Conversation is hearing and being heard, with due attention to the fact that each person is vast inside—and even more vast are the ever-shifting, ever-growing spaces between and among people, and the vastness of the physical and poetic world we all occupy.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 1074
Conversation is when we take the vastness inside you and inside me and multiply them together.
Please pass it on.
© c 2010, 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
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You tried meditation/contemplation. What makes you think anything is supposed to happen? Do you expect God to dance every time you play a jig?
:- Doug.
The wonder of children is that they obey at any time!
:- Doug.
Hearing and being heard are profound because we are vast on the inside—so these multiply vastness by vastness.
:- Doug.
We have different ways to think. Some of them involve thinking alone, and these have proven fruitful. But there is another whole realm of ways to think when we are thinking together. These we have barely begun to explore. The fact of the matter is that together we go places we would not and could not have gone individually.
Just what ways do we think together? First, there is something that exists only in the group. Second, we have more views on everything and so these lead to more angles which ideas can bounce. Third, we have more experience against which to measure what we are seeing.
That is enough.
But what is this something that exists only in the group? There is something there, but it is a mystery. Perhaps it is a mystery because individually we cannot see it! It is related, I think, to people getting hopeful when they hear each others’ stories—it is in hearing and being heard. It might be in seeing the gaps and possibilities opened by the stories and the others. This hearing takes us beyond our own perceived limits: it stretches us. A group simply is larger than one person. It is also larger than a collection of individuals because of the hearing and seeing and stories. We cannot have stories with one person. There is a mystery to move us in stories, and it is simply the movement back and forth between teller and hearer. It touches something inside each.
So with groups in conversation: hearing and heard touch both.
:- Doug.
Conversation is a continuous flow: now fast, now slow, now enriched with silence. So if life is of one piece, then so is life’s conversation, for conversing is what life does!
:- Doug.
If you want to wind up
some place new
you need to
go a different way
(change your ways)
:- Doug.
When I have new people to serve I think new thoughts. When I meet new faces I come away new.
For creativity, actually for all life-filled life, it is valuable to switch the context—the people with whom you work, the parts of yourself—mind, hands, feet—you involve.
And then the surprise! When you go back you experience another switch—old and new juxtaposed!
:- Doug.
Helping a cause gives us a new conversation to invite.
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 1073
Paint incomplete pictures
Vigorously work to not know
See? Others are necessary
Invite, invite, invite!
Please pass it on.
© c 2010, 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
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
Wherever you turn
There are others to meet
Wherever you turn
In these you meet God
:- Doug.
Legal simply means relation: with other people, with groups, with government. Some laws are homespun, as Wills and powers of attorney, some imposed, as taxes. If there is injustice in our relations, how can we respond—best? By protests, marches, yelling, persuasion, reasoning together, coming together?
:- Doug.
Little bird flew to this tree
called to me then flew away
never came my way again
:- Doug.
Our source can be touched
In the gathered
In the whole
Not the parts
The meeting
Not the dividing
Nor the talk
But the conversation
Nor the speeches
More the silence
Our source as individuals
Is the group from which we arise
Nor do we make up the group
The whole engenders us
Expresses itself by us
:- Doug.
When we work on physical things and differences, we are working indirectly. When we cut off the weeds, they grow again and we cut again; but we are more effective if we extirpate them. Then they do not return. If we work on why we have differences, that is see that they are surface and we are the same inside where it all originates, then we do not erase the differences but celebrate them, work with them, turn them to good.
:- Doug.
There is this emergence
Between Among & Beyond us
Wind unseen, felt: real
We can fight
We can ignore
For awhile
Or we can with it work
Even now a crest approaches
:- Doug.
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