FootprintsintheWind.com

Draw for me a picture of your ideal father. Father means children—how does he treat his children? Their mother? His community? Thus you reveal your world.

:- Doug.

Do you seek to live in balance—or in creative tension?

:- Doug.

Which imagination? Are there two—or more? Again, by which imagination are you being dreamed?

:- Doug.

Words have meanings at angles and faces as in a cut diamond: bending light, sparkling sound. So do people. Only people have infinitely more. We need to train our ears to hear what we did not before. It is there.

:- Doug.

What I am looking for in image, or perhaps in drawing beyond metaphor toward image is intestinal language. Something to get to us where we live. So too this is about intestinal conversation.

:- Doug.

Metaphors have the capacity to mean what they say and what they don’t say. That’s almost magical, isn’t it? But what is no magic and seems as if it is lies in the crossing of those two opposites: the collision so shakes the mind to force us into imagination. This is an abrupt turn: our brain was headed due south and now our body is going north-by-northeast. We are no longer figuring out something; we are working to enter in. To a place that did not before exist.

:- Doug.

If I love to watch butterflies, do I love the change or only the beauty? What would I love of the dissolving goo of me?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2243

I converse to find awe in you…knowing it is there.

Please pass it on.

© c 2023, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

No one has conversed before. Not these conversations. Not this conversation. Does this conversation matter? Can we make it matter? Can we quickly get to the heart and compost-heap heat of the matter?

:- Doug.

In 2009 I asked What will happen over the centuries to all our data? Now I ask, What will happen to all our conversations? Do they disappear into the passing breezes? Or do at least some of them enter into persons, become embodied, and make worlds? What if they did?

:- Doug.

We can study each other over and over till we discover their covered-over glint of divine. It may take many tries.

:- Doug.

Ask permission to ask your other the real questions.

:- Doug.

Are we witness to testify to a judge?

:- Doug.

Elie Wiesel on p 11 of his preface to Night, writes: “It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.” Thus, witness bears some of the same weight as does memory. Even a memory that might only last until the wisp of smoke falls apart—but nevertheless memory that long.

:- Doug.

We can catch glimpse here and there of the same notes sung by music, poetry, play, and conversation, and then like a dream, the clear similarities float away. We no longer see, we begin to question. We are left only with wisps of beauty and holiness. These come and go. They dance with us. They fly to ethereal place-times. Play is somehow these growing edges.

:- Doug.

“Poetry must be exorbitant,” writes Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens, p 142. So must conversation—wild conversation. Out of the track.

:- Doug.

Conversation is living and noble play—and more.

:- Doug.

There is something afoot in conversation—a unification, an understanding penetrating one of the other, a blending, a melding, a secret word or two—and then it is gone. So we return to the fountain looking for what waters might—and will at unexpected times—appear.

:- Doug.

What supra-biological do we derive from conversation? My sister like her father years before her stands and talks for hours with a newly met person, now become friends. What is occurring?

:- Doug.

Can we find a way to catch the airs of what our other omits saying? And we as well?

A start might be speculation in what we could say—what would make the story or statement just heard complete, whole??

We could also start with ordinary unladen speech—“Pass the salt please”—and specify what goes behind it—“I want the prickly sensation on my tongue.”

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2242

In conversation we have the opportunity to be a translator for another—her un-heard, un-recognized language into something she now can hear, maybe act upon. We can illuminate for her.

Please pass it on.

© c 2023, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Dreams might be a school in attending one another.

:- Doug.

We don’t tool around—we story around.

:- Doug.