FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation exceeds, expands, enlivens, . . . communication.

:- Doug.

Life wears swift slippers
—We meet in conversation—
Veering us too soon

:- Doug.

Conversation is about that which is not inside an individual, but what is between us, what arises from our meeting, fully and originally.

:- Doug.

Conversation, this mystery, cannot be wholly expressed: certainly not in words!

:- Doug.

Conversing expands and concretizes living. It makes possible new possibles: new ways, paths, doings, together.

:- Doug.

We have a right to tangled fulfillment.

:- Doug.

Conversing comes in complexity: we cannot learn the tangle, cannot plan it, nor for it. Only enter. Become entangled. Force ourselves to allow our struggles to subside. Now we live out ever complexified. And that is some sort of joy. Its appearance elates.

:- Doug.

Unlike our thoughts of improv, conversing is not letting something out, but noticing something showing up in between us. Somehow we must let out this being that was not there before we came together. A new being may emerge any time we meet. Only if we notice.

:- Doug.

How is it for you? Is conversing an art, a craft, or a drudgery?

:- Doug.

Is conversing the Twenty-first’s great improvisatory art? Or act? There is in here a surprise, a hanging over our heads. Not in all cases a sword, often an open sky.

:- Doug.

Improvise is to not see ahead, not provide for what may come. Surprise is to take above, beyond, or over. Brothers to each other, the one carefree spirit, the other overtaken. In conversing, the one the essence of a walk in the familiar woods, the other on the walk meeting some new and wonderful beastie or fertile field.

:- Doug.

Game: adjectives unfitting

:- Doug.

The conversation eternal
The conversation every here
The conversation ethereal

:- Doug.

Draw a simple O
Include us both
. . . .

:- Doug.

Ponderful: Conversations

:- Doug.

Conversation is a work in the soil and seed and sun and water over weeks and years and maybe millennia, to blossom in a passing moment, complete of color and aroma and beauty. Always, the flower fades. But can the work of sun and seed and soil and water have been lost? Or are they but wind through the leaves, revealing other handiwork a few cosmic moments after? This conversation, can you see, is a trace of something come and gone on? And so, and so: each conversation, your conversation, is but a lightest touch of that longer conversation.

:- Doug.

Great improvisers of conversations are like ancient priests: thinking only of their Thou.

:- Doug.

Was it divinely bestowed on you, that shitty attitude?

:- Doug.

I like that book: it could be a model for mine—if I did mine poorly.

:- Doug.

You can digest the words of the writer. But can you absorb the writer’s person, her importance to your life? Can you weave her into your being? Can you with her converse?

:- Doug.

A big part of hearing your other is hearing how what they express, words or otherwise, lands in your body, and maybe later in your gathering-into-your-being aspect.

:- Doug.

Come live in a different world.

:- Doug.

I seek not to change minds but to change shields—our separation from one another.

:- Doug.