FootprintsintheWind.com

Are witnesses part of the dialogue?

:- Doug.

News report: local teenager dies in confusion.

:- Doug.

What is deeper? I asked a lady in my dreams. I don’t recall her answer–she was not quite as lost for words as most people at that question–but here is where my wisps of memory seem to point me: Deeper means a deeper well or pool in the person, not always the whole person, but a portal to the whole. It might be wide not deep. It touches essence. Or is touched by it. We reach bone and beyond that, marrow: the soft spot that grows the hard, strong exterior.

The soft spot that grows the hard strong exterior: accept the opening line! The hard strong exterior can become brittle and kill the soft growing creative interior with it. We must ever supply blood and food and life to it or risk death by brittleness. What shall we risk: life or brittleness? This is our only choice. Shall we risk meeting strangers, being friends ourselves, or shall we risk the hard shell of separation from the rest of ourselves?

So we have two metaphors, pregnancy and marrow. Both speak of the small soft vulnerable thing that brings the miracle of strength and the flash of life. Pregnancy is not for the weak, but it can happen to us all. Marrow is in each of us. So too is strength. That strength comes from bringing together hardness and softness, light and dark, thrusting and receiving.

What have I learned? What has been learned? Many lessons are offered each day, the curriculum is broad, the intercourse is sweet and intimate: do I accept? Do I thrust?

:- Doug.

Can conversations be pregnant and not deliver? Can a mother, pregnant, refuse delivery?

Some conversations are pregnant, and then we walk away, leaving the mother–the conversation, the situation, who is the mother?–to deliver or to abort. How often do we abort conversations, run away afraid to deliver, to raise this child?

Where is the truth, the really real, the meaning here? Do we impregnate each other? Are we impregnated in conversation? We are. We might refuse it, wear protection, and we do often. Sometimes the seed is planted when we are infertile or simply not willing to play. Perhaps we are in pain or we do not wish to engage. Sometimes we just respond to the societal influences: don’t talk to strangers. Remember, you are a stranger, too! There is much that tells us to fear, yes? And there is one who encourages us saying, and there are a few who also teach, Fear not.

And when we are pregnant, do we do what is wise and healthy for our unborn child? How shall we nourish these twins, the persons seeking to be born? Do we take in good things, love and energy, do we avoid the hate and fear?

:- Doug.

Good conversation can take out all of your energy
Good conversation can also rejuvenate you
What is going on?

:- Doug.

To find the common heart spaces: meaning, beauty, laughter and tears. This is what seeking conversation means for me, for now.

:- Doug.

Cultivation: that is what conversation calls for, yes? The seed is not ready grown but must do its heavy work right away: find its direction in the dark and damp, push through the compacted earth, find the sun,find something to feed upon. Then it takes months to ripen. Our tending is feeding, getting things out of the way. Some conversations we plant, some were planted by unseen hands generations ago and we are privileged to harvest and take in for our nourishment. Some grow in the wild. So we may imagine some conversations mysteriously flower, go to rich colors quickly, or that others with the same tender hand seem to die in the earth. It may be a question of the ripeness of the conversation and the persons. We need not worry ourselves but enjoy what we find and move on, planting, tending, harvesting. Or so it seems today.

:- Doug.

This important thing you want to do with your life, how would you know it?

:- Doug.

How to open a door:
Humor
Disclosure
Story
Empathy

:- Doug.

Trust the conversation
Trust the people
Trust the strangers

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

In reading a wonderful book, Kim Stafford’s Early Morning, one of the things he says Bill and Dorothy Stafford taught their children was Make sure you talk to strangers.

This is good advice. It is paranoid to teach children to avoid people. After several generations of telling our children to never speak to strangers, they are dangerous, we have internalized it.

So when someone offers to connect, we fear. How are you going to find friends to share the laughs and tears with, to go to for help, if you do not talk to strangers? How indeed can we find friends if we stay away from people? In conversation’s terms, how can we ever become real if we do not meet?

Even in our scary times, this is good advice. For how do we overcome the terror except through each other?

:- Doug.

Is your work a work of importance?

:- Doug.

Rather than work in the econo-my, we need to be working in the econom-us.

:- Doug.

What are some of the best conversations? What makes them better than the worst or the inconsequential?

:- Doug.

What are the mysteries of dialogue? Just how can we be born?Why do we shy away? What pulls me on? Deeper levels of intimacy or thinking than are possible for one person—what is possible when 2 or 3 meet? Is it about intimacy? Is intimacy too broad a word, like trust?

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

What is intimacy? I got the intimation (!) or inkling this morning that it is a stand-in word for something else and more diverse than this word, much like yesterday I realized trust is. We speak of intimacy with another and with G*d. We speak of sexual forms and spiritual and emotional. It seems to mean letting down shields, so it then means letting yourself flow out and letting others flow in. There is a mingling of essence, a mixture of skills and talents, probably also of shadows. There is an examination of shadows as well as lights. There is an uncovering of the covered, an unfolding of the folded—a ripping! There is a mutual discovery and exploration for discovery. There is a vulnerability exposed, not so much trusting but hoping the other will see and be gentle. There is in this vulnerability and intimacy an unknowing, and a gradual realization that each one is infinitely larger than we had supposed. There is also connection: a knowing. Knowing deeply. Knowing, being known, being recognized as person, as worthy of being known, of being valued.

Intimacy is all of these things, but rarely all at the same time. Is it a continuum? Is it wave or particle? Does it come and go? Is there a ridge between intimacy and non-intimacy? What would non-intimacy be? Hate? This might be a form of intimacy. Ignoring, looking through, I-It? If so, now that we’ve named It, what do we do about It, how do we recognize It?

What then is a good conversation? How much intimacy is best? Does a good conversation need to be about something that matters? I suspect we can have a good conversation about meaningless chit chat if that is what the persons need. There can be a connection there if all we need to do is share a good laugh or a piece of fluff. Yet I suspect even then we are trying to connect. We in effect say, “Hey, I’m a fun person, gentle, caring, someone you’d like to know.” My preference is for the ones which change things and change—open—rip—people. This seems to mean to seek out the shadow and especially the flash. The more the question matters—is live—the closer we get to the bone: the closer we get to intimacy, to living inside out: displaying to the world who we really are, playing with the world with our most real self. Truth and Beauty and Goodness merge in each person and we need all of us to get all the facets flashing. Intimately. Really.

:- Doug.

We are incomplete
And G*d is the most incomplete

:- Doug.

G*d is bigger than that.
Whatever you say or think….

:- Doug.

Remember when you quote scriptures that all have come to us through human filters. Some light therefore is colored, some clear, some diffused, some bent, some things appear that are not visible to the unaided eye, and some is kept from us. Seek to see.

:- Doug.

We need to let things land
before we bat them back again.

:- Doug.

The trees do blush, a-knowing they shall soon be bare.

:- Doug.

Why do we try to get ahead? Ahead of what? Ahead of whom? Rather, could we live?

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

Now this is evocative: verse comes from a root common to versus and means turning, turning as in plowing, turning the soil. So our turning in conversation is a bringing the moist, dark, composted matter to the top, aerating and providing a home for roots and growth and living organisms. Beyond the dance to the dirt. I like that. To turn, roll, stir, fall, spindle, distaff, toward, bend, destiny, ladle, become, turn into, wind, fold. Good stuff!

:- Doug.