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What is the concept I am seeking in the word “spiritual?” Thrill (to pierce, penetrate, hole, shivering, exciting feeling). It is an uplifting, a possibility of doing the impossible, being the impossible. Being more than we thought possible.

None of these are it, only nip at the skirt.

That little thing easily smothered that begins a conflagration.

So much for not being able to name it. What is it? Maybe that is the best, the better way: say what it does. This little thing in conversation like spirit may be more verb than noun. Conversation does things. To us. Conversation makes persons, changes us, engenders relations, starts fires. This little thing in conversation is what instantly boils the blood.

:- Doug.

Conversation is response, and that is a realm of Thou. This expresses belonging or longing or giving of self or hearing of like or receiving or interchange or flowing.

:- Doug.

What is the character of this conversation I study, and what justification have we for approaching it with respect and awe?

:- Doug.

Buber says we can stand in I-Thou relation “with beings and things which come to meet us in nature”, (pp 124-5). Some original peoples of North America hold that non-human animals and plants are persons and deserve to be met as such (e.g. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p 56: “know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents.” This one is “Someone, not something.”) Might the latter enrich the former? More specifically, are words necessary for conversation, or even for meeting?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2156

The big question right now is why and how recognizing our relation to plants and animals, knowing again their personhood, relates to our study of conversation. In one sense it is obvious: relation and person are basics of conversation. Yet we in western thought mode, especially since the rise of science, do not admit that living beings besides humans can be persons. That is, can have value as individuals. So one thing we do not know is how this mosquito, this dandelion, this moss can have worth as an individual. Another is how we might meet.

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So I am seeing a desire to make spirit central to my study of conversation; and to look at specific areas or uses of conversation—to make it concrete. If conversation is central and not a tool, then what is specific, what is concrete? How do I give it framing, put meat on the bones? Conversation is perhaps how we stitch spirit to spirit, or reveal the stitches. Not so much stitches as tendrils, living bits reaching out to other living bits. Softly, tenderly stretching to meet. That is perhaps the beginning of a frame.

:- Doug.