FootprintsintheWind.com

What does it mean to say that our conversational surroundings support us in our desire to be free and to develop fruitfully and to act in all matters appropriately?

:- Doug.

Who is stronger? The big athletic 17-year old boy or his grandmother, 110 pounds, who must look straight up to talk to him? Which could pick up the other and hold him or her above the head? The boy is physically stronger. But let Grandma point an index finger in his face and he backs down. He can solve algebraic equations and explain the basics of calculus much quicker than she. But she can tell him what mattered from before he was born and can imagine further into the future than he. He has street smarts and can keep them both safe in seedier areas of town. She has world smarts to know the people in all areas of town are their relations.

:- Doug.

Let my reading brew, steep, percolate.

:- Doug.

It is the task of people to meet daily challenges and rise above. Sometimes, perhaps most times, this needs some together—either in helping or testing.

:- Doug.

What are the problems, annoyances, and conflicts that conversation is seen to move us past? What such things can we mobilize to encourage people into converse? Inaccurate question! What we want to know is the path to a common realization that conversation can be the action to move us past the stress, to help us see we are capable.

:- Doug.

Seldom do we realize how close we are to the tipping point.

:- Doug.

This may be the moment when a largely literate populous is becoming more oral, more passing.

:- Doug.

If it can be done as simply as with a meeting of two or three it is worth the experiment.

:- Doug.

What is the effect on our daily lives of the life living in our conversations?

:- Doug.

How can conversation enlarge our vision of life? Picasso offered: “You’ve got to create images they won’t accept.”

:- Doug.

Gregory Bateson points us to the meta- and the meta-meta- logical levels for conversations about conversations, and conversations about conversations about conversations, with a warning: Never nothing more!

We could as well look another direction, to the conversations beneath, the roots, the conversations within, the entangled.

Quoth the raven, “Ever, more!”

Here too is complexity and worth, hidden and available.

Quoth the raven, “Ever, more!”

:- Doug.

In sailplanes there is an instrument variously called a variometer, rate of climb and descent indicator (RCDI), rate-of-climb indicator, vertical speed indicator (VSI), or vertical velocity indicator (VVI). Humans are a variometer of climb or descent of the humanity and life in the currents around them.

:- Doug.

There are many conversations underneath the conversation.

:- Doug.

First we listen
That we may hear

:- Doug.

We each have varying words for what is most profound about us—and where it may be located. Not to worry. It is common amongst us and all can hear it.

:- Doug.

I don’t care what you call me
so long as you hear me

:- Doug.

There is a closeness sometimes comes along with conversation.

:- Doug.

Words are tools
left lying about
might cause you to trip

:- Doug.

This is my task: what is conversation? How to measure it? How to estimate the degree of life inherent in the moving centers, and to find out what this life is.

:- Doug.

The work—the unknown—for me is to convert the ideas in architecture and other arts into the art of conversation, so as to point to places ahead to look further. I may not get to the promised land, it may be that none of us does, but we can start the course.

:- Doug.

I tend to think of conversation as of 3 broad swaths: Outside the Gate, where we chit-chat; the Corral, where we exchange information; and the Open Field, where we work.

:- Doug.

In lived conversation, we tend to use a word several times, we get hooked by this word, perhaps a word we seldom use. Why is that?

:- Doug.

Books are tools. Mark them. Tear them apart.

:- Doug.