FootprintsintheWind.com

The richness of conversation
the quality without a name
think of it like living

:- Doug.

I also have to realize that a brief encounter is unlikely to, in fact is not designed to, spark much real conversation. It might leave me feeling hollow. On the other hand, every whatever is all of the all, and might touch a spark already embering.

:- Doug.

What qualities do you value most in conversation? This seems to be a rich question, much like What Went Well? The value is in letting the question sit with people after I have left. Will they seek to make their conversation richer? Will they ponder the question? Some might. This is a working question, one which works on those those asked, one which invites a desire to surface.

:- Doug.

There is intimacy of friends, which may never go anywhere near home; there is intimacy of strangers, even holy intimacy of strangers, which may touch the quick and the bone. Do we invite a thread among these friends to go closer to the bone, a thread among strangers to become friends after having reached intimacy? Are members of each group reluctant to cross the line? Do people ever want to be intimate in both ways with the same people?

:- Doug.

There is growing to, and growing here. I set before you death and life: choose life.

:- Doug.

I feel I have come upon something gentle which has brought me to a soft landing place. I want to get my bearings, but it feels solid and lasting. I am not quite ready to explain it to others in any full form, but that will come or not. It is well.

:- Doug.

Growth—imaginative
—Fantastical
—Never comes
—Tugs us away from
Everyday growing

:- Doug.

Growth is about living in the future. Missing.

:- Doug.

We are of each other.

:- Doug.

Be the world. Only this.

:- Doug.

Why do I laugh?
Why do I cry?
My body requires it
My living requires it
Only this and nothing
Nothing nothing
More

:- Doug.

Profound has aspects of consciousness of self, and aspirations. Also of something hidden away, maybe we can find it again.

:- Doug.

Installed in each of us, and between us, is a BS detector. Almost unnoticed is the other one, a detector of heart.

:- Doug.

A goal is your ego speaking
I am better
I can control
I fear I am not
I fear I cannot
I am greedy
A goal is unnecessary

:- Doug.

What if conversation were not about growing? Nor life about growing? What does that leave but conversing and living? Only these and fully these? Are these enough? Even depth is excluded as exclusive, for shallow and depth and dry and wet are all needed.

:- Doug.

I seem to have reached a more bottom layer of life just the last few days. Like Buber I might say that one cannot live all of life in profound places, but to never visit them is not real living.

:- Doug.

The thread I have been spinning out this morning goes something like this: Each of us is uniquely different from each other of us, each of us has our own fingerprints. Yet we are each humanity, life, all of life. We put immense and unneeded burdens upon ourselves to make sales quotas, write a perfect power of attorney, get the house paid off, buy a better garden tractor, get the bathroom updated: to reach some goal or other. And then start all over again. Nor is it as I had thought about growing. There is something beneath all that, when we squeeze out the essence of life. It is living. It is engaging each other. It is meeting one another. It is meeting one another’s needs. Nothing else.

:- Doug.

The direction of this imaginative project is toward naming what humans lean into. Its premise is humans stumble between two legs of improving and destroying, with an often negligible advantage to improving. How then shall we choose?

:- Doug.

Profundity nudges us along the growing stem leading to a flower which is a station on the journey but not its end.

:- Doug.

Why do we need profound things?

:- Doug.

Posit:
There are things which most find profound.
Conversation touches these things.
We can point recognizably to these things.
Finding the profound things helps us remember. Us.

:- Doug.

People tend to agree on the deeply personal things, the things which are welcoming, which feel homey and friendly. So I can use that even if people do not agree that beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholder.

:- Doug.

I want to explore how to ask people about what a deep conversation would do, look like. If you could have a conversation with 2 or 3 people, alive now or at some other time, who would you want to engage? What would you talk about today, this first meeting? What would such a talk feel like? Where would it take you? What would be the setting—a garden, a campfire, some other place?

:- Doug.