FootprintsintheWind.com

Exercise: Write one true thing I did not know.

:- Doug.

How would you feel if someone stole your words? Or only your writing? Where in you would you find the world after a night of dreaming? What would you notice sharply, what would you mourn? How would the world rearrange?

:- Doug.

Use Hemingway’s one true sentence in a conversation: what is one true thing each of us can say, just now?

:- Doug.

Not spiritual stability
seek
but spiritual vitality

:- Doug.

The rain opens itself
for life
you in conversation for ours

:- Doug.

Reading prompts reader to think. To think in a way unaccustomed. This thinking is near to dreaming, full of images in all senses, seldom in words, often in songs and stories playing out, carrying us along its waves and islands. This thinking stretches us forth to new shores. Here we meet persons like us. All people whom we have allowed to become persons to us are like us, speak with us, even when they do not like us. Here we swim, fly. Here we make good. Reading pulls us out of our single selves. Reading is conversing, conversing reading. Panoramas grow.

:- Doug.

The rain opens itself
for life
you in conversation for ours

:- Doug.

Can we swear our allegiance to a spirit of compassion?

:- Doug.

Sacrifice your stories, never telling
Or sacrifice them to communal campfires:
Choice

:- Doug.

To whom do we pray
if not ourselves
our kind
to make right this world
make better?

:- Doug.

Conversing serves to
or ought to
enlarge worlds

:- Doug.

The craft worker sees
The leader has sight
But two friends, talking, receive
Vision in exchange for their fear
Of opening eyes

:- Doug.

When you have only the power to weep

:- Doug.

We have a story for every filling conversation
every time we meet as persons
not of blood are we but blood of stories

:- Doug.

You are a secret
wanting to be known
some days

:- Doug.

Dark matter
Dark energy
Dark matters

:- Doug.

You remember saying things
I never heard you say
Or don’t recall you ever saying
So we each think the other
Is losing grasp of memory
Or even enjoying dementia
Or at least employing it

:- Doug.

What if the far shores
had not been created?
Are they the reason
you travel?
To see something
marvelous? A thing never
before accepted into your
world of what’s in the world?
Just so from there others
travel to your shore
and marvel. Just so,
travel opens
the eyes of your mind,
and conversation becomes travel
and this person a shore rising

:- Doug.

Is truth small
or large? red or green?
Is truth?

:- Doug.

What is light? Where does it come from? Fire. Nuclear reactions as in stars. But also from sea creatures and the foxfire of fungi, from eels and fish and fireflies, and we probably have not found it all. There is also the luminescent materials in dials, hands, scales of navigational instruments.

:- Doug.

We start off in one land
Find ourselves in another
Such is travel
Around the province of
Conversation
In the neighborhood of
Meeting

:- Doug.

Conversation is irrational
flesh, earth
universe

:- Doug.

I am an un-guessed
spinning world
longing, maybe, to be guessed

:- Doug.