FootprintsintheWind.com

I need a sub-text, a current flowing in an opposing direction, in a hundred directions. I must put my quandaries on the paper, let them complicate!

:- Doug.

It is not about the reward—that’s looking through the telescope backwards. It is about where we have been and what we can bring back from there: something akin to Campbell’s boon for the community.

:- Doug.

One part of what we give one another is the autotelic experience.

:- Doug.

Can autotelic activities point us not just to and about the “real” world, but toward becoming a new person?

:- Doug.

Have I fallen into the Lutheran sermon fallacy? The one that says a sermon must be twenty minutes? Who says my chapters need to be ten pages or even one page long? Have I found a good place to stop? The Buddha holds up a flower.

:- Doug.

Why do you converse? To test your skill? To open your heart? To extend your mind? To enter flow? To find joy? To find companion? To start a movement? To take part in a secret? To escape? To love? To serve? To contribute? To offer?

:- Doug.

Flow is a form of dying to our self-project. In ritual we die to societal structure. Much the same seems true of meditation. I found it curious that Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi holds flow is not real life. Then it came clear to me. These are nice baubles on the necklace of life. They even help. But life has a larger work.

:- Doug.

But we must be kind as well as effective, or we be not human. So we give each other opportunity for tastes of meeting and flowing, but somehow move us along for our common good and a larger common good. The world grows ever more, ever more, complex. Back of seeking I-Thou is a necessarily I-It world. We are in ludus for brief times, and mostly in interludes.

:- Doug.

Meeting is for flow; conversation is for work.

:- Doug.

Is conversation (and life) only and finally about flow and enjoyment? Or is there a more that turns us toward some action?

:- Doug.

Can we surpass
Anyone
In our goodness?

:- Doug.

It may be outside life, but it leaves one feeling it is the whole of life. It is conversation.

:- Doug.

Not the river
the flowing

:- Doug.

A bully forces your attention on you—and therefore on him. But in conversation your awareness is best placed not on either of you, but on the flow of the conversation.

:- Doug.

This richness is the shoe horn—after that, the foot and the shoe are one.

:- Doug.

Why, for you, are those things enjoyable?

:- Doug.

Is there any single core of our being? Why do we assume there is? Maybe there is no bottom to get to. Maybe we each are more far flung, more a community of voices, cacophonous. Maybe we spread out to the edges of the unknown universe. Maybe we are coterminous with the all there is, only a little thin at the edges. I can never know you. I can never know me. Always I am surprised. When I bother to look. I want it to be When.

:- Doug.

Is life an affront to dying?

:- Doug.

But I don’t want to write a chapter on how and why conversation is like ritual. Rather, can we explore what fun we can find in or put in conversation when we use lessons from ritual? Not “deep fun” but rich fun, rich enjoyment.

:- Doug.

I have been writing of the effort and the work we need to invest in the conversation and the preparation for the conversation. This, as if it were the difficulty, the thing we want to avoid. Both may be true. But more true is that the work is the enjoyment.

:- Doug.

Conversation is like chess, only with infinity pieces, each with innumerable possible moves, on a board of innumerable dimensions. See how many strategy books there are for chess?

:- Doug.

Conversation is a skill not to learn, but to exercise—find—enter.

:- Doug.

Offer questions, one to another
In questions, beauty, flight, calling out—
Can you come out and play?

:- Doug.