FootprintsintheWind.com

This may be the moment when a largely literate populous is becoming more oral, more passing.

:- Doug.

If it can be done as simply as with a meeting of two or three it is worth the experiment.

:- Doug.

What is the effect on our daily lives of the life living in our conversations?

:- Doug.

How can conversation enlarge our vision of life? Picasso offered: “You’ve got to create images they won’t accept.”

:- Doug.

Gregory Bateson points us to the meta- and the meta-meta- logical levels for conversations about conversations, and conversations about conversations about conversations, with a warning: Never nothing more!

We could as well look another direction, to the conversations beneath, the roots, the conversations within, the entangled.

Quoth the raven, “Ever, more!”

Here too is complexity and worth, hidden and available.

Quoth the raven, “Ever, more!”

:- Doug.

In sailplanes there is an instrument variously called a variometer, rate of climb and descent indicator (RCDI), rate-of-climb indicator, vertical speed indicator (VSI), or vertical velocity indicator (VVI). Humans are a variometer of climb or descent of the humanity and life in the currents around them.

:- Doug.

There are many conversations underneath the conversation.

:- Doug.

First we listen
That we may hear

:- Doug.

We each have varying words for what is most profound about us—and where it may be located. Not to worry. It is common amongst us and all can hear it.

:- Doug.

I don’t care what you call me
so long as you hear me

:- Doug.

There is a closeness sometimes comes along with conversation.

:- Doug.

Words are tools
left lying about
might cause you to trip

:- Doug.

This is my task: what is conversation? How to measure it? How to estimate the degree of life inherent in the moving centers, and to find out what this life is.

:- Doug.

The work—the unknown—for me is to convert the ideas in architecture and other arts into the art of conversation, so as to point to places ahead to look further. I may not get to the promised land, it may be that none of us does, but we can start the course.

:- Doug.

I tend to think of conversation as of 3 broad swaths: Outside the Gate, where we chit-chat; the Corral, where we exchange information; and the Open Field, where we work.

:- Doug.

In lived conversation, we tend to use a word several times, we get hooked by this word, perhaps a word we seldom use. Why is that?

:- Doug.

Books are tools. Mark them. Tear them apart.

:- Doug.

What catches our attention? What calls us to share our attention with another?

:- Doug.

The cooking theory of conversation

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2116

Do our conversations gain a deeper feeling in complexity? Just maybe they do. Complexity is a place to get lost, the unpredictable flames in the cooking fire, and lost is a deep dark place with things swirling around you. There is something moving you cannot quite understand, cannot grasp. Maybe it grasps you.

Please pass it on.

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What are we cooking in conversation? Ourselves. Our ideas. Our betweens.

:- Doug.

It’s not the stove
It’s not the flame
It’s not even the heat
Nor the ingredients
It’s the cooking

:- Doug.

What’s cooking? What are we making?

:- Doug.