FootprintsintheWind.com

What catches our attention? What calls us to share our attention with another?

:- Doug.

The cooking theory of conversation

:- Doug.

What are we cooking in conversation? Ourselves. Our ideas. Our betweens.

:- Doug.

It’s not the stove
It’s not the flame
It’s not even the heat
Nor the ingredients
It’s the cooking

:- Doug.

What’s cooking? What are we making?

:- Doug.

We each carry responsibility for repairing the culture.

:- Doug.

Together is what humans do. Conversation is the life of together.

:- Doug.

What is the purpose of cooking? What does this tell us about the purpose of conversation? What else?

:- Doug.

So the prime role of conversation is creating: finding something new, or mixing in a new way, or making something that never before existed. It is imagination even beyond creating. It is increasing the possible. It is imagining and thinking and working together. The idea that conversation is simply encoding a message, transmitting it, and decoding it, misses its worth. It is a feast, a party! It is beyond give and take in which there are losers more than winners: it is everyone benefits. The prime role of conversation is poetry: making.

:- Doug.

What are the lived values of conversation? Everyone has a contribution of worth. Hearing is of the highest value. Allowing in things so they can work and make something new. Life. Nourish. Curiosity. Seeking the surprises. Moving. Novelty. Making. Finding. Discontinuity.

One of those values has to be sharing so to build the life of all. The commerce of sharing, the flow, makes it clear that withholding is the primary death, the primary sin. We grow in and by way of interchange. The exchange that happens in conversation is the seed of living, growing, standing forth.

:- Doug.

Cooking with Conversation

:- Doug.

What if we converted our words to colors and drawings and aromas?

:- Doug.

What if I write something and you say it? Like composer and musician, say.

:- Doug.

It may be easy to come up with things we don’t know, but good things, lush things: that’s the work.

:- Doug.

Try in the same conversation to have different modes. Choose among words, body movement, music, meditation/contemplation, prayer, letters, email, books, leaving spaces physical and temporal, making centers, phoning, feasting, conviviality, washing dishes. . . .

:- Doug.

How can I fit all I am learning and touching together in my studies? Then again, the question is the study, it is the thing I am using as my compass direction. So I could simply say, for instance, here are these 15 properties, what we do not know is how they fit with conversation, yet there is an intuition that they are speaking of the same thing. Life is a thread. It seems so thin it might snap, yet here it is. Stop, look to see, listen to hear, converse with us about what you find.

:- Doug.

The things which drive us nuts about conversation are perhaps among its prime benefits.

:- Doug.

Curious about conversation.

:- Doug.

There is much transpiring in the forest underneath our feet. And respiring and drinking and feeling and talking and growing and crawling.

:- Doug.

I don’t have decades for patient groundwork toward improving our practice of conversation—but we do. We have generations.

:- Doug.

We start with unfinished humans in unfinished conversations. We cannot say either will ever be finished.

:- Doug.

Conversation occurs naturally not smoothly but in fits and starts.

:- Doug.

Like a heartbeat conversation
keeps us going keeps on going
unlike a heartbeat
its life might be carried by others
possibly even across the generations

:- Doug.