FootprintsintheWind.com

A Lakota Sioux term: “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ” (All Are Related or All My Relations). I am coming more to believe this saying, no, absorb this saying into my being. All living are related through living.

:- Doug.

Intimate conversation flows from intimate revelation. It runs in spiral streams. I say what’s important to me. You respond with yours. I go to deeper waters. You as well. We sense in our fingertips something cool and thin and then begin to find these waters came from the same underground river. Shared source.

:- Doug.

When you hear a metaphor, it is an entry into the pre-words inner processes of this person. It whispers what they really feel or think. You can come closer. Just here. Hear more than one? Pick the last. Metaphor whispers.

:- Doug.

Interpret. Use your words to reflect back what you heard the other say. More importantly use your frames, your angle of view. For example, if the other uses sports and war as their primary metaphor and this does not enliven you, look for a picture that sources from your core. Perhaps it is cooking and the warmth, flavors, and gathering that brings. Speak your heart. Switch metaphors. You may both learn. You may come closer together. Share metaphors.

:- Doug.

If you won’t converse you won’t know him or her, nor your possibilities.

:- Doug.

Food is medicine
Water is life
Conversation is touch

:- Doug.

What if we reconnected to our local watersheds and foodsheds, how would it affect our conversations?

:- Doug.

Are there regional differences of conversation?

:- Doug.

We might renew our sense of kindness with our sense of conversation.

:- Doug.

Metaphor is a conversation between what is known and what is partially known, to the end that we might question, learn, and extend our world. Our life.

:- Doug.

What does it mean to be in conversation? It conversation a container? And nothing more? Lawyers, Doctors, and other professionals are in practice, but does it mean more: they are engaged by the Work? It there something for instance that they each—person, profession, conversation—get and give the other? And more than that? And less?

:- Doug.

It seems time to start interim-writing.

:- Doug.

So far—what’s next?—I’ve noticed two ways to metaphor. The first is the most usual: finding things which share characteristics: a slippery thought is a greased piglet. The second is finding things as unlike as can be imaged: a slippery thought is a pre-school class on the first day.

:- Doug.

Many times I read a writer and think I have found the key. “We have a history from which we need to recover.” “We need to pay attention to what’s around us.” Ever I find another big picture and way through. Next week a new book, a new idea, a new whole to fit my burgeoning thinking. There is no solid ground, it is all ice floating in a moving river. We take our stand. These floes our human “solidity.”

:- Doug.

In conversation, is our work to act as life-givers?

:- Doug.

We humans are tiny critters caught in a web, a web spun out of a folklore of unendable economic progress. Once the spinning started, once it became our new home, we ourselves began to weave. We did not, do not, notice we began weaving with carcinogens, sludge, and poisons. We have reached an astonishing point where ordinary people inject themselves with botulinum! We can no longer see a way out to solid footing.

:- Doug.

What does it mean to hear through another’s ears? How is it done? When are we done?

:- Doug.

There is applied imagination
But what of implied imagination?

:- Doug.

We can round a square and square a round. Can we verb a noun, and noun a verb? English, as many western languages, has too many nouns, too few verbs. We need to verb many things! River that sky. Book your ideas. Husband your wife.

:- Doug.

Whether or not they have stolen her money, they have stolen big chunks of her personhood.

:- Doug.

Can gesturing—to ourselves alone, or with others in conversation—help us think and relate?

:- Doug.

Notice when we cross the senses in everyday speech and metaphor. Why?

:- Doug.

Is it so, that I use metaphors to help get me into a physical experience? To carry me bodily out beyond mere mental description? What is that sweetness I turn over on my tongue?

:- Doug.