FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2101

Host a poetry party—finish each other’s verse—with something that makes it more wonderful.

Please pass it on.

© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

My working question is: What can theater, architecture, sign language, dreams, sharing food, and all the other languages teach us about doing conversation well?

:- Doug.

Life is in conversation.

:- Doug.

I seem to be a non-institutional Christian.

:- Doug.

Of course you quaver. It’s a conversation. You cannot know where it leads.

:- Doug.

Now I see the plaiting of languages: theater with architecture; story with nourishment; sign language with dreams. The betweens converse. Here is the engendering, the gestation, the giving birth.

:- Doug.

More than a mixing it is interfusing so as to carry: meaning.

:- Doug.

There is a meaning of words pulled apart and standing alone, naked, side by side in a dictionary. There is the richer meaning of words dancing or wrestling arm to arm, belly to belly, in a sentence. It is worth our trouble to study sentential words.

:- Doug.

Languages In Conversation

:- Doug.

Meta conversation—contexts of contexts—betweens of betweens: here is the really real, the hidden course of life. We are inter-steeped in this, brewed so we seldom see it, and certainly cannot tease ourselves out separate.

:- Doug.

Does your conversational partner feel nourished by your conversation?

:- Doug.

Today a friend said that he notices people are angry. It has been increased by covid. Anger means, my cousin told me, “it’s not fair.” There is an increase in feeling of it’s not fair. INF. It isn’t, covid and our candidate losing or not having his own party fully behind him or people vilifying others based on their politics or religious beliefs or any other things that are not basic human. So how do we meet others as humans? Converse from behind screens, like a state band contest?

:- Doug.

I have a lot of study to do for my Work: from storytelling to sign language to architecture to theater to dreams to relational presence to nourishment to a dozen more. And what will the languages tell me? I cannot know. They each engage a different part of conversation, a different aspect of doing human.

:- Doug.

On the way back, I was listening to a Krista Tippett interview of Jeff Chu. He spoke of his great grandfather, who was accompanied much of his life by two spirits, with whom he spoke daily. When his great grandfather decided to join the Chinese Southern Baptist church, the spirits became furious with him and when he did get baptized, they left and never spoke with his great grandfather again. Jeff said, “What am I supposed to do with a story like that?”

From this I see that one language of conversation is story. Story tells us things that require us to process—to work over and let work us. Call it “story conversation.”

:- Doug.

We are a swirl
One swirl all
Many swirls each
Swirls could be
Enough

:- Doug.

Our divisiveness may be fed by covid-19 and the separation we have taken. We have not had the opportunities to meet one another, to converse, to learn of a wider thinking: we have instead been stuck inside our little computers and littler phones, making our world swirl smaller by days. If we ever again get out to meet, we may find we are not so strange, and not so against us.

:- Doug.

A language is a way of encapsulating for transfer a way of thinking (itself a way of grasping and manipulating the world). Two ways combine.

:- Doug.

Conversation is your pair of seven league boots to traverse friendship, marriage, war, ages.

:- Doug.

First peoples converse with non humans
Mycelia carry messages between trees and others
Trackers hear tracks
All have learning to respect

:- Doug.

There being many ways to understand each sound we utter, we can be frustrated by how others interpret our intent, or celebrate. Or, look for all the ors.

:- Doug.

What if, instead of letting nature takes its course, we got active in our development? We could take some small steps in our moral or ethical development, or in the ways we converse. Ever with a hand light on the scales, so the ages might watch and correct.

:- Doug.

Dancing shows
we want the music
to bring us to entangle

:- Doug.

Life is hidingly cyclical
Unwrappingly we may allow it

:- Doug.