FootprintsintheWind.com

How did your father change and develop over the course of his lifetime?

:- Doug.

Being met is to the soul what oxygen is to the brain.

:- Doug.

Conversation is a place we can seriously and with respect make sense our our pasts, our futures, and our lives.

:- Doug.

Into the betweens we may find our selves dissolving.

:- Doug.

Imagination has an important rational element.

:- Doug.

What is your responsibility for this conversation?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2338

Wonder: are birds and others of our cousins so un-nuanced that their world is all sex and predators and no poetry? Or is this just the limit of our imagination?

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© c 2024, 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

Questions we can ask each other midway into our conversation: What have we oversimplified? What is often oversimplified? What question does nobody ask? Where do you feel torn? Is there anything else about this subject?

:- Doug.

Together, create a list of 17 questions—for each other, for experts, for how others approach your subject.

:- Doug.

I’m curious
How can we help
Each other
Get more curious?
Are you curious about me?

:- Doug.

Why have a conversation? I have no great answers. None of us does. Do it anyway. Prepare to be surprised.

:- Doug.

No part of you is simple.

:- Doug.

At support group today, a lady told about keeping a log on everything her mother did during the day, so that she could pick up on patterns to tell her mother’s doctor. I wonder if we might together keep a log of our conversations and get some value from our patterns.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2337

In conversation, your friend is at once your window, door, and skylight to other worlds.

Please pass it on.

© c 2024, 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

In our conversation maps we might think we disappear. But what happens is “we” are everywhere, pouring through, over, and around each of us: soaking.

:- Doug.

A purpose of conversational tasting, trying, and nosing, is to enrich our cultural, our human, repertoire. We add to our inventory of story.

:- Doug.

You’re right. If I were in your shoes, I’d feel exactly as you do.

:- Doug.

I’m not sure what this book is about. I’m less sure than when I started what conversation is about. I have some hints in the idea that persons are complexities. I have some hints in strange words like “temenos” and “Papunehang.” The edges just keep getting fuzzier.

:- Doug.

When in doubt
in a conversation
write a poem

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2336

Some use a string
to find their way returning
I seek a thread
to find a way into
the forest’s dark and bright

Please pass it on.

© c 2024, 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

After all this
study, thinking, working
it is to me
yet a mystery
how to get
how to stay
close

:- Doug.

Maybe it’s not an earth-shuddering breakthrough. Maybe it is only progress. Celebrate the step made forward, back, or other-ways.

:- Doug.

People have a right to choose how revelatory they want to be, occasion by occasion. Allow it to them. Be gracious. We have a lifetime, maybe more, to get to close. Time is a construct, a Humpty-Dumpty-like invention that “means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

:- Doug.