FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2185

Dialogue is sacrament. It is an engagement that binds upon the participants an obligation each to the other. It is thus a visible or audible sign of the grace between. This grace is mystery to be sure, but an everyday possibility.

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© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Love is not what you feel
Love is what you do
Despite what you feel now

:- Doug.

There is something real when persons gather.

:- Doug.

We’re so fat these days from trying to feed our scrawny souls.

:- Doug.

Can meaning be made for, or found by, more than two? Can meaning be meaning for me if it means not me, this me? If I must mine the meaning, work it, to make it mine, then is it of lesser worth than that arising between you and I, just these specific two of us? Can meaning be made for, or found by less than two?

And yet in my writing, in my dreaming, don’t I seem to try?

:- Doug.

Instead of analyzing what the other person says—instead of combining something of yours with it—could you find the person? Could you enter their essence? Could you become the between?

:- Doug.

Voices
allow betweens
once & only
making conversation
making persons you and me

:- Doug.

We grow out of this placement, among these people, in the betweens of this people, not simply out of dirt and stars. We cause this place to people. It is what we do, and our responsibility: responsibility to the place and to each person.

:- Doug.

We have an opportunity, not so much to draw people into spiritual conversation, as to venture there with them.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2184

Do you enter
into relation
or do you shape the door?

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© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Just because we grow out of a common universe does not mean we are all one and same. We humans developed separation. Separation may be an art form. Separation so we may join together, collaborate.

:- Doug.

We are not merely inserted into this world as aliens, but grow out of it as foals from the donkey. We belong here though we kick our heels and refuse our work.

:- Doug.

Conversation is the way we become persons
The way, that is, arising out of betweens
Persons, that is, to stand forth and do our work

:- Doug.

Conversation is the way we grow out of one another.

:- Doug.

Are we but pimples on the ass of the world?

:- Doug.

Is the end-point of conversation creating? Does conversation serve creating, making, working, forming? Are playing and enjoying essential in creating?

:- Doug.

Ask questions to which you do not have a full, if any, response. Thus we meet, opening and enlarging our betweens.

:- Doug.

Three things may be named which are likely roles of conversation in the world out of which we grow: to meet, to draw our, and to form the between of us.

:- Doug.

What makes a meeting fruitful? Is the fruit being?

:- Doug.

We can confront, but when is confrontation meeting and when not? To what extent do we invest our being?

:- Doug.

A clue to whether you are in I-It or I-Thou: I-It is about pastness; I-Thou about presentness.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2183

A person becomes such only in the presence of another—and then only in the face of the difference between them. Between them. Note well: each of us—you!—can bestow personhood upon an other you meet today. Astonishing! And ordinary.

Please pass it on.

© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

This ever-changing hour
touched
by possibility

:- Doug.