some*one* at stake
Meeting, more than conversation, needs something to be at stake: it has to be about something; someone has to be affected. No mush here.
:- Doug.
Meeting, more than conversation, needs something to be at stake: it has to be about something; someone has to be affected. No mush here.
:- Doug.
Today in a support group for care partners, one woman told us about her husband. I do not say he suffers from his dementia, since she is the one who suffers more often. He was reading the newspaper classified ads. She asked him what he was reading. He answered, “I’d tell you, but its classified.” A meeting, a memory, a legacy.
:- Doug.
The purpose of conversation as of poetry is often to de-familiarize us and re-familiarize us.
:- Doug.
Things which just barely touch conversation are in fact the outer edges of conversation, its learning places. Listening, hearing, attending become positive acts of expression: strands inseparable from the knot that is conversation.
:- Doug.
What we are working toward in conversation is a consummation, not a mere cessation. We savor not solely at the conclusion, but throughout. We circle it. It infuses the whole. Here is a wholeness. A wholeness that does not know where it is going—our adventure!
:- Doug.
Can we converse in a way that brings enduring grace, charm, and beauty to our offerings and our receptions?
:- Doug.
When you start to take even one other human as a monster, that’s you, becoming.
:- Doug.
How will you know you are in meeting? Reality tells us we may not know till days or years later. Memory may pop, and you know now what it was. A flash catches you in a later meeting, telling you both were and still are meetings. A word, an echo, a perfume remains, stays with you.
:- Doug.
What makes our meeting memorable is when we manage to round it out. That makes it a meeting. This is why Harrison Owen said that overstaying can undo the meeting. We are undoing the rounding, fraying the threads.
:- Doug.
We cannot hide
who we are
from others
except the others
don’t know
how to consciously
read what we reveal
:- Doug.
Within art is the ethics of goodness, truth, beauty.
:- Doug.
The work is to go on.
:- Doug.
There may be value in staying with the hunger.
:- Doug.
We shrink from intimate because we sense it is of the holy. It is other. Do we remember that holy is other?
:- Doug.
A sadness not to break us
but to hold us
how we want to be held
or were once held
as children
made by it
not unmade
:- Doug.
Conversation is an art
a dark art
we bend to it
:- Doug.
What happens in processing?
:- Doug.
Meeting can be about finding the large in the small.
:- Doug.
However free it be
However right it be
Much costs much
:- Doug.
In the fog
of the woods
I see afresh
:- Doug.
The soul and the spirit, yes
Who and what and more awaken?
They play, they are not lost as you
:- Doug.
Finding our humanity is enough, because it creates.
:- Doug.
Purer arias
Quieter paths between
:- Doug.