FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation, ritual, meeting, and maybe flow are each the intersection of two lives. No more may be said. These are necessary for humanity to advance beyond survival.

:- Doug.

The Last Hot Chocolate is exploratory—searching for answers and mainly questions.

:- Doug.

Why converse? Shake off my blinders; wake up my mind; shiver my spine; cry; laugh; come close.

:- Doug.

Conversation is elusive, subtle, nuanced, varied, brutal, complex, and chewy.

:- Doug.

In conversing, do we shift from me thinking to larger overviews? Shift pronouns to the inclusive “you?” Take time out of our talking?

:- Doug.

Flow is a clue to enjoying conversation. We should enjoy our conversations. Ritual is a roadmap into and around within the thing you’ll see, do, be, and want.

:- Doug.

Csikszentmihalyi’s flow is centered in individuals; Turner’s communitas is centered in culture or society; maybe conversation is centered in the two of us.

:- Doug.

Persons need, and are brought forth in, conversations of brain, feelings, and will.

:- Doug.

We get remade in the indeterminacy of conversation, not as new persons, but as new persons together. WE are gathered in the abyss.

:- Doug.

Too much hubris there is in a target—as if you knew where the arrow would land! All we can control—what a word!—is what we do till we release the string. See? Eugen Herrigel taught us—at book length—how much and how little is wrapped up in that lifetime of moments of notching the arrow and stretching back. Play together—with some one or two others—play in direction only—let loose your landing place—let direction find its arriving—each moment a garden of possibilities—each blooming just when our gaze calls to it.

:- Doug.

We haven’t seen each other practically the whole of our adult lives. We have stories to find out, warp and woof and guitar strings to finger and tease.

:- Doug.

I’ve been in too much of a hurry to resolve my writing—to make sense of the conflicts and complexities brought up by any two or three worldviews. I must learn to allow things to ferment and fester.

:- Doug.

If there are no ways we can guarantee a conversation, a meeting, or a good conversation, what are we to do? Are we, like the good fisherman, to bring our best rods, reels, lures, line, choose the best times of the day, the likely waters—and then? Keep putting our line in the water. Not grow discouraged when “the fish are not biting today.”

:- Doug.

We ought to be different
and difficult
versions of ourselves

:- Doug.

In conversing and especially meeting there is a feeling of losing yourself and being found, simultaneously.

:- Doug.

What if, in your conversation, you started yelling at me, throwing your hot chocolate in my face? That’s a break of structure too far, yes?

:- Doug.

In conversation we lose among other things social status. We are, or often intend to be, equals. This is crossing the liminal.

:- Doug.

Turner holds every experience has both a rational and an emotional element. Since a conversation is an experience, every conversation has an emotional element. We must process this, at least take it in. Also each has elements sacred, profane, oceanic.

:- Doug.

Conversation helps us understand: the other; ourselves; us together. It circles and eddies.

:- Doug.

See how I can get myself stuck, if I can’t converse with you?

:- Doug.

Examine/Examen what we do well in conversing and meeting—and what we want to do well. Where do we already flow?

:- Doug.

How can conversation and meeting be more enjoyed—have more flow?

:- Doug.

Flow in conversation is less a little dimpled ball made to go into a small cup, and more a spring, a fount.

:- Doug.