FootprintsintheWind.com

First the planet produces people
Then some people become persons
Earth peoples to person!

:- Doug.

We invite and so do well by these nearby representatives of humanity. When invited we choose to accept or not, or something between. Live invitingly. Live acceptingly. Talk. Seek out new inviting ways. Mention your books being written or other deepening projects; ask about theirs; be curious. Invite curiously.

:- Doug.

Game designers want to get inside the players’ minds. So too you and your counterpart when you are conversing; but held up to a game, it is bigger, more nuanced, and therefore less knowable. An action even less knowable is what your other has found inside your mind. And more: what they suspect you know of them that they know of you, back through all the mirrors in the barbershop.

:- Doug.

Play a game; tell a story about your play for another to hear or read. Your game became a story, your story a conversation, your conversation your life. Together. When you hear such a story and give compliments or thank the teller, you grow a person, you grow your world.

:- Doug.

Conversation helps us build a more complete world model, to integrate ourselves more into the world from which we were brought forth.

:- Doug.

Everywhere you go, you encounter your own conversation.

:- Doug.

Which game would you like to play? Which invites you more?

:- Doug.

Ask a little question; respond to it as cheaply as possible: investing as efficient use of your efforts as can be, to arrive not at answer, but at direction.

:- Doug.

How do we make conversation more. . . ?

:- Doug.

There is something more round and about us, not magic, but also unnoticed, which enters our conversations and enters us. This qwoan lifts us, invites us, engages our imaginations. And we walk away.

:- Doug

Watch the movie extras and you may catch a filmographer or director saying, “The landscape and its weather was another character.” Like that, your landscape and weather might be a player in your conversation, one who does not often say, “Notice me. I’m here,” nevertheless one who invites you here.

:- Doug.

When we see any part of our placing—ourselves, the other person, the setting, the task—as our adversary, we are halfway there. Can we invite us all to go further and see these as collaborators, even so far as seeing us all as one thing?

:- Doug.

Soothe and slow may not get you two long and far, though they stand a good chance.

:- Doug.

Is the situation—the between—your foe? Or your helper? Maybe is it simply another player, even the log and the water with which you, together, are all rolling? Holding you up, keeping dry, keeping going?

:- Doug.

What are the parts of what I am studying that pull me in? These then can teach me about the pull and push of conversation, and how I can manipulate those, what different perspectives I can discover.

:- Doug.

Conversations, like games, are interactive: that’s what makes a game a conversation.

:- Doug.

Every day, design a new form of conversation.

:- Doug.

Don’t report only ideas with which you agree. The other and contrary may open a valuable path.

:- Doug.

Do not write to only get ideas across or recorded: slow; express elegantly; sound the never before fathomed; find us a way to steep.

:- Doug.

I’m only one of the breathing organisms on this spinning top, and even then one of the fewer with intelligence. All the same, mine is an essential bit of spin, so I intend to throw in of my substance.

:- Doug.

Every conversation can teach us about conversation, if we let it in—or we enter.

:- Doug.

If/Since the surround brings forth the lady bug
And the lady bug brings forth the surround
One conversation fades others early arose, bringing

:- Doug.

What’s the use of mystery
Save it invites discovery?

:- Doug.