FootprintsintheWind.com

Be still. Be present. All the same, you are conversing.

:- Doug.

Have a conversation in which you together make as many metaphors as you can. Make it a game. The play of bouncing metaphors will cook up new ideas and cook down old ones. Contradict! Use new lenses. Make more incisions. Dive into the heart of the thing.

:- Doug.

Be thorny.

:- Doug.

I don’t so much seek growth as progress, not so much progress as life’s process from seed to shoot to flower to decay to seed. . . .

:- Doug.

I am the engine of the insights in this book—not the things I read. They may trigger me—but note: me.

:- Doug.

Could freewriting improve freetalking? Worth a try?

:- Doug.

Friend, come enter this woods with me, meandering, exploring, curiosity our walking sticks. We will seek to be surprised, and it may work out that we find or make something new of ourselves.

:- Doug.

Conversing can be mystical. Notice the continuum: from information through friendly, understanding, meeting of the I and Thou kind, to mystical and what is beyond that.

:- Doug.

Conversation can be in turns conflict and conviviality. Each can be meaningful.

:- Doug.

Can We (Ever) Converse?

:- Doug.

When can bleak look open and a space for emergence?

:- Doug.

Is it ever possible to have an I and Thou conversation? Is meaningful possible, or is it only a settling, an unsatisfying mingling of words, notions, dreams, and old fights? Are we doomed to keep trying and never getting through to one another? Or is possible possible? Or, are we best served to be alert to surprise, giving up our infantile play at control?

:- Doug.

To be meaningful does conversation require reflecting? What does reflecting within or after (is there an after?) conversation even entail?

:- Doug.

I do not always like surprises, yet I seek them.

:- Doug.

Why are we conversing?

:- Doug.

What are our problems of conversation?

:- Doug.

I facilitate a change process in how we converse, and in what direction. So seek and present surprises. Surprises to get us reflecting. Surprises to get us asking layered, crowding, cutting questions every time we think we have an answer. There is great and perhaps lasting worth here.

:- Doug.

Our hidden ground: Fire, Imagination, Spirit, and Surprise. Hidden because we often hide it. Or hide from it, frightened and little.

:- Doug.

In conversation what you give should be at least in part idiosyncratic. And peculiar to your conversation mates.

:- Doug.

The value, ours, is in surprising conversations.

:- Doug.

This is about how conversation expands our possible possibilities.

:- Doug.

You never can tell what is going to happen in a conversation. That’s the fun, challenge, evocativity, and tragedy of it!

:- Doug.

Intricacy gives the gift of possibilities un-thought, unexpected, unpredicted. It does not push us to choose, but puts these on a store display shelf.

:- Doug.