FootprintsintheWind.com

Theodore Roethke wrote an article to draw me out, “How to Write Like Somebody Else.” Using his title as a sourdough starter, let us think how might—why might—we converse like our friend? (Just to be complete: for me the title had more meat than the essay. This means we must, as ever, find our own way. Don’t use all the starter your first baking.)

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2359

We are here to complicate this narrative. Where is here? This conversation. What narrative? First, that of your friend.

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

Is attention the center of conversation? Perhaps it is attention, intention, leaning, pulling, stretching.

:- Doug.

We will not know we are meeting while we are in it. Nor will we know we are in a conversation in its midst. One is often immediately thrown out of the state by asking if one is in it. Take your cue from happiness—ask if you were.

:- Doug.

Where do we open? Where have we hidden ourselves?

:- Doug.

Poetic Conversation

If poetry does what
Other forms of thinking
Cannot

If we allow
Conversation to set us
Thinking
Jumping tracks other forms
Will not

What bread can we
Savor
Kneading these?

:- Doug.

“[A] good poem can never be completely entered,” wrote Jane Hirshfield, “completely known.” (Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, pp 31-32.) A good person can never be completely entered, completely known. We are all good persons. Yes?

:- Doug.

Where are we after
The humans die out?

:- Doug.

Conversation is a way we process our lives: in rehearsing what transpired (breathed across), we are gaining an understanding of the nuances and extensions of us.

:- Doug.

Conversation adds complexity to two complexities.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2358

Kronos and Kairos
gods you are
who touch but do not own
time—you we made up
to figure out a little
of what we might yet mean
when we say time
But time is our larger god
our over-god
whom we also made up
to worship

Mine—another larger god
to deceive us
to tell us of belonging
as if two ephemeral things
ever hooked each other ever
Some stories it seems
we tell ourselves
to make it through this night
or this millennium
or to build this whatever this
which may not outlast
any of us
but it is mine

Mind—a fabric
woven every day
weaving, woven, unwoven
every song
every prayer
every conversation
constructed, constructing
itself
person
world
Mind does not exist
if
we do not weave
brain grows from
little gametes meeting
but mind’s made up
and so never made up

Time, mine, mind
human sandcastles

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

A woman was telling us about her husband’s dementia: he has almost totally stopped speaking. She said plaintively, “There is no conversation. There is no conversation.”

:- Doug.

We can look at many places to take conversation to home, to focus. Two of them can be expressed as continuous threads from 1. differentiation to integration, and from 2. utility to expression.

:- Doug.

We keep the conversation going when by sparking and inventing new outgrowths of complexity between us.

:- Doug.

My work is an intimate spiritual in-vestige-ation of conversation.

:- Doug.

Each conversation is each person’s way, this now, for making meaning in the world. Complicate that with each persons making meaning out of the other’s process of meaning making. Complicate it more by the reflective process each takes after—whether complex, simple, or not at all.

:- Doug.

We grow both of us by sharing food. “When I eat alone, I have nothing. Alourdes, quoted in Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola, p xxi.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2357

You owe it to your friend to have conversations with many others—to increase your repertoire, to increase your curtains, to increase you.

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

Mistake your way to conversation.

:- Doug.

Conversation is fractal.

:- Doug.

How do we get good at dying?

:- Doug.

When it resists
telling
sing it out

:- Doug.

Vodou says of fire, “Never say hot again. Say strong.” I say Don’t say deep again. Say strong.

:- Doug.