FootprintsintheWind.com

The crowd dissipates; the dream fades.

:- Doug.

We are after, yes?, perceptions new to us.

:- Doug.

Is an event imaged necessarily any less real than a thing remembered? Memory is never as precise as we imagine; imagination is never as precise as we remember. Precision would take away an essential—a freedom, a power, a fecundity. But note: Memory and imagination may each take patient waiting, a turning away for a season, before it delivers viable offspring.

:- Doug.

The people you meet are all different from each other. Attend. Give your particular kind of attention.

:- Doug.

In a field softly rolling underfoot, a stream flows and spins, and if you are in it, you are fore and aft, and if you also tune your fingertips, you can hear whispers from all directions. Splashes and spots warm and cold, dark and clear. You are part. The field undulates and you raise your arms to steady yourself. Record what you hear, in dreamfields record.

:- Doug.

We gather around the quality we cannot hold in our mouths.

:- Doug.

Perhaps our converse arises when we release the quality we do not name in our world, our times, sending it outward rolling alive.

:- Doug.

How ought we constantly hold the Why?

:- Doug.

Where in your body can you find your pulse?

:- Doug.

Not knowing pulls us on like knowing never could
Not speaking pulls us on like speaking never could

:- Doug.

I tend to not explain my thoughts: they are more fertile that way.

:- Doug.

The other almost certainly has a name. Then again, why would a culture develop to give names or want names?

:- Doug.

This stuff about SETI is also giving me things to expand my thinking. She calls herself an earthling. That is larger than human.

:- Doug.

I feel like I am making progress these days in my search for what this work is about. It is an undefined and undefinable and unreachable end. It is finding a direction.

Can we detect intelligent life in the range of 300 years out? Intelligent and caring life? Here again words fail. We are trying to conjure up in imagination a ball without a skin.

:- Doug.

My words at least today are flowing softly, gently, with a grace. They are as life is.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2074

Most people think conversation is a tool. Not so. Conversation is the main life force and we the seeds to scatter it.

Please pass it on.

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Perhaps I should build a new habit: come out here and work first on this page before I check any email or weather or other things outside of this work that finds life.

After trying it: That actually, at least today, feels to be a more life-sensitive to start my day. We shall try that again.

:- Doug.

Our way of speaking, with sound waves, and communicating, with electromagnetic waves, almost certainly aren’t the only ways. Where and how are we not searching to hear. . .generations?

:- Doug.

You might ask—With whom do I converse? I might answer—with a specific person, Sarah, not yet walking among us, rather alive and an elder in 300 years.

You might ask—About what do we converse? I might answer—About that elusive quality of humanness and life that has no single word name. I might make up a word to mean exactly this and nothing else, say humanicity.

:- Doug.

What is this quality we call human, this flow and force running through us? It is not spirit, the word does not rightly fit the shape of the thing. Yet we know it when we can reflect.

:- Doug.

I write of time as if it were something standing in the way. Yet it is mutable. Yet it is sometimes a way most open.

:- Doug.

The timeless way of conversing is
the timeless way of making human

:- Doug

Here is the meaning of which I speak, which has no good word to stand in for it: a filament thin and strong as Lilliputian ropes that runs through humans and calls you alive. It’s not about wealth or success or fame, but about fully wholly being where you are, wanting only to live more alive the next instant. Its elements are presence and wanting what you have and are, and more of the same each day coming to you.

:- Doug.