FootprintsintheWind.com

Search deeply: from where does this conversation arise? From whence your responses? No beginning, continual middles. Risings, fallings, darkenings, lightenings. Now simple, now profound, now complex, now stupid: human. And in that somehow sacred. Where does this conversation come from? Remember the bits you can. Give thanks. Inwardly find your reverence. Outwardly. For this other, for this conversation.

:- Doug.

Conversation is a radical thing: taking worth away from profit and placing it instead on living.

:- Doug.

Sacred can be found in conversing. Sacred can be found in living. If we put it in. Put in your bit of sacred.

:- Doug.

The conversation will no longer be the conversation, but something better. Bettering.

:- Doug.

If people are stealing from and killing one another, what right do Western capitalists have to deplore such things? For we have been teaching each other to do these very things: To take the land by force (whoever owned land before the kings and bullies, land the gift of the earth to humans?), to enslave the serfs, to invade the lands of others (think of the North American first peoples), to kill and maim and worse. We dare to hold over it all the name of a god of peace and love! To this day we expand the conquest, with soft sounding things like patents and intellectual property rights: patenting living beings, even humans. Taking our very lives. How is this good?

:- Doug.

Be grateful you are here to converse one more day. And hear.

:- Doug.

What we propose is a respect for conversation. See again the sacred in conversation, as our sacred responsibility to each other.

:- Doug.

I want us to see the world bigger. Bigger see. See with our ears, our fingertips. To take in with the beaks of the robins, the gills of the perch. Taste with our minds. Expand our reach, touch, and feel. Bigger see.

:- Doug.

Healing is work for all. We make whole and we make more whole. You don’t have to be ill or broken to be healed or whole. It just happens we all are.

:- Doug.

In our conversations let us make space to explore our sense memories and our sensing in the moment. There is much value here if we can get beyond the fast thought we barely recognize as not our own.

:- Doug.

A Lakota Sioux term: “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ” (All Are Related or All My Relations). I am coming more to believe this saying, no, absorb this saying into my being. All living are related through living.

:- Doug.

Intimate conversation flows from intimate revelation. It runs in spiral streams. I say what’s important to me. You respond with yours. I go to deeper waters. You as well. We sense in our fingertips something cool and thin and then begin to find these waters came from the same underground river. Shared source.

:- Doug.

When you hear a metaphor, it is an entry into the pre-words inner processes of this person. It whispers what they really feel or think. You can come closer. Just here. Hear more than one? Pick the last. Metaphor whispers.

:- Doug.

Interpret. Use your words to reflect back what you heard the other say. More importantly use your frames, your angle of view. For example, if the other uses sports and war as their primary metaphor and this does not enliven you, look for a picture that sources from your core. Perhaps it is cooking and the warmth, flavors, and gathering that brings. Speak your heart. Switch metaphors. You may both learn. You may come closer together. Share metaphors.

:- Doug.

If you won’t converse you won’t know him or her, nor your possibilities.

:- Doug.

Food is medicine
Water is life
Conversation is touch

:- Doug.

What if we reconnected to our local watersheds and foodsheds, how would it affect our conversations?

:- Doug.

Are there regional differences of conversation?

:- Doug.

We might renew our sense of kindness with our sense of conversation.

:- Doug.

Metaphor is a conversation between what is known and what is partially known, to the end that we might question, learn, and extend our world. Our life.

:- Doug.

What does it mean to be in conversation? It conversation a container? And nothing more? Lawyers, Doctors, and other professionals are in practice, but does it mean more: they are engaged by the Work? It there something for instance that they each—person, profession, conversation—get and give the other? And more than that? And less?

:- Doug.

It seems time to start interim-writing.

:- Doug.

So far—what’s next?—I’ve noticed two ways to metaphor. The first is the most usual: finding things which share characteristics: a slippery thought is a greased piglet. The second is finding things as unlike as can be imaged: a slippery thought is a pre-school class on the first day.

:- Doug.