than this word, much like yesterday I realized trust is. We speak of intimacy with another and with G*d. We speak of sexual forms and spiritual and emotional. It seems to mean letting down shields, so it then means letting yourself flow out and letting others flow in. There is a mingling of essence, a mixture of skills and talents, probably also of shadows. There is an examination of shadows as well as lights. There is an uncovering of the covered, an unfolding of the folded—a ripping! There is a mutual discovery and exploration for discovery. There is a vulnerability exposed, not so much trusting but hoping the other will see and be gentle. There is in this vulnerability and intimacy an unknowing, and a gradual realization that each one is infinitely larger than we had supposed. There is also connection: a knowing. Knowing deeply. Knowing, being known, being recognized as person, as worthy of being known, of being valued.

Intimacy is all of these things, but rarely all at the same time. Is it a continuum? Is it wave or particle? Does it come and go? Is there a ridge between intimacy and non-intimacy? What would non-intimacy be? Hate? This might be a form of intimacy. Ignoring, looking through, I-It? If so, now that we’ve named It, what do we do about It, how do we recognize It?

What then is a good conversation? How much intimacy is best? Does a good conversation need to be about something that matters? I suspect we can have a good conversation about meaningless chit chat if that is what the persons need. There can be a connection there if all we need to do is share a good laugh or a piece of fluff. Yet I suspect even then we are trying to connect. We in effect say, “Hey, I’m a fun person, gentle, caring, someone you’d like to know.” My preference is for the ones which change things and change—open—rip—people. This seems to mean to seek out the shadow and especially the flash. The more the question matters—is live—the closer we get to the bone: the closer we get to intimacy, to living inside out: displaying to the world who we really are, playing with the world with our most real self. Truth and Beauty and Goodness merge in each person and we need all of us to get all the facets flashing. Intimately. Really.

:- Doug.

We are incomplete
And G*d is the most incomplete

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 703

We offer each other what we can
We stretch a little—we must
Life comes at us, we are buffeted
Now and then we remember we are life.

Please pass it on.

© c 2006, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

G*d is bigger than that.
Whatever you say or think….

:- Doug.

Remember when you quote scriptures that all have come to us through human filters. Some light therefore is colored, some clear, some diffused, some bent, some things appear that are not visible to the unaided eye, and some is kept from us. Seek to see.

:- Doug.

We need to let things land
before we bat them back again.

:- Doug.

The trees do blush, a-knowing they shall soon be bare.

:- Doug.

Why do we try to get ahead? Ahead of what? Ahead of whom? Rather, could we live?

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

Now this is evocative: verse comes from a root common to versus and means turning, turning as in plowing, turning the soil. So our turning in conversation is a bringing the moist, dark, composted matter to the top, aerating and providing a home for roots and growth and living organisms. Beyond the dance to the dirt. I like that. To turn, roll, stir, fall, spindle, distaff, toward, bend, destiny, ladle, become, turn into, wind, fold. Good stuff!

:- Doug.

Transformation is task. Ever incomplete, it is joy.

:- Doug.

Can we know anything, grasp it forever? Nothing is forever. Everything moves. No one; every one; all. Yet inside lives a need to know and be known. Our question is to find a way for this one, now, to creatively say goodbye. We know forever the good, beautiful and true we have touched and set it into motion, outward.

:- Doug.

What are the parts of ourselves that need transformation? Can we know?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 702

We are not damaged goods, dented in our fall from the shelf, but incomplete, designed to be better than perfect. We are asked to improve the world. We are asked to help each other grow ever and always more complete.

Please pass it on.

© c 2006, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Do I make poetry because there are ones with whom I want to get in touch?

:- Doug.

Do I create words because I see more there and want to share?

:- Doug.

What is it about little girls and mystics that leads them to want to spin themselves dizzy?

:- Doug.

What is the role of departure in conversation? It seems it must be great, must at least not be ignored. It could be that if we do not disengage here, we may miss engaging there in a new way. It could happen as running out of steam, but if the conversation be good, it calls for a good ending.

What makes the ending good? It invites a going forth. Perhaps it invites a returning—as a new person. I think of the Hero’s Journey cycle as informing this: going forth, meeting danger, being—with one’s own innate resources—transformed by meeting danger into a new person, who then returns to the community, changed, changing, to the larger task of meeting anew.

We are whole yet incomplete. Our task is to complete. Once we move toward complete, we find other ways to complete. Changing our community, contributing to its change, takes courage and energy that no one of us possesses. Energy is not a thing to possess, but a flow to invite, receive. So we use our energy to ignite and invite others’. It takes courage to invite it, faith to know it is there in most people, some nearer the surface, some buried deeper, most hidden. Departure is not only a new beginning; it is an arbitrarily named place on the spiral.

Departure might be a call to reflect. Departure might be a place to take a deep breath and a rest. Is departure the in-breath, the out-breath, or the small still space between? Might departure be more than all this?

:- Doug.