FootprintsintheWind.com

Something we really care about—this is an essential of the qwoan of a conversation, of a person.

:- Doug.

In conversation we mold space—so that it facilitates our life. We are shaping not life’s quantity but its volume—its fullness, its girth, its rippling.

:- Doug.

Does this conversation help each person to be more fully themselves?

:- Doug.

Maybe the deep part of us is the part where we are attached to the sinew of our fellow living beings.

:- Doug.

Conversational architects—me!—take up seriously our responsibility for the beauty, order, wholeness, and life of all conversations in the world. Do we gasp!?

:- Doug.

No straight lines. My mind seems to start at the periphery and radiate.

:- Doug.

Theodore Zeldin says, p 147 of The Hidden Pleasures of Life, that meetings can reveal of a person “a different voice or mask.” In this last situation, mood, conversation, or challenge, what different voice or mask did you uncover in you?

:- Doug.

Let’s embody the younger elder.

:- Doug.

What are some things we might do in a conversation to unroll life?

• Address feelings, facts (5 Ws), tell a story, ask for help, tell the (hard) truth.

• From inside a conversation, how to unfold life? I like the idea of asking for help. It is counterintuitive that it would draw us together, but it does. At least if the person asked is of a giving nature: most are.

• Telling the hard truth: this is akin to stepping into the fire. What advice does Arnold Mindell offer? Seek trouble. This might be a good book to draw on for the course. p 191: “say the lowest most gruesome things and the highest most spiritual as well.”

• Say what the group seems to be doing. Say “ouch!” Remind us of something forgotten.

• So this can be a fruitful exercise, and there is no end in sight, only if we do not keep looking.

:- Doug.

Mock up in your mind the surrounding terrain of this conversation: the people and events and land and weather. Then the people specific to this conversation: their personalities, mood, and wounds of the day to the extent you can guess. What little sweet or savory can you unfold from these that will let the life out?

:- Doug.