FootprintsintheWind.com

Awe is another language for the larger, the holy.

:- Doug.

In death when we survive we lose the relation we had with this person. Some of it. This tests—stretches—the notion that we make persons of one another, for just here we had some of our person clawed out from our skin. But do we also lose the conversations, the conversation, with that person?

:- Doug.

Paint a puppy
Soon chased by a cougar

:- Doug.

Conversation has to do with the perpetuation of life, and its expansion.

:- Doug.

Come live in a wider world.

:- Doug.

NB: conversation enwraps hostility and friendship/kinship combined. To understand, we must account for this.

:- Doug.

Can our conversations become potlatch, giving our two selves to the conversation, lavishly, prodigally, freely, but expecting nothing, only knowing conversing will turn the gift to good?

:- Doug.

Don’t expect to find on these pages many proofs and footnotes. Hints maybe. It is up to you to provide whatever P & F you require.

:- Doug.

Alexander’s mirror of the self and Gendlin’s focusing both point toward a living life detector, a part of us connected. What are we detecting? Wild, and our own stalking, the various spirits, the qwoan.

:- Doug.

When you make persons, you by that means raise the possibilities in life to untold exponentials.

:- Doug.

It concerns me not, the losing of some little faculty, like word finding. My concern is creating more faculties.

:- Doug.

Our task: carry life’s creative urges to more moments of time; carry life’s creative urges to more people/beings.

:- Doug.

Will it work? Dunno. It’s worth the experiment.

:- Doug.

If conversation is created with the whole of these two persons, then the conversation stands a good chance to come out whole.

:- Doug.

How do we recognize conversing of value? Can it be done within the conversation? Can we adjust for it?

:- Doug.

This is a new conversation.

:- Doug.

Have we ever talked as revealingly as we might?

:- Doug.

Going by some land where recently stood a building I had often been inside, words came out, “I never thought it was that small.” Seems that putting up walls, boundaries, enclosing the space, in some way tangibly increases the space available to use.

:- Doug.

Conversing is putting together two beings for a wild, uncontrolled, untamed, undomesticated, uncultivated engagement. All is possible. Yet we can bend it in the long arc toward life.

This is a larger view than I have had, but hinted all along. All our live-long life we have been a-feared of conversing. We have avoided it, we have avoided really engaging one another. Here is the fear, here is the risk of life. What advice or direction can I give? None, for I have barely stepped into the territory of Here there be. Come, hold my hand. We’ll go together.

We can point our toes. We might speculate on ways to bend. That’s about it, till we get further in, meet some of the beasts.

:- Doug.

I learned more deeply about love from my sister. No. I am learning. In the youth of her old age, abandoned by her children, I help. Run errands, take her places, pay her bills. Love is truly verb, not feeling, for if emotions I’d have given up after her depression, pushing me away, pushing.

Just so, conversation is work. In this work, conversation is love. Love of Thou. Love of life.

:- Doug.

Project Apollo seemed to be scientific exploration, a drive in us from the childhood of our species. All the engineering and high math, all the numbers of people and hours of work. Sparked in a challenge put in words by one man “before this decade is out. . . .” What artifact produced is lasting? A photograph of a blue marble.

:- Doug.

Three unknowns in conversation
You friend, fully a mystery to me
Myself, still after years of Who are you
Conversing itself: coming going breathing kicking
These but the flying clapper in the bell

:- Doug.

Is the holy merely impulse
In us sometimes pushing out
Or our center pulsing?

:- Doug.