FootprintsintheWind.com

The teller draws out, educes, from the hearer something she knows. But also more, for our hearer assimilates what the teller wishes, and accommodates herself to the outside pattern coming from him, shifts the pattern to say music. Making speaks to sensing, sensing bends speaking in response. From whence the patterns of a moiré?

:- Doug.

Let us enter a space set aside through the gate of silence.

:- Doug.

What might we do to create a bounded sacred space for our conversation, a temenos? Here exceptional events might freely happen. Light a candle, turn down the outside light? Remove the cell phones? Clear the space? Remove the table or sit back from it? Set out two plain clear glasses of water and see into them? Call in the sacred, the set apart, the silent? Tune attention? Attend body and breath, stomach, legs and fingers?

:- Doug.

Try nonsense conversations: speak in sing-song gibberish. A child learning his toes, play with your verbal instrument for tone, volume, speed, rhythm, percussion, intent, friendliness, animosity, anger, calm, enunciation, impeccability. . . .

:- Doug.

Why is the focus of focusing on pathology? Can it be applied to expand imagination or spirituality? Could it develop conversations and meetings?

:- Doug.

What are the physical and spiritual moves of good conversation? What gestures of face and stomach and wayward feet steel your talking, steal your hearing?

:- Doug.

In Nachmanovitch’s Free Play last evening I ran across the notion that the purpose of literature is not to prove nor sell but to invite thinking. I stopped running and stared. Yes! That is what I have been about in this book. To vex people into thinking. Together.

Thus, having written it is enough. It is play, and that is its purpose.

Is it to be lasting? What lasts? Nothing forever. What did the cave painters communicate? But they do speak to us. There is a thread.

Threads are pregnant. We are their children. Gestating.

Play with me. Think.

:- Doug.

We’re not teaching. We’re calling forth.

:- Doug.

Conversing, like play, is useless. Only after, we might sieve its use, that is when our conversing becomes an It.

:- Doug.

I play that I play. I play there in converse that I play there.

:- Doug.

Canst thou converse unmindful of past or future, unmindful of gain or loss, unmindful? Then thou canst enter converse.

:- Doug.

For meaningful conversation to emerge I and Thou must disappear.

:- Doug.

Conversation’s task: to tease two Thous from a state of not being able to play to a state of play.

:- Doug.

The primal function of conversation is not information transfer: rather the growing of community, between you and I, between you and a larger group. More so, converse seems to grow spirit, and not just in individuals nor groups of people alive now, but among people alive across times, perhaps beyond time. Spirit grows. Conversing grows. These may be the same thing.

:- Doug.

Gravity is a field; electromagnetism is a field; waves are fields. We each have a field, perhaps one of personality, perhaps one of the energy we elicit from others. We each are a field. We each enact a field, multiple fields.

:- Doug.

Coming from a place of joy, presence, discovery of other and together and worlds, conversation has this capacity to cause life to overspill its bounds.

:- Doug.

P₂X₃: To open up the requisite variety for our conversations means practice, play, exploration, exercise, experiment. So how? When?

:- Doug.

How does hearing out work and with what results?

:- Doug.

Curiously admire.

:- Doug.

Wow! The spigot was opened today and even last night! Lots of insights—four sides of 3×5 cards. The reading in Nachmanovitch’s Free Play was triggering me. He was taking me to different parts of my mind, holding up a menagerie of metaphors, having this converse with that, telling me there were other intricate possibles out there, telling me that intricate is itself a word too tame. These things were in me. More: many cornucopias of universes are in me. All the while. And they are in other persons too. My book, my task, my books are to call the kids out to play!

We are the kids! We are allowed to play! This is our world!

:- Doug.

This is valuable. It must out. To others. Perhaps not in my way nor in what I saw but in the fact of seeing, hearing, being able to express—a bit.

:- Doug.

Releasing, releasing, releasing!
This book like many past is turning loose
This devil this angel this trickster
I know not which (witch?)
This about, around, through: this me

:- Doug.

What does phonesthemia think, and what do you think of it, and what especially does it think of you?

:- Doug.