FootprintsintheWind.com

We’re a holely lot
By conversation filled
If at all

:- Doug.

We meet
ourselves
300 years on

:- Doug.

This is why I am today keying in on this word convivium. It is an uncommon word. It has windows, doors, and skylights. Lots of doors. We need to go out and meet our convivium, our ancestors older and newer. It is a home word. It does not encapsulate the whole, but rather opens up the loaf, starts the conversation.

:- Doug.

The encapsulated word traps our thinking. I’d rather a home word—a place with windows, doors, and skylights to go out and meet the world and come back to cherish them all.

:- Doug.

I’m weaving together two books to make a library, a theater, a convivium. A black raspberry bush.

:- Doug.

(gesture to the path)
The way is
(two hands moving up along side
your ankles to your torso)
the human

:- Doug.

Don’t stop with finding the Old English physicality, enact! Gesture! Walk! With another!

:- Doug.

Larger, weaker
Homely, beauty
Other, Other, Other

:- Doug.

To walk and talk
That’s what it means
To be human
To gesture
Broadly and minutely
To befriend
The other to tend

:- Doug.

Wanna come? I invite you to help us invent ways to human better.

:- Doug.

Point to behind. If someone comes after you in line, where do they stand? In chronological order those who come after you come later in time. Compared to you, we say those born 50 years from now are where? In the future is after you, behind you, yes?

:- Doug.

To think, let us stroll.

:- Doug.

Even if they won’t work with us to human better, we will work.

:- Doug.

This morning I was reading in The Extended Mind and was understanding this valuable material. But I had made no notes and no inklings. I decided to push myself to discover what I had discovered. All of the inklings today stem from that push. That tells me something.

:- Doug.

Humanity—look for opportunities to transcend—but what?

:- Doug.

Take what you’ve just been taken by. Restate it in your own words and gestures and metaphors. Use it. Apply it to your tasks.

:- Doug.

This might be called “The Course in Metaphors.”

:- Doug.

If we want to peer into the future, we may have to turn around. Maybe a reason we don’t see the future is we don’t have eyes in the back of our heads. The future is coming along behind us. We can change our thinking by changing our metaphor.

:- Doug.

Let’s develop gestures for key concepts and metaphors—like for streams and roots, fore and aft, port and starboard.

:- Doug.

Gesture more
understand more

:- Doug.

The question is, Is this author sparking new constellations in me? Could she or he show me an unexplored world? If so, get the book.

:- Doug.

Is there a way to introduce “What will happen next?” into our work?

Experiment is one way: we send people home to try out the experiments themselves. Will walking, enacting, and interoception give us any breakthroughs?

It needs to be curiosity with a stake.

What is the stake? It’s our grandchildren at stake. It’s love for the human race, wanting to do good for strangers. It’s wanting to do our particular good, before it is too late.

No, no, no! I say to them, whatever they say. No namby pamby. What stirs your blood? Why would you literally die for it?

:- Doug.

What else might ancestor mean?

:- Doug.