Can always go back
We know more of a friend at a later stage of our development than an earlier. Why should it surprise us that we can always go back with curiosity?
:- Doug.

We know more of a friend at a later stage of our development than an earlier. Why should it surprise us that we can always go back with curiosity?
:- Doug.
When you were speaking, what of your friend did you take in? Go back—was it his face, what her hands were doing, whether she was distracted or bored? Early in her dementia, when irritated with me, my sister would bend her fingers and unbend them in a characteristic way—what was going on for her? While speaking, what did you hear of him—laughter, snicker, an encouraging hmm, farts? Did she reach to touch your hand, your shoulder? Did you catch an aroma or even taste? To what extent did you escape from your words and gestures so you could receive? Receive from his or her multitudes cascading over your head?
:- Doug.
The things you want most to give to others may be precisely what stands in our way—Being’s way.
:- Doug.
When others stand in your presence, what of human Being do they hear? What through you do they taste, sniff, see, feel? What breeze of Being lifts a hair on their head? Can you stand out of the way?
:- Doug.
In conversing we are opening windows, doors, and skylights into each other’s worlds—again, we are deciphering the poems we are—then entering—then coming back into our own world, now larger.
:- Doug.
To enter into one other person’s life—to seek to understand that person’s history and ways—to walk in his moccasins, look out through her eyes—is to somehow touch the lives of all persons. Each one of us is a microcosm. Each one reflects all. Said another way, all are jewels on Indra’s net.
:- Doug.
Anger and pain can be overcome if only in part, by reaching out of my little balled-up self and entering by imagination into the life of my friend who has hurt me, or whom I have wounded. Of course, it only goes one way, heals only one side, my own. But there is a chance it touches my friend.
:- Doug.
Wispy the breezes
from you from me
satiation
is probably
not what we want
:- Doug.
Grab this conversation
‘Tis your last chance
This day is soon gone
This moment, week, year
Life
:- Doug.
Dying, even death, may come to you in conversation when your friend outgrows you, needs to move to relationships with others, to find meetings from which you will be absent.
:- Doug.
We think that to enter conversation is to shut out the world beyond that cone of light. Instead, we find conversing sloshes bootless into the muck the world presents. What do we say of the imagination required by shutting out or entering into troubles? Does each ask for a different kind of imagination?
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 2377
Hearing means bearing—one another’s burdens of pain, of telling, of hearing.
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It is not a book report. It is a report of where it took me, or I it, what I made of the book, and all that flowed.
:- Doug.
What does it mean
Male and female shall be one
Nevermore a difference?
:- Doug.