FootprintsintheWind.com

Limit my writing to unanswering questions and evoking curiosity—wonderments.

:- Doug.

Say it slant
Say it half
Say it spiraling

:- Doug.

To set goals is to live in future, some Then that never can arrive, because you allow no now.

:- Doug.

Separate beings
disappear
skin and boundaries
semi permeable
irrelevant
one event
pulsing

:- Doug.

Use shared art making—a play, a dramatic reading of any book at hand, a dance, a song: this might whisper us into a new and necessary conversation. A new and fecund and necessary companionship, sharing of bread, society.

:- Doug.

A provokes B’s energy, B evokes A’s energy, inertia is overcome.

Until it gets old and boring.

Thus energy requires apartness as well. So C meets A, D meets B. New colors of sparks. More faces of qwoan, more sides to the die. Die becomes dice.

This is the work and play of collaboration. Interject next a few friends, near and far, chance encounters with acquaintances and strangers: the universe sings!

:- Doug.

Every encounter you have one and two-thirds powers to create, make, call forth, invent, other persons. The first power is to hear the being facing you into existence as person. The two-thirds power is what the two of you have jointly to give birth to, bring forth, your composite person. It is two-thirds not one-half because each of you must go farther than to the meeting point. And no, you cannot bring yourself forth as a person—only the other can, by hearing you, taking you in, respecting you. You can’t do this for yourself. Can you tickle yourself?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2204

Our responsibility conversing is for the whole, not just the project we are on—this is what brings life to the world. Bring life to the world. Life will bring the rest.

Please pass it on.

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Maybe we do become, as Nachmanovitch proposes, an organism made up of a group of two. What can we abduce of this organism: it has its own organelles and cilia, speaking orifices, and an augmented shared brain and will.

:- Doug.

In this process we create a language, just we two. A rhythm, a shorthand, a manner. We drop consonants, vowels, and whole words. A look, a bob, a pointing is enough, a lot. Even though we cannot be sure what each means, we are sure enough.

:- Doug.

Moreover, spirit, qwoan, is more verb than noun, more moving than static. It is sent caroming between us when we converse, as we turn to one another. Or maybe it is this qwoan which sends us back and forth, turning each of us and both together, turning against the qwoan, in a dance it would be crazy-making to trace. In either picture (and the others we dare not draw) there is something playing a circuit with us. A circuit at times of spirals up and down.

:- Doug.

I don’t need to get to the clear and full definitive expression of spirit in any writing: just walk with my nose pointed that way, to breathe in some.

:- Doug.

Meditations on what we don’t know of conversation.

:- Doug.

Where is spirit in this, especially without interjecting notions of God?

:- Doug.

We don’t throw a ball, a spear, a spacecraft, without an intent it lands. Throwing without arriving probably does not exist. What would be the point? To exercise our muscles? To what end? Expression requires impression.

:- Doug.

Perhaps conversation serves as the expression of life and life is what makes it so difficult to define. Perhaps expression is life—or a function of life, a need. But being heard is an equal need, if not greater. We speak in order to be heard, live in order to—what? Perhaps more subtly interwoven is that life is an expression of conversation—this necessity to hear and be heard, to come together.

:- Doug.

Do noticings come before inklings?

:- Doug.

Try out the glimpses you are reading and see if they can play with your writing subject.

:- Doug.

Conversation is more than solely emotional. Conversation points to us and laughs. Look at conversations and learn of the ones conversing.

:- Doug.

Maybe there were not many major or surprising breakthroughs, but a lot of mid level ones and little pin pricks of light. Write those.

:- Doug.

Maybe not everything is conversation; but maybe everything is a teacher of conversation.

:- Doug.

The unexamined conversation is not worth living.

:- Doug.

The peoples of Europe made shoes, the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island made moccasins. One separated themselves with hard soles from the earth; the others placed themselves within and arising from the earth. One feared wild and untamed nature; the others saw themselves as brothers, sisters, and grandchildren of the trees and skies and beavers and salmon.

:- Doug.