FootprintsintheWind.com

Just got a call from an automated selling computer. This is the antithesis of connection. It makes a pretense of connecting, but it is only for the purpose of extracting money from me. I am not a money vending machine. I did not choose to allow this false connection to continue.

:- Doug.

I have a need to connect people and to be connected myself. This is where my life is—in the connections. I exist no place else.

I exist no place else but in the betweens. None of us do. I need the sap of life which flows here.

:- Doug.

Is this not what church is about? Not some sweet way of meeting a god who will do my bidding, but one who demands that I be who I can be. Meeting is a difficult thing to do, but easier than not meeting.

:- Doug.

There is deadly risk in dialogue. We are imperiled. If we are born in conversation, we die there, too. We die when we leave it; we die when we meet another, for we cannot long remain other, and yet we must. Both people must be willing to let shields down, the shields which keep us inside our images of ourselves. Our plans may not be accepted, they might be tossed aside, worthless. We might be tossed aside worthless. Our very being might be killed and it is not for sure that someone new will rise from the ashes, or that if such a one does we will want it. We might not recognize ourselves, indeed we might not survive in any form. This is why we hold back, not willing to lose who we are. We are afraid we die. This is why we argue for our position. Yet this is our test of faith: we put forth what reality beyond truth we see, not knowing whether it will bear any fruit. Have we done good or ill we cannot know. Ours is but to offer, trembling to offer. This is a test of faith for despite our past experience that something better arises from the ashes of dialogue, we can never be sure about this time. We risk it all.

So if you do not wish to risk, I will understand. I will not hold it against you. Great courage is not mine, either. I shrink from dialogue. I shrink from revealing myself and from receiving your revealings. I fear that I may have to give up myself and my pet plans and my comfortable ways of living. I may have to learn something new, change my way of working and living, meet new people, become a new person myself.

There is risk here: what else goes with it? A responsibility not just to accept what the others say and go along, but to meet what they say, to throw my offering into the mix, see where the similarities and dissimilarities and correlates are. How are we related, how are our ideas and our dreams related? Perhaps tonight the conversations will turn away from what I think will work into something else: it is my duty to listen; it is also my duty to share my vision; then it is my duty to bend so we can weave a new pattern. There might be a better form. I wrote that like I do not believe those words, but indeed there might be a clue to a fuller measure beyond this half measure, there might be indeed something grandly better. Prepare to be surprised.

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

We are together to converse. It will go some places neither of us intended. Some of this will be through Bohm’s ideas of similarity and dissimilarity, which are pretty similar to Howe’s correlative thinking. It amounts to relational thinking: how is this related to that?

We have to somehow get beyond thinking, do we not? For thinking is about analyzing and getting handles and limiting and defining things, and we need constantly to move beyond that if we are to grow.

Conversation then has the effect of moving us beyond thinking or at least thought (that is to say, beyond past tense historical thought) to some new field, where we can do relational thinking, where we can be drawn beyond. Beyond thinking or beyond normal ways and patterns of thinking? Still I think there is something beyond similarity and dissimilarity: what? Perhaps creativity. At least an opening. Perhaps awareness. Perhaps possibility. Is that all?

Is that all? is a wonderful question. It can bring us up long.

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

This morning I read a few of the notes in On Dialogue and The Miracle of Dialogue. I was thinking of my vision of the flowers of JOB. The long fluted flower, something a hummingbird could really love to get its beak into, is a drawing down and in of the lines of a continuum, down to a point at the base of the flower. Here at the center is the point where things begin to open out, inviting the hummingbird in at the same time. Where does the flower end? At the end of its petals? Wherever on the winds the molecules of its fragrance are transported? On the wings of the hummingbird which the flower borrows to allow its pollen to fly? In the nectar that flows in the veins of the hummingbird, becoming hummingbird? Or is the hummingbird becoming flower? Where do any of end and begin? Is not the air which Jesus and Gautama and Muhammad and Lincoln and Schweitzer breathed still around to be breathed by you and me? So then maybe we are the coalescing of the one whatever it is of the universe into nodes of the same? We are centers of the world, opening out, like the flower that describes the continuum. And where it opens out, it opens out to the all there is. Here joining and opening and being meet, here in the all there is. Here we all are unique and connected. Where does the flower end?

:- Doug.

Conversation is how we create.

:- Doug.

There is an old saw, “It is better to be silent and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Perhaps it would be good to turn that around: Far better to speak our doubts together so we can all grow, than to remain fools.

:- Doug.

Thought flows around us. I am caught in the central race of the waters. I am in love with this river called conversation. This intercourse is where we are real and alive. Conversation is essential to thinking: Conversation is to thinking as river is to flow. Each makes up the other.

:- Doug.

Some say Nothing happens until someone sells something. I tell you Everything happens when we risk our very selves to converse.

:- Doug.

I’m in the business of conversation. You are in the business of conversation. No, we are both alive only in the flowing surging waters of conversation.

:- Doug.

We must test out this thinking work. We must find differences and similarities and mis-perceptions. From these grow persons. What is this like? Where does this fit? How do we diverge and where do we meet? In the crevices the flowers grow. Who might we be? What flowers are we?

:- Doug.

We need to get out of ourselves and share this thinking work with others. We must grow it. We must grow our conscious awareness, we must see more of the real, we must create more of the real. We must kill off our pet projects, we must find more cliffs off which to jump—and more from which to turn back. We must find all of life.

:- Doug.

The higher joy of giving
The joy of sacrifice
This is real

:- Doug.

When we rely solely on experts, by definition we get limiting answers. Experts focus. They look at this and little of that and nothing of this over here. Lay people look little into this, lots at that, and a great deal at this over here. Experts and lay people need each other: neither one has a whole picture. The more people, the wider the panorama. The more conversing, the better our information, grasp and implementation. The more conversing, the bigger our dreams. Don’t chase the workers off: invite them to the harvest. It is vital we get more people conversing.

:- Doug.

Conversation is about moving beyond thinking. We become aware of things we have not grasped before, even things we cannot grasp. Its social nature draws me outside my orbit. Conversation invites my awareness. Conversation expands us. When we are conscious of more we do more.

:- Doug.

Since conversation is thinking together, it is labor, we seek ways to avoid it. Simultaneously it hints at the essence of us, so with our fear we are fascinated: we do it all our days. We are in fact drawn to it and to one another. I want to find out what is in this other, between us, and therefore within me. We know we are more than we have thus far come. Thinking is a social act. When we think, we touch the world. We touch others who think; we touch those who do not think as we do: trees and fish, turtles and turkeys. What is it about thinking that can make muscles move?

:- Doug.

Conversation is labor. It is the work of thinking and bringing forth. Oft do we run to avoid it.

:- Doug.

All merges at the open end.

:- Doug.

These are parts of joining: the individual, the group, the universal. It is here, the universal, that we find true being.

:- Doug.

These are not Its. These are lives. They are participating in life. They are participating in my life.

:- Doug.

Can we be convivial—can we share life?

:- Doug.

At the opening is the gathering point. The universal is the existence of which we are all a part, the most real, G*d. So it seems that all things, people and beings converge at the place where they open out the widest.

Now that changes the picture a lot: we see that where we are the same, connected and one is our larger selves, it is our open sides, not our closed off, smaller, pointier selves. We are gathered where we are larger, we are gathered where we spread out in the wide open spaces, where there is room to spread out and be different, and the differences amount not to divergencies but acceptancies, things to celebrate. The more different we are, the more the same we are. For one thing, we all have the desire to be all that we can and to use to the fullest our individual specialness.

We are all unique in our specialness, but the same in that we have a specialness. So we celebrate and make room.

:- Doug.