FootprintsintheWind.com

I learned more deeply about love from my sister. No. I am learning. In the youth of her old age, abandoned by her children, I help. Run errands, take her places, pay her bills. Love is truly verb, not feeling, for if emotions I’d have given up after her depression, pushing me away, pushing.

Just so, conversation is work. In this work, conversation is love. Love of Thou. Love of life.

:- Doug.

Project Apollo seemed to be scientific exploration, a drive in us from the childhood of our species. All the engineering and high math, all the numbers of people and hours of work. Sparked in a challenge put in words by one man “before this decade is out. . . .” What artifact produced is lasting? A photograph of a blue marble.

:- Doug.

Three unknowns in conversation
You friend, fully a mystery to me
Myself, still after years of Who are you
Conversing itself: coming going breathing kicking
These but the flying clapper in the bell

:- Doug.

Is the holy merely impulse
In us sometimes pushing out
Or our center pulsing?

:- Doug.

Risk there is in intimate conversation: an intimate risk. Not only might you get hurt, but the conversation might devolve into an argument or worse a fight, or your intentions might get read backwards.

:- Doug.

You might invent a new form of conversation-making if ones you’ve heard before don’t work or fit.
:- Doug.

I don’t want to know yet how the book will be organized. I do not want it regularized, for now, perhaps ever. Let it reveal itself.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2209

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What can you catch by the hind foot when you deny your eyes their authority?

:- Doug.

Take your discuss and throw it a way.

:- Doug.

Conversing is for love’s sake.

:- Doug.

The deeper is the more sacred: the set aside, that which is yet of us and has to do with us. We reach beyond our reach, to ourselves, our larger. Sacred is one thing we point to by using the word deep.

:- Doug.

The nourishment is in the whole stew.

:- Doug.

Write with the intent to write. Converse with the intent to converse.

:- Doug.

I thought I was writing a book about conversation.

:- Doug.

Will I die in conversation? Must I?

:- Doug.

There may be a mystery here. The unfocused lot of things all saying how important, gossamer, nuanced,. . . the conversation is, may be pointing to the center.

:- Doug.

If this moment you were in my conversation classroom, I’d invite you to grow still. Just sit. Outside time. Nothing is needed. Let it be. Undeciphered.

:- Doug.

Write with a lighter touch
Walk in the softest moccasins

:- Doug.

The work and I are one. I do not work on it nor does it work on me. We do what is right—right words, right stories, right unfolding.

This may be the zenith of conversation, too: attained when the conversation and we are one.

We cannot get there from here. We have to go somewhere else first.

:- Doug.

Out of a dream-scape arises a wild horse snorting, hooves in air, reshaping unnoticed into a dancer in a diaphanous ballgown: such a mixed metaphor is a proper and rightful muse.

:- Doug.

Relent, enter the conversation the writing wants. . . . Become one with the horse, yielding now, resisting now, going my own way now, now moving indivisibly.

:- Doug.

I hold my body from dancing
filling with words
that wonderful empty space
which freed of me
echoes new songs; releases

:- Doug.