FootprintsintheWind.com

Risk there is in intimate conversation: an intimate risk. Not only might you get hurt, but the conversation might devolve into an argument or worse a fight, or your intentions might get read backwards.

:- Doug.

You might invent a new form of conversation-making if ones you’ve heard before don’t work or fit.
:- Doug.

I don’t want to know yet how the book will be organized. I do not want it regularized, for now, perhaps ever. Let it reveal itself.

:- Doug.

What can you catch by the hind foot when you deny your eyes their authority?

:- Doug.

Take your discuss and throw it a way.

:- Doug.

Conversing is for love’s sake.

:- Doug.

The deeper is the more sacred: the set aside, that which is yet of us and has to do with us. We reach beyond our reach, to ourselves, our larger. Sacred is one thing we point to by using the word deep.

:- Doug.

The nourishment is in the whole stew.

:- Doug.

Write with the intent to write. Converse with the intent to converse.

:- Doug.

I thought I was writing a book about conversation.

:- Doug.

Will I die in conversation? Must I?

:- Doug.

There may be a mystery here. The unfocused lot of things all saying how important, gossamer, nuanced,. . . the conversation is, may be pointing to the center.

:- Doug.

If this moment you were in my conversation classroom, I’d invite you to grow still. Just sit. Outside time. Nothing is needed. Let it be. Undeciphered.

:- Doug.

Write with a lighter touch
Walk in the softest moccasins

:- Doug.

The work and I are one. I do not work on it nor does it work on me. We do what is right—right words, right stories, right unfolding.

This may be the zenith of conversation, too: attained when the conversation and we are one.

We cannot get there from here. We have to go somewhere else first.

:- Doug.

Out of a dream-scape arises a wild horse snorting, hooves in air, reshaping unnoticed into a dancer in a diaphanous ballgown: such a mixed metaphor is a proper and rightful muse.

:- Doug.

Relent, enter the conversation the writing wants. . . . Become one with the horse, yielding now, resisting now, going my own way now, now moving indivisibly.

:- Doug.

I hold my body from dancing
filling with words
that wonderful empty space
which freed of me
echoes new songs; releases

:- Doug.

let it go, let it come
stand away
and with live ears

:- Doug.

In my studies I found some things that startled me. Maybe you will find them important too.

:- Doug.

Iambic pentameter is the way to go
loosely, loosely now it comes and goes
some rhythm here some rhythm there—so what?

:- Doug.

If we have in English no word for the opposite of conversation, how serious has been our study of conversation? If we get serious about conversation we might learn about ourselves. I propose that the most direct route to getting serious about conversation may be to play with and at it.

:- Doug.

Spirit (as well as conversation) may have special affinity for play, as in such terms as “the play of inspiration,” “the play of ideas,” “the play of cosmological concepts.”

:- Doug.