FootprintsintheWind.com

She speaks to my condition. That is a curious phrase used by Quakers, and yet it seems true to my place. Condition suggests something passing, that what matters most deeply to each of us is ephemeral. Options would be heart or mind or spirit, which somehow miss the mark. Condition also seems more concrete.

:- Doug.

In conversation, in deeper meeting, when are we best served by avoiding words?

:- Doug.

What do you see as the sweep of history? Or the sweep of humankind, or spirituality?

:- Doug.

Reverence for conversation. Something I have and espouse.

:- Doug.

The Curiosity of Conversation

:- Doug.

The Remaining Mysteries of Conversation

:- Doug.

What happens next?

:- Doug.

What do we talk about in a profoundly meeting conversation? Questions and stories are significant parts. Witness one another.

:- Doug.

Touch me, conversation.

:- Doug.

Evil cannot be eradicated, It cannot be abolished. The issue is to what in a conversation will you commit yourself?

:- Doug.

The first of the list of Dos: Do take what is given.

:- Doug.

Person
wanting to hear
your stories

:- Doug.

End of life time is edge of life.

:- Doug.

By sitting with another they will eventually find what they need.

:- Doug.

What if this conversation were exactly what is needed to heal this world? What if your story were exactly what is needed to heal this person?

:- Doug.

Conversation
a source
of life

:- Doug.

It takes a certain grace—and maybe graciousness—to hear another’s stories. Maybe that means to hear their stories out into the open.

:- Doug.

Conversation is to re-mind people who they are.

:- Doug.

We seek because we deeply need the conversation in which meeting occurs. The other kinds are necessary to the functioning of an It-world. We need them to eat. Yet more than eating, we need meeting. Or eating would not be worth our while. So the conversation in which meeting comes about is what I want to point us toward. These meetings are not likely. They are necessary.

:- Doug.

The meeting conversation you seek you cannot have often. Just often enough to sustain your liveliness.

:- Doug.

We know what we need. It is not words. We need to be met. We are surprised that meeting is ephemeral. Knowing this, go. Expectantly, vulnerably, openly.

:- Doug.

Martin Buber in I and Thou, at page 99 writes “Love itself cannot persist in the immediacy of relation; love endures, but in the interchange of actual and potential being.” So too conversation keeps on, becoming stronger and weaker, more intimate and less, more Thou and then more It in an interchange. Constant change. Here is where our dismay arises: we are denied continual satisfaction of our need for union with the other.

This last is significant, maybe a key to another inner passage, and bears restating. I get disappointed when our conversation does not leave us with a feeling that we were one with each other. We speak of soul mates and mind melds and these are but hints of what we mean. What Buber is telling us is the truth of experience: we only get these meetings fleetingly, perhaps in a glance. Yet we keep going out, seeking and being open to such meetings, for herein we come alive.

:- Doug.

We often take too little from one another in our conversations. We can hold back our challenges to one another so much, we fail to stimulate. Real harm is done, unseen, for what is the cost of what could have been?

:- Doug.