FootprintsintheWind.com

The more I open up my life, the more of it beyond that will be opened to me.

:- Doug.

Let us take two minutes now to be with our old friend, Silence, and stand in his presence.

:- Doug.

One form of spiritual can be interpersonal closeness.

:- Doug.

When we are told there are two kinds of something, let us guess there are probably more: this is only where the writer’s imagination left off. Take it as “I have found two, so far. . . .”

:- Doug.

Separate out the questions. Leave them in. Put the speculative responses elsewhere, if they need to be there at all. Don’t even write the questions as questions. Perhaps start a journey. Or gather ingredients and start cooking, without a recipe.

:- Doug.

What you just said causes a string to sound in me, a string wending through something my wife said to me making love, something a theology professor said in class, a passage in Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, all the way back to one of my Dad’s sayings. The string snaps and I am back here, bringing all this along.

:- Doug.

Many things are working and roiling within you—some even have to do with this person in front of you. They are appropriate for focus and then bringing up.

:- Doug.

A sense of cosmic mystery is more than a mystery on the forest path or a murder mystery. In some way you want to enjoy it without understanding it or untying the threads. It encompasses you and beyond you. You feel larger.

:- Doug.

Approach my writing the other way to. Start with a conversation and search for ways to make it better.

:- Doug.

Possible factors to explore in a conversation: What is our relationship to: self, Thou, others, work, the project to be undertaken, society, God, feelings, how to do this project, motives.

:- Doug.

Open mystery conversation: How will we get the culprit (your Thou) to confess to the conversation?

Closed mystery conversation: What is this conversation about, what “crime” will we commit (that is, who will we be) together?

:- Doug.

Focus the reader on feelings, as well as and beyond thoughts and thinking.

:- Doug.

Give the readers some of the responsibility.

:- Doug.

“The spirit of peace.” This from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. To write of spirit is ghost-like. Nebulosity keeps reader and writer trapped in old thoughts. Not ghosts but whiches, writer! Tell us which spirit.

:- Doug.

Don’t conversations have to come at things directly? Is to ask the question to smash it?

:- Doug.

Build mystery by leaving open multiple plausible hypotheses.

:- Doug.

Where does imagination come from? Where is its bed to retire to sleep and dream?

:- Doug.

We are restrained by viscous circles—and by them perchance freed and even shot off.

:- Doug.

Who ever really knew conversation?

:- Doug.

Why care if the work accords with current thought academic or otherwise? It is a work of imagination. It stands on its own feet. It need only accord with itself, and that only when it suits its purposes!

:- Doug.

Converse asks you to become unmindful. Unmindful of past and future, gain and loss. Yes and self. Perhaps also to be unmindful of your Thou. Leaving only only.

:- Doug.

What is the mystery in conversery?

:- Doug.

Mystery is a place to call home, a place that gives me rest, nurtures me, and sends me out again into the surprises. No richness without surprises.

:- Doug.