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What are you doing in a conversation if not allowing goodness out to play?

:- Doug.

Stories we know are condensed bundles of happenings, truths, wishes, and all that. So too are words. Condensed tomato soup can be reconstituted with water. If I reconstitute with milk it resembles the original, with a different taste. If you use soy milk or almond milk is the result tomato soup? Yes, and it may be better than the original. If someone uses kerosene? You can the soup; you have no control over the final reconstitution, do you?

:- Doug.

The news we take in is about the exceptions not the rule, so no, the world is not getting worse: that is just the meal you are being fed.

:- Doug.

Do we talk at the edges of our experience—or mostly about every day things? This might be a flag of remarkable conversation and the forgettable: do we repeat the ho-hum This is the argument I had with my wife today, again; or do we open ourselves to talk about our pains, our vulnerabilities, our worries, our quandaries, did I make a mistake saying that?

:- Doug.

When the person across from you speaks, ask your body where it all lands, where and how it oscillates in your skeleton, muscles, and organs. Don’t mistake this for their story—it is your story. Then ask what you feel as a result of what landed. Can you shh your mind from giving you words? Your body, given space, might give you a fresh word or image. Explore here.

:- Doug.

Let’s get curious about the complexity swarming in each of us.

:- Doug.

I have faith in meeting.

:- Doug.

Lost for a way to get closer in conversation? Ask for a story.

:- Doug.

Are you in the house of stories just to visit, or do you want to settle in?

:- Doug.

Conversations can be broachers and movers of community sense-making.

:- Doug.

The galaxy spins
And all the stars in it
Groundhog returns, burrows

:- Doug.

Conversation can be your act of roguish creativity.

:- Doug.

In meditation, ask What else?

:- Doug.

Freedom overdone becomes riot.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2219

Explain not
Enter

Please pass it on.

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In some way not yet fully conscious to me, I am softened. And maybe it would be good if this light sense were not to become wholly conscious, for having it pre-conscious makes softness come without having to think it through each time. Compassion becomes the starting point.

:- Doug.

I like my writing. I like this last insight, the words, the named folks. They can speak to me. I can speak of my crackles. Write precisely crackles.

:- Doug.

What crackles in me about Alexander’s work, and Friere’s, Boal’s, Buber’s, Kimmerer’s, Lawley’s and Tomkins’s, Blake’s, Whitman’s, and all the other fireflies in my shimmering night sky? Write about that. Don’t write a book: write precisely that.

:- Doug.

Relation is a door to the wild: to what is larger than us, to what is larger than our default mode network.

:- Doug.

Conversation is a gardening.

:- Doug.

Our entanglements can be loose, a can with a dozen red wigglers in the bottom—we don’t have to be forever knotted. It might just facilitate more connections using time as an accelerant.

:- Doug.

Conversation is much work.

:- Doug.

My reader: I take you into my confidence—as my peer—seeking together—wondering—wandering.

:- Doug.