FootprintsintheWind.com

In a conversation, or even conversation itself, we get an inkling of what we can do: allow. Allow the gradual rubbing together of its processes, namely talking, reverie, reflecting, silence inviting and accepting, good will toward one another, life-attending.

:- Doug.

How important is it that in my book I distill things to the most startling points, the places of new insight? For now, I think that is important. If anyone is to be helped, then I must help them find the stronger seeds, the likely good spots in which to plant them.

:- Doug.

Largering is our activity.

:- Doug.

We are not passing scraps of poetry from hand to hand, but hints of our larger, larger ear to ear.

:- Doug.

“More here than meets the eye:” this is true also in the sense that vision is not our only sense.

:- Doug.

Alexander shows that science knows the mechanics, but has so far failed to examine the whole and how it guides the mechanics. It points me to start looking at the whole of a conversation: we know the mechanics, but what really is going on? (We don’t yet know.)

:- Doug.

It takes small to concentrate; large to gather context.

:- Doug.

The canoer’s J stroke imparts energy and then direction. A person conversing has an opportunity to deftly do the same.

:- Doug.

Where can we stand to hear all the living beings, all the stars, and all their stories? This is the hearing that conversation requires of us: to hear from the whole.

:- Doug.

Gal Beckerman in The Quiet Before, pp 208-209, speaks of spaces to work together but also apart. This is a kind of respiration as in a conference with breakout sessions. What good does this serve?

:- Doug.

Once you have invented a concept the theorems flowing from it are forced upon you. So, once we have proposed the concept of, say, making life in conversation, then we find we can start to invent things to do with that, like invite people we formerly thought were not like us, and search for ways we can add life to so-so conversations.

:- Doug.

Conversation makes life
Life makes conversation
All there is

:- Doug.

There is no conclusion. There is no formula to make all of your conversations wonderful or productive. There is only you. And me. And our work in every conversation, in every minute, to bring to this now, life.

:- Doug.

If we start by asking ourselves how we would go about making a wonderful conversation like that one, where does that take us in the search for what we don’t know about conversation?

:- Doug.

People are merely conversation’s way to make more conversation.

:- Doug.

What we most don’t know about conversation is how to make life. And that’s the job. All its faces.

:- Doug.

The two together, the pleasure from doing the thing, and the making of life, this is the value we get from making conversation a little better.

:- Doug.

As concerns conversation, we have too little awareness of how essential is its becoming.

:- Doug.

I have so many insights about conversation, how will I ever bring them together in a book, to where it makes sense to a reader, to where it is useful to a player in a conversation?

:- Doug.

This is not one thing. It’s a conversation. Not definable. No inviolable lines can be drawn around it.

:- Doug.

How Do Conversations Learn?

:- Doug.

The Conversation Ceremony

:- Doug.

I seek to have every conversation living.

:- Doug.