FootprintsintheWind.com

Dacher Keltner (Awe, p 28) calls awe a self-transcendent state. It is like fun, he writes, and now a door opens to what Bernie was trying to get me to comprehend with him. So the questions rise up out of the mist: does conversation lead to awe (for this person, this us, the possibilities of the universe?); or does awe lead to conversation? Or are they so entangled we don’t ever want to tease them apart?

:- Doug.

Might conversation be a kind of emotion, similar to how Keltner classifies awe an emotion?

:- Doug.

Wheels within wheels
Maps within maps
Fractals within fractals
Breaths within chants
Conversings within conversations

:- Doug.

What is the role of chanting and breathing together in conversation? What effects do they have on us, individually and together? How might we play with these?

:- Doug.

Some things we say come from others around us—maybe even whole phrases or ideas consciously picked out—which we then espouse—even as our own ideas. This can even become adamant in us.

:- Doug.

Architecture is one shape of the landscape of conversation; one form the spiritual practice can take; one way to come together to serve humankind and all life.

:- Doug.

What sound do you hear
from the bell whose clapper is
these two butterflies?

:- Doug.

I can discern at least three parts to our human aural process. I assign words to keep them clear in my speaking and writing. Audition is what happens when our ears pick up a sound; Listening is what we do to a sound, including attempts to understand it, grasp it, control it, and assign meaning to it; Hearing is when we take it in, assimilate it, make it part of us and us part of it.

:- Doug.

No longer fully overcast
clouds are pulling away from one another
and between—O between!—
an opening here, an opening there
and in them a deepening
deepening blue, and I—my spirit—
flies again and again into that deep
out from my torso
into the blue, as it becomes indigo
then violet
then welcoming black

:- Doug.

Like much else in life, our messes and imperfections might just hold our greatest.

:- Doug.

Pure conversation is not about you. You’ve got to wriggle yourself out of your me, I, ego. It’s not about what you say, nor hear, nor do. It washes through you, you wash through the conversation. You and the conversation and your Thou all semi- or more permeable.

:- Doug.

Can either of us koan?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2218

I fear I fear the page so many friends who play with me and I taking one or two by hand at a time may leave my other dear playmates behind, leaving us sad and lonely. I’ll come back for you and we’ll play a new and fuller song!

Please pass it on.

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Here
in this conversation
offer your self
so divine oneness might
whisper through your strings

:- Doug.

What says this conversation
within the conversation
within the conversation?

:- Doug.

Can we live more than one lifetime? In a conversation? We can.

:- Doug.

What if, in conversing, our messages were not the conversation’s heft?

:- Doug.

A musician carries the music spirit in body and pulse. This conversation carries its music spirit in your bodies, in the conversation’s pulse, and in its circle of flickering shadow and light.

:- Doug.

Conversation is more than communication.

:- Doug.

Like my grandson’s basketball game: it won’t matter which team won or lost, but whether he gives it his all to the extent circumstances allow. So to each conversation. Sometimes, rarely, you both open, receive, and give your all. Other times, one or both of you can’t or won’t. Go on to the next one, with your new all, freshly.

:- Doug.

I must show it is possible, and invite my readers, to invent new ways for each of them to converse.

:- Doug.

William Stafford held that violence is a failure of imagination. Depression too is a failure of imagination—one is stuck and cannot imagine a way out, or only one way, a way that does not work or is too difficult to try.

:- Doug.

Maybe not everything is in conversation. Even so, it carries the spirit of conversation. And the encompassing spirit of meeting.

:- Doug.