FootprintsintheWind.com

I feel like I keep getting to new ratchet-places and there is nothing to say: the steps before no longer exist for me.

:- Doug.

I am stuck in Cartesian thinking! I was attracted to this phrase the fabric of space as a locus for life. Now I see “fabric” as a Cartesian “machine-like” thing or structure. To be manipulated. Then when done, it is “fixed,” and can be “used.” To accomplish some “thing” I want to have or have happen. Ahh! But if I see it as flowing living, it becomes a dog with its own energy and deciding. So if conversation is not a fabric to be folded, wrung, washed but rather organic pulsing to ride, cooperate with, intensify, and awaken, then what?

:- Doug.

I am beginning to see that if everything has some life, the stones, the stars, then life is striving upward to more complexity, more inter-plaiting, to where there is consciousness, and whatever is beyond consciousness.

:- Doug.

We are engaged in awakening each other and the stuff without a name that we flow within when we become most alive.

:- Doug.

People love something. Start here. Not there.

:- Doug.

In conversation, some players function as fenestration, opening windows, doors, or skylights. Some close them. I want to be an opener.

:- Doug.

We could study each conversation in which we find ourselves. Listen to our own variometer. Find the flows. Give a look, voice a sound, send an intention to nurture this upflow, repair some other.

:- Doug.

Would you like to live? That’s news you can use.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2118

What if, in conversation, we consciously brought in more differences, more context, say by chance? More differences might help us in settings where people see only the others’ choice as morally wrong: it will help each “side” to see that the setting is much more complex than two sides. Maybe.

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

Deeper Together

:- Doug.

Seeing with our “together eyes” is a higher logical level than seeing each person in his or her own orbital path.

:- Doug.

I was worried that there would be no thrust to the book, the thesis, other than the drumbeat of What do we not know? The question is really, What do we not know of life? Then again, the question might be, Don’t we already know all we need to know of life? To keep learning it?

:- Doug.

How is all this news we can use? We cannot predict what your subjects will be. We cannot even suggest a method or create a statement of action or principles. However, we can state its purpose. Your purpose in conversing is life and all its closest living relatives: freedom; appropriateness; wholeness; fullness.

From here, all opens out.

:- Doug.

In what kind of a conversation can you like yourself, feel good about the whole conversation?

:- Doug.

As one person or between in this conversation is lifted, we too are lifted.

:- Doug.

Wholeness includes centers which appear, grow, and fade away as life dynamically goes on. Events are centers, and the gaps between centers and people. Pure actions are centers. All parts of the wholeness.

:- Doug.

What does it mean to say that our conversational surroundings support us in our desire to be free and to develop fruitfully and to act in all matters appropriately?

:- Doug.

Who is stronger? The big athletic 17-year old boy or his grandmother, 110 pounds, who must look straight up to talk to him? Which could pick up the other and hold him or her above the head? The boy is physically stronger. But let Grandma point an index finger in his face and he backs down. He can solve algebraic equations and explain the basics of calculus much quicker than she. But she can tell him what mattered from before he was born and can imagine further into the future than he. He has street smarts and can keep them both safe in seedier areas of town. She has world smarts to know the people in all areas of town are their relations.

:- Doug.

Let my reading brew, steep, percolate.

:- Doug.

It is the task of people to meet daily challenges and rise above. Sometimes, perhaps most times, this needs some together—either in helping or testing.

:- Doug.

What are the problems, annoyances, and conflicts that conversation is seen to move us past? What such things can we mobilize to encourage people into converse? Inaccurate question! What we want to know is the path to a common realization that conversation can be the action to move us past the stress, to help us see we are capable.

:- Doug.

Seldom do we realize how close we are to the tipping point.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2117

We should endeavor always to see one another in frames of value, of each one’s aspirations.

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