FootprintsintheWind.com

While we watched, it happened: It is processing that creates the thing, the artifact (not the other way round), but processing is where we live, act, move, bring being and existence to life. It is not the result we are after, but partaking.

:- Doug.

World-ing
We-ing

:- Doug.

Can one learn about one’s self, without a Thou?

:- Doug.

If we could find out for ourselves what conversation is and how to converse, we might get past our fights with one another, past wars and violence. We might argue well, dispute, get angry, love, and get our backs up—and get along after and anyway.

:- Doug.

You are only you in this context. In another setting with other people you are a different you. What accounts for the difference? And the unity?

:- Doug.

What happens in conversation? What happens in each player? In both at once together? In between the two? In society? In even larger contexts? What happens outside conversation?

:- Doug.

Why do you answer your phone? Does it call to you psychologically, socially, spiritually, some other way? Why do you want to talk to others, to hear their voices and ways?

:- Doug.

Do we live to converse or do we converse to live? Are these fitting terms?

:- Doug.

If we felt conversing as a sticky substance on our fingers and legs, we’d know we cannot free any one of us. Setting and sticky describe each other. As do the people.

Are we in fact freed to be our fullest selves when we find we are in this cinnamon sticky bun? All we survey are a part of us and we of they? Is it even possible for us to know ourselves apart from even one other?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2189

Possibilities sprout from ambiguities. Creativity yearns for ambiguity.

Please pass it on.

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Read E. M. Forster’s “Anonymity,” and that gave me the startling insight that not having a name takes one to deeper wells. Your name—being heard—might actually get in the way of losing yourself so you can proceed home. Who are you before your name is added? So that might hint that there is a deeper place to go with people than to hear.

:- Doug.

To be lost
is
To be home

:- Doug.

Home
Beauty
Spirit

:- Doug.

Some conversings get endowed with life, and some give life to their parties: both hear and speak.

:- Doug.

Is a city an agglomeration, a gathering-in; or is it at least a little a natural growing-out of people and environs? Is it a making visible and tangible what already exists?

:- Doug.

“‘There reaches a point where you see other humans drowning, or washed ashore with nothing,’ says Tara, ‘where there is no possibility other than to help with all your heart. It isn’t kindness, exactly—because there is less element of choice than people think, and for this reason it is less noble.’” Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, p 116.

This passage reflects fairly precisely my caring for my sister—or my present view of it.

:- Doug.

What does it mean to converse? What better question can we ask of conversing? What better invitations can we give to conversing?

:- Doug.

Conversation is making kin.

:- Doug.

If we should wish to send messages to distant times, do we do best to precisely choose our words and facts, or to work poetically, lyrically, in story, invitingly? Or all of these?

:- Doug.

Cartographers we are, mappers of relations, human and more, across unacquainted scales of space-time, to enlarge the ways we—all there is—think and play together.

:- Doug.

A thought from last night: our work, conversing, is related to what Alexander was doing in Book One, in particular the mirror of the self: we have in and among us BS detectors; we have also detectors of the higher, of spirit, of qwoan. Using those, we can find our way, toward the better end of the continuum. We know the way.

:- Doug.

I-Thou appears to engage the right-brain. How do we teach right-brain activities? Maybe inviting is better than teaching?

:- Doug.

Since conversation is a social activity, the way to learn it is in pairs or threes. Wherever two or three gather, conversation is possible in their midst.

:- Doug.