FootprintsintheWind.com

Denseness of a conversation is a question of how many new ideas we generate. It is also a question of the novelty, utility, diversity, and integration of the ideas which emerge. Another indicator of denseness is how engaged the participants are in each other, the conversation, the ideas, and the carry forward from the conversation. Denseness then measures quantity and quality in a conversation.

:- Doug.

Why do we have queries for individuals and queries for our whole Meeting? Does this arrangement take us somewhere deeper? Does it signify something fundamental about the divine human relationship? Is this dual questioning perhaps a yin and yang of some larger completeness?

:- Doug.

Open Space is conversation without a single subject—its subject occupies no space/time. Here is born its power—in dispersion.

:- Doug.

Maybe the edge of the universe—where we fall off?—consists in the many black holes.

:- Doug.

Could we get pulled into a black hole of constricted conversation where even our caring heart could not escape?

:- Doug.

Black holes are so dense they occupy effectively no space. Might we have conversations that occupy no time? Conversations with no boundaries in space/time?

:- Doug.

It is a matter of selfishness that keeps us stuck in the black ooze economy: the selfishness of those who claim to own the oil. They frighten us saying that if we overthrow them we will no longer have our automobiles, our economy, our jobs: we will die.

There is no proof to it: it consists mainly of their fear—their fear of trying something new. We can reassure that there is life (and business) after this activity in ooze dies its natural death.

We are not trapped in their death-story. We—that’s all of us—can write a different story. We just have to tell it despite their yelling.

:- Doug.

The problem with a distributed economy is not that it will lose jobs and businesses—because it will create jobs and businesses—but that it will eliminate particular jobs and businesses. Most specifically it will require the people who make the big bucks heading up the old way big businesses to think. To work. For all of us. To all this they are unaccustomed. We are unaccustomed.

:- Doug.

We are not so much about power to the people as power from the people.

:- Doug.

God speaks to us, among many ways, through the people we meet, the life around us, our memories, the books we read, the movies we see. Good morning, friend!

:- Doug.

Space is the opening, time the activity of meeting. Maybe.

:- Doug.

Time can be interleaved—or activities and conversations can be interleaved with respect to time. I email you, you email me at another “time”—one conversation. Asynchronously. Polysynchronously. What if their brains do not allow them to respond while we are still in the room? How can we yet hear them?

:- Doug.

If space is a community of living relationships, is time also involved in relating? Perhaps as rhythm? Maybe space is the stuff and time the relationship itself?

:- Doug.

Don’t have targets—have directions where you can be persuaded and befriended to choose even better directions.

:- Doug.

Conversation is how we organize our world.

:- Doug.

Population compression gives us more dense conversations.

:- Doug.

We amplify
eyes, hands,
imaginations,
moans,
soul,
when ourselves
intricately we weave

:- Doug.

Larger smaller
growing shriveling
loving excluding

:- Doug.

Can we allow ourselves freedom to become part of a greater whole?

:- Doug.

The atom does not comprehend the molecule, cannot know much of the cell. At each level this bears out. So how can humans expect to hold much notion of our gatherings? Or much control?

:- Doug.

Complexity invites self-transcendence.

:- Doug.

Humans move toward greater complexity—weaving and weaving ourselves into the new.

:- Doug.

We belong to many wholes
and they to us

:- Doug.