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Profundity nudges us along the growing stem leading to a flower which is a station on the journey but not its end.

:- Doug.

Why do we need profound things?

:- Doug.

Posit:
There are things which most find profound.
Conversation touches these things.
We can point recognizably to these things.
Finding the profound things helps us remember. Us.

:- Doug.

People tend to agree on the deeply personal things, the things which are welcoming, which feel homey and friendly. So I can use that even if people do not agree that beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholder.

:- Doug.

I want to explore how to ask people about what a deep conversation would do, look like. If you could have a conversation with 2 or 3 people, alive now or at some other time, who would you want to engage? What would you talk about today, this first meeting? What would such a talk feel like? Where would it take you? What would be the setting—a garden, a campfire, some other place?

:- Doug.

If we want to get to depths we need not only be alert for when they appear, but to plumb for them in likely places and times. Places might be people, these people; times might be more mercurial yet subject to being probed with questions, jocularity, lightness, invitation, and story.

:- Doug.

I will make what they create.

:- Doug.

Notice the poetry from the last few days: I have chosen small things and concrete. Just here are the shared, the common, the things which come to our hands, to which we all belong, which remind us of our belonging.

:- Doug.

Even if we can or can never know these things—meaning, long, deep—is there worth in proceeding beyond knowing, beyond even the desire to know?

:- Doug.

What long views can we find in conversation? Long in the sweep of history: time. Long in what all is taken in: spatial width, depth, height. Long outside time: now, eternity. Long outside space: one, universe. Long as a force co-extensive with the universe, maybe long is the stuff of the universe. Long outside the players while including them. Surely long is longer than these.

:- Doug.

If I were to write a chapter or a section of a chapter on the role of meaning in conversation, how could it be done to make it other than a chore and a bore?

:- Doug.

What are the roles of meaning in conversation? Meaning is a reward for engaging. Meaning is a draw. The opportunity to find meaning in this conversation; the opportunity to express my meaning; the opportunity to explore my meaning, to examine it. Meaning makes work. Meaning creates discomfort. Meaning accuses. Meaning repels people. Meaning repels fun. Meaning draws us to our more. Meaning must be more than these.

:- Doug.

What does deep mean in conversing? Are there paths to it? Why do we avoid this question? Is it too difficult? Why is it difficult? Are there too many ways to define deep? Is it recognizable? Will we know when we arrive? Will we only know after it is over? Can it be sought? Can one open to it? Can more than one open to it? Does it require that both arrive? Is it about intimacy, knowing one another? What does deep mean to me?

:- Doug.

Well then, what approach to conversing? Open to the possibility of conversing, open to going deep.

:- Doug.

Make an approach to conversation, grow the conversations from seed.

:- Doug.

It is not necessary to say the all in all is conversation; the smaller thing more clearly so, is that humans react to one another, they converse with one another almost every day, almost all of them. Conversation is the human world.

:- Doug.

Of course it is impossible to define conversation: it is as impossible to define the limits of what is real, because once you have done it, then you have something else next to it which is not real, and how can that be? Do I need to simply love the question: What is it to engage?

:- Doug.

World = Conversation

:- Doug.

Perhaps conversation is not diffused through space but is space itself, like Einstein’s gravitational field: we have a conversational field?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2190

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2190

We are removing the emoting from observation. It is Clean Thinking: not adding our own wishes or predilections to what we are thinking through. What is the thing stripped? Then again, there is no thing apart from its context. So we need all that: but it is good to know that there is the thing and the all that: to see clearly, cleanly.

Please pass it on.

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Trust conversing
enter in

:- Doug.

The object is not to know conversing, but to discover conversing.

:- Doug.

I keep looking for the end of things in my life—get through the task, the meeting, the next thing—while the end of things is in the middle. Live where I am, partake of life.

:- Doug.