FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation is a participant sport in a spectator world.

:- Doug.

It seems humans seldom think we are living in a good society. So can we at least make a conversation in which we would be willing to live?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2108

In a meeting of the minds, the players ought not go out the same as each other, but infected by each other. Inflected. Infected is stained, tinged, dyed, colored. To inflect is to bend, flex. Not change at angles, curved.

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My conversation work with groups has been artificial—people have in essence agreed to my rules, which implicitly ask them to be respectful of each other and kind. But when you’re sitting with someone you know and you want to raise a sticky question, how do you start? How do you reach agreement to be respectful and kind?

:- Doug.

Your passion
might just keep you out
of the beautiful valley

:- Doug.

Life is in conversation

:- Doug.

How does life enter conversation
Or the other way around?

:- Doug.

What might we do
If we were 11 generations
Working together
Then how do we decide
Which work?

:- Doug.

It facilitates adoption of change for the change to be small and smooth. Step by step we take our time so the dance is pleasant.

:- Doug.

Conversation is us expanding
How we make sense of all this
And so our horizon of ignorance
Its weather stormy or overcast
Though most days we are foggy

:- Doug.

Kinds of conversation (never that and nothing more): 1. Tell receptionist my purpose; 2. Medical waiting room pass time, deal with nervousness; 3. Weather talk expressing common humanity; 4. Convey logisitics; 5. One worker telling another where something is; 6. Person calling up patient for tests; 7. Secretary offering seat for comfort. . . .

:- Doug.

Goals seek to make the task as simple (and so, achievable) as can be. The next logical level is purposes. These start to add subtext to text. The next level is something akin to values and culture: things start to get murkier and tangled, harder to pick out. It’s here where the large and lasting hangs out.

:- Doug.

Metaphors seem to share some aspects with logical types, or at least get us to seeing relationships among things which are dissimilar. There is an even closer relationship between metaphors and abductive thinking: using one thing similar to understand more about another close to hand. Metaphor and metachange: a transfer from one to another, a transfer that extends our thinking.

:- Doug.

I want to explore whether indeed depth is met by complexity. There is complexity in emotion: probably no emotion occurs in pure form, alone from some other. There is complexity in spirit, swirling, mystery, mysticism. There is complexity in intellect, in text context and subtext, in the forest under-lands. Is all this complexity what we mean by depth? We often want to sound out the depths, find the floor, and yet we do not know if one exists, or if there is a bottom, whether it must of necessity be single or tangled. The bottom may often be a complex I do not know.

:- Doug.

Changing our conscious awareness of conversation changes the possible expectations we have of conversation. That is, it changes our relationship to the relationship that is conversation.

:- Doug.

When Gregory Bateson writes of somatic and genetic levels, that may be parallel to what transpires in a particular conversation and cultural understandings of what can and ought to transpire in conversations. There exist upper and lower limits in what is possible and permissible. It is a cultural level bias or setting.

:- Doug.

Perhaps by depth in conversation I mean, we mean, complex. Complexity gets to implications (in-foldings) and nuances and tangles not noticed in common hours. Just there (then?) we are liable to grow.

:- Doug.

Do we need to communicate love? What is communicating when we speak of love?

:- Doug.

Where does love underlie your politics? Love for whom? For whom in your daily life, in your home perhaps? Please tell me a story about why this premise carries ground shaking meaning for you, personally.

:- Doug.

Remember always that conversation is action, not stasis, not thing.

:- Doug.

Logical types in weather forecasts:
A. Chart of temps and precipitation coming
B. Motion picture of flows of clouds and wind
C. Pictures of jet stream
D. La Niña, El Niño
E. Climatology

:- Doug.

Poetry carries emotion
Poetry carries numinous, mystical

:- Doug.

Wherever there is life there is conversation.

:- Doug.