FootprintsintheWind.com

Many times I read a writer and think I have found the key. “We have a history from which we need to recover.” “We need to pay attention to what’s around us.” Ever I find another big picture and way through. Next week a new book, a new idea, a new whole to fit my burgeoning thinking. There is no solid ground, it is all ice floating in a moving river. We take our stand. These floes our human “solidity.”

:- Doug.

In conversation, is our work to act as life-givers?

:- Doug.

We humans are tiny critters caught in a web, a web spun out of a folklore of unendable economic progress. Once the spinning started, once it became our new home, we ourselves began to weave. We did not, do not, notice we began weaving with carcinogens, sludge, and poisons. We have reached an astonishing point where ordinary people inject themselves with botulinum! We can no longer see a way out to solid footing.

:- Doug.

What does it mean to hear through another’s ears? How is it done? When are we done?

:- Doug.

There is applied imagination
But what of implied imagination?

:- Doug.

We can round a square and square a round. Can we verb a noun, and noun a verb? English, as many western languages, has too many nouns, too few verbs. We need to verb many things! River that sky. Book your ideas. Husband your wife.

:- Doug.

Whether or not they have stolen her money, they have stolen big chunks of her personhood.

:- Doug.

Can gesturing—to ourselves alone, or with others in conversation—help us think and relate?

:- Doug.

Notice when we cross the senses in everyday speech and metaphor. Why?

:- Doug.

Is it so, that I use metaphors to help get me into a physical experience? To carry me bodily out beyond mere mental description? What is that sweetness I turn over on my tongue?

:- Doug.

What do we not know? About conversation?

:- Doug.

Let us play the game of random metaphors. A table is a pot of frogs; a conversation is the smell of dirty feet. Then we all work to find ways it’s true. After, we search for new meanings. What would the world have to be like for this meaning to work? What would it be like to be one of those frogs, or that smell?

But how do we find those random and strange metaphors? How do we get as far away from similarity as we can? We have no idea till we get the idea. I suppose.

:- Doug.

Do what’s right; deal with the explaining later.

:- Doug.

Long talk

:- Doug.

Conversations of the long views

:- Doug.

An intelligence lurks in conversation beyond the intelligence brought by the players. Moreover, this intelligence can be coaxed into the open.

:- Doug.

I may have closed my practice. But I have a work.

:- Doug.

We cannot re-set the conversational clock back to some idealistic past. We sync ourselves and the conversational clock. That way conversation does its evolutionary work from today, where we are living. At its optimum rate and effect. To keep the conversational clock alive, we keep it lively in the participants: central to their living.

:- Doug.

Let’s look at conversation in terms of trajectory. Where is this conversation headed? Where is conversation headed in our community? Our culture? In its meanders?

:- Doug.

If you want to converse better, read more widely.

:- Doug.

“They used to meet across the road and we just keep that lectern here for them. But the younger people are not so interested in community service,” the older proprietor told me. I like talking with older people. Their talk is soft and gentle. It takes a long view. It shows how we all fit. Conversation of the long view.

:- Doug.

Conversation is at the edge.

:- Doug.

This is happening
so that
you might converse better

:- Doug.