FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2162

Like the boy lost in thought, we dance the circle dance of conversation. It stops our thinking to get us thinking new thoughts, it stops our talking to get us talking new talk. New persons.

We remember to remember. We are new persons.

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Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2161

People of the fire
Conversation makes
Make conversation

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© 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

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2160

Some say history is a river
Some say spiral
Others, older perhaps
hold it is a lake
where past, future, present
mingle
I swim through
cool and warm pockets
Ancients speaking
Whispers waiting for birthing
I am—all are—reshaped

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© 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

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2159

Making conversation is not to be taken lightly. It is a sacred responsibility.

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© 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

About what should we talk?

:- Doug.

Lighting fires
cooking
storying
destroying
restoring

:- Doug.

Might I kindle your eyes?

:- Doug.

My task: to call forth.

:- Doug.

Death is our profound mystery
Life the mystery hiding beneath
We swirl

:- Doug.

Say less to open ways.

:- Doug.

In conversation we call to one another. We want to meet, to be known and to know, to arrive at good for all of us. To open ways.

:- Doug.

I call for seeds: finding powers, putting to work in many directions, a delta of stream beds from a mighty river.

:- Doug.

Please give us space to consider. Consider: with the stars. The world is more, unfolds.

:- Doug.

Consider. That is the return. My way to open.

:- Doug.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of reciprocity, I of conversation. Waters of waters.

:- Doug.

We do the work of conversing. Then it works on us.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2158

Trees and grasses. Sunshine and earth. Some water. Someone hands you a slip of paper. It says you alone can be here. For a spell. For a spell. Together you imagine a house. A home. A garden. You enlist help. A house and garden appear. Home comes into focus, continually changing across years. Friends come and go. You join workplaces, groups, perhaps churches, political conversations. By you joining, they change. You change. Your world changes. You see it differently. New people come. With richer pictures of their world. Someday you realize everyone lives in a different world. A world each makes. A world seen through filters each holds up. Even husbands and wives live in different homes, see different trees and grasses, sunshine and earth. Some water. For a spell. For a spell. It is good.

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© 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

What Buber offers as gifts, as Kierkegaard offers, are not free. We have to turn. We have to go out to meet the face. The face of Buber’s Gott, the face of our daily friends and antagonists. We have to go again and again to the narrow ridge between I-It and I-Thou. Are you willing to turn and go back there with me? Buber asks. I ask. Let’s look again at the path to that narrow ridge:

Page 3: “PRIMARY WORDS DO NOT SIGNIFY THINGS, but they intimate relations.

“Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.

“Primary words are spoken from the being.”

Page 75: “THE EXTENDED LINES of RELATIONS meet in the eternal Thou.”

Pages 123-4: “its central significance—namely, the close connexion of the relation to God with the relation to one’s fellow-man.”

:- Doug.

Giving is not free to the giver. Pain, sore muscles, and back aches visit givers. More, it breaks the heart.

:- Doug.

There is a power I want
But don’t know if it’s there in conversation
Now I remember I have seen its power to destroy
To destroy marriages, families, countries
I fear I am expecting magic
But magic is something for nothing
This, this will take work, and pain, pain

:- Doug.

Conversation is a world
made of gifts
Gifts
you may not buy
nor sell nor trade

:- Doug.

Let us converse the world
Back to wholeness tonight
Forward to wholeness with morning’s light

:- Doug.

Respiring
Breathing in and out
Comes with conversation
Makes
Fire

:- Doug.