Gnawing dark beast
In conversing two things: We bring a little of our other into ourselves; we let go a little of ourselves. Perhaps this is fire and death. Perhaps this is a gnawing dark beast and a seedling.
:- Doug.
In conversing two things: We bring a little of our other into ourselves; we let go a little of ourselves. Perhaps this is fire and death. Perhaps this is a gnawing dark beast and a seedling.
:- Doug.
I seem unable: —to find any animals who don’t have some conversation; —to claim for humans a higher animal state, but only find those animals more closely resembling us; —to hold only humans have emotions or feelings.
Holding these notions is ultimately not significant. What is is to find one another, to create our one another. Conversing, we create not things but persons. It almost seems we are adding layers to the onion, blood to the human beasts.
:- Doug.
Your direction through the door
—what you’re gaining
what you’re losing
what you’re facing—
slices you a wedge
when opening to you
the all around bursts
:- Doug.
These very conversations
These swirling bodies, minds, souls
Are how we transcend reality
:- Doug.
Your friend is your adjacent possible.
:- Doug.
We are a part literate part oral culture. As long as we have vocal folds we will be oral. If we can listen we may hear our oral forebears, our oral selves.
:- Doug.
For the bright snow
against the brilliant blue
I must all my thanks now sacrifice
:- Doug.
Some use a string
to find their way returning
I seek a thread
to find a way into
the forest’s dark and bright
:- Doug.
Let us learn the language of story telling that we may feed our many.
:- Doug.
Our friend is a well opening underground to a rushing ocean, a roiling river, a boiling cauldron. Into our friend we drop our visions, fears, possibilities, our souls, spirits, dreams, knowing—without proof, knowing—that they will be returned to us infused.
:- Doug.
Can we—you and I in conversation—take a little from here and put it there, and so change this? Is unfolding a big thing?
:- Doug.
It is just barely possible that we seek most the mysterious, the thing just outside our reach, the temptress fading into the mist, the prairie dog chattering and disappearing below ground.
:- Doug.
I am not trying to prove it
It is the other way around
:- Doug.
Patch Adams has decided to be silly as a way of life. Can I find my way there?
:- Doug.
Some sneezes are wet
Some coughs are dry
Finish this poem, or try
:- Doug.
Is she another person outside this setting?
:- Doug.
There is not one story—within every story there are always more.
:- Doug.
How does it affect one’s thinking to be left-handed? Your hand always immediately covers what you write. How would that train your memory?
:- Doug.
At Quaker Meeting today, one member stood and related about meeting with a friend. The friend had had a massive stroke a few months before. The two women sat, one speaking, the other not. The one with no words had eyes alive. “I experienced radiance,” this member reported. What a wonderful friend to notice this radiance. If I was the one without words, I would want to give such eyes.
:- Doug.
Maybe a pattern-seeking animal is a pattern-making animal. If so, ought we be seeking non-patterns, such as the random, the stochastic, the guessed-at? For instances: the music in the wind’s vagaries, the way some birds fly sort of with the flock, sort of not, the route of smoke on a still day? Let’s go farther and further afield from those. In looking in these places, we are even now looking for a pattern. What is a non-pattern? It has to somehow exceed the question of What patterns are we incapable of seeing?
:- Doug.
Persons are coming to life
around you
all the time
one of their rivers
is the hot chocolate
of conversation
you are stirring
:- Doug.
I am reading my own pre-writing. This is most evocative for me. Pre-writing is that which almost whispers to me so that I have to chase it into the labyrinth, and drag it out in pieces, while it is grabbing and pulling me back in.
:- Doug.
Ask your question not from script nor duty nor etiquette. Each question can be humanity felt together.
:- Doug.