FootprintsintheWind.com

Are we wary to actually meet another? Are we wary to meet the moment?

:- Doug.

What we need as a leader is one who will give it a steady hand. We do not need someone who is unable to stay rational for ten minutes. We do not need someone whose aim is retribution on his enemies. Those are a recipe for a careening ship of state. This is a dangerous world, and there are those who would take down the United States. We need someone who will hold us to our highest ideals. Every day, no matter the leader’s mood. This is the strength we need.

:- Doug.

Can we say “I think” and mean it? Can we not get caught up with someone the next minute saying, “That’s absurd,” or, “That’s not what you said yesterday”? To say “I think” means you are thinking here and now, not repeating what you said yesterday. You are not evaluating your thinking—for that might be a different kind of thinking, or not even thinking at all! “I think” is to report what I think just now. That is valid and valuable. It is the track of a living wild beast.

:- Doug.

Twice differently
our conversation
can be
full with
content

:- Doug.

In conversing, stories rarely have a neatly stitched ending. More often they break off, or they leave threads dangling. Like life.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2278

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2278

Do you see that cars are ways human care for other humans? Do you see that some suppose they are doing these car things for pay?

William Blake wrote “I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. ‘What!’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!’ I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.”

After the same way St. Francis wrote his canticle to Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brothers Wind, Air, and Fire, Sisters Water, Mother Earth, and Death.

What can you say?

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© 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

Contemplation is a sacrifice of time—putting person in service of larger. Conversation is as well.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2277

What might be two or three pieces of music you have felt are profound? What is it about those?

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

We could fruitfully bother each other.

:- Doug.

We can learn everywhere of conversation because conversation is everywhere.

:- Doug.

Keep a conversation journal. Learn from your conversing.

:- Doug.

Some people have a thinking cap. This is my writing cap.

:- Doug.

A chrysalis is a liminal space.

:- Doug.

This is not the whole story of conversation, but it might be a start on the story of whole conversation.

:- Doug.

That conversation cannot resolve.

:- Doug.

What’s the difference between the advertising song “Liberty, Liberty, Liberty,” and Handel’s “Messiah?” Between “Mairzy Doats” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah?” How much do each of them affect you? Which are more significant to you? Do you think others share your reaction? Which are models for your most important conversations?

:- Doug.

Don’t fight your meditation and contemplation, don’t run after good or bad: It is doing what it does all the time.

:- Doug.

The conversation is alive, and doing what it does. I trust this. I remind myself. So I cultivate conversations—more numerous, and with more.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2276

I am inhabited! I am inhabited by my microbiome. And: I inhabit it—it is a cloud in which I travel. In this respect, I am like Charlie Brown’s friend Pig-Pen. Why not see conversation this way? We inhabit all these conversations swirling around us, tornadoes and breezes.

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© 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

What might be the meaning you find in being part of a living, ever growing, whole?

:- Doug.

Thresholds make conversation a work in progress, a limbo, and might bring no presently visible way out.

:- Doug.

Threshold conversations probably cannot be finished in one sitting. It may be that the more radical the change or shift engendered, the more is processing needed.

:- Doug.

But what if we’re not as separate as we, without thinking, think? What if we are not as “individual?” What if identity might be felt as larger than this bag of skin? Are we not fractal to the cells in our bodies one direction, and the other to the families and communities within which we live?

:- Doug.