FootprintsintheWind.com

Our task in some conversations is to wade into the wetlands to learn reciprocity.

:- Doug.

A Conversation Bigger

:- Doug.

I need to take care of my body—to keep it active—so I can get out this significant work.

:- Doug.

Let the conversation teach you
Not the words
Nor the people
Nor the talk
The conversation itself

:- Doug.

We may be in a conversation bigger than we recognize.

:- Doug.

There is a conversation which is longer and broader than we notice—it could be within our ken if we attended. The bees and the flowers have changed the colors and probably other aspects of each other over centuries. Different species have combined intricately to make lichens. We carry in our bodies other living beings to make up our microbiome. All this did not happen yesterday, but over millennia. Some conversations are so slow we miss them. Some conversations are so quick we miss them. The only thing ours has going is that it is the right speed for us to participate.

:- Doug.

This all is turning a corner: life is the hidden name of conversation. Our task is to expand and extend life, to stretch, to make bigger. We engender life not merely through bodies coming together, but through notions trading genes. Notions can come from all of life, all the thousands of species, not limited to one full of itself, but lacking hair and claws and roots.

:- Doug.

I may have a far too small idea of conversation. It’s office may be out beyond humanity. It may be to extend and expand the work of life.

:- Doug.

I’m studying something that has never before been studied: how do I touch your imagination with it?

:- Doug.

Conversation makes persons
Conversation makes thinking
Conversation makes relatives

Conversation births life

:- Doug.

Conversation is work because it is thinking together. Thinking is always work.

:- Doug.

I have here a conceptual project: therefore I need to invent metaphors to help communicate.

:- Doug.

If plants are the eldest among us, the oldest teachers, might they have something to teach of conversation?

:- Doug.

Conversation the teacher. My role is to bring people into the presence, invite them to hear, ready them to hear. To hear? Each other. To expand and invent. All us.

:- Doug.

Tell the wonder of conversation.

:- Doug.

Writing is my reciprocal gift for receiving oxygen from this place. It follows to ask with what heart ought I to write?

:- Doug.

Sometimes I stand in the way of a deepening meeting conversation. Unwillingly willingly. I don’t want to hold it back; perversely, I do, as in my distraction a few days ago, sitting with F.

:- Doug.

“The plants are our oldest teachers” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p 213). What are they turning/tuning us toward?

:- Doug.

Perhaps while I have been working on conversation, conversation has been working on me, turning, growing, me.

:- Doug.

The larger powers of conversation are to create and to destroy. Who is to say its delicate powers are not stronger?

:- Doug.

What do I know of conversation? Precisely none of its mystery.

:- Doug.

Ask their names, speak their names. This is the step into conversation, into relation. Know. This one.

:- Doug.

Let us sit together
Let us tell stories
For a time yet to join us

:- Doug.