FootprintsintheWind.com

We’re all mystery
to one another
as is good

:- Doug.

There is a namby-pamby god who says “There, there” and gives you a lollipop. There is another god who confronts you and challenges you. To grow.

:- Doug.

Violence is the refuge of the weak of imagination.

:- Doug.

Just a little thing
our conversing—a flutter
of butterflies—O!

:- Doug.

As elder tales are simple yet conceal more than we first take hold of, so too the people and conversations we chance daily have layers beyond counting.

:- Doug.

When I write down a principle I have turned a between into an It so that the principle draws us into the realm of knowledge. A pinned down specimen. But we do not hold knowledge with a Thou. We meet. The principle is something drawn from the between that is that meeting. The meeting is fullness beyond enough.

So we must ever go beyond principles and knowledge to move out to relation, that is, to the meeting of I and Thou.

:- Doug.

Grief is not a disease!

:- Doug.

Be as open with your fellows as you aspire to be with your God.

:- Doug.

True conversation starts not with tragedy, justice, freedom, sharing, and the like, but with the spirit working our depths.

:- Doug.

Conversation is at once based upon and brings about changes in humans, specifically in their relations one to others.

:- Doug.

How has conversation changed over the millennia? Not only in quantity and quality, but also its direction or lack of direction?

:- Doug.

The writing is the work of inventing. Now we find what we don’t know.

:- Doug.

Meet the meeting as well as the person. Who and what all are you or might you be called to meet?

:- Doug.

Is it word loss or word slowness in coming forward? Word shyness?

:- Doug.

If it takes her a long time to find her word and you can’t wait any longer, whose disability is it?

:- Doug.

Less outcome, more presence: this applies to my life and what I need to do for my sister. Stay. With.

:- Doug.

In dialogue we must do justice to the unique situations of this our meeting, and of this person in front of us, and this person who is us. This is our task. Every meeting. And yet we can never meet this task in full every time. This may be of the biggest things we can never know of conversation. Less outcome, more presence.

:- Doug.

“It is hard to locate with confidence the intent or significance of individual [conversations] in the wider webs of cultural practice.” Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, p 285. Yet if we are to learn or grow, we must plunge into the attempt. We can pause in this talk of our children’s college and ask how what we are saying fits our times, places and the greater flow of life: what does education at this place do for and to human progress or regress? To life? For conversations 300 years on?

:- Doug.

We go out of doors
the one spirit
lifts, floats on
thermals unseen
we see farther
and so further
we open

:- Doug

Stories are Conversation large.

:- Doug.

O Conversation, wending through us, wending, wending us.

:- Doug.

Imagine
in 300 years
the coming faces

:- Doug.

Let us dream with our conversation
Let us hear her dream within us

:- Doug.