FootprintsintheWind.com

Doubt is a faith
Doubt conversation

:- Doug.

How may whirlpools in this river?

:- Doug.

You cannot step twice
into the same river of conversation
More largely, you can

:- Doug.

We might pay attention to the variations among individuals. That is what we do daily, especially in conversation. It is what we forget to do daily in interactions with clerks, custodians, and children.

:- Doug.

This text is alive with multiple meanings—is this but a flag of our conversation, the kind that leads to meeting?

:- Doug.

When people talk, big things happen. When persons talk, bigger things happen.

:- Doug.

Test: Is my writing changing me?

:- Doug.

To find ever larger chunks of yourself, delve into ever more particular faces of your friend.

:- Doug.

The growth we seek is not magic. It comes in every conversation in which we open to a new and possibly painful falsity in what we knew for certain.

:- Doug.

If it feels mechanical, it is. Don’t keep pushing. Turn somewhere else in your conversation. Fresh paths rejuvenate.

:- Doug.

I know my Maker is with me because my life grows more complicated. Tests are not to make one stronger but to pull out what is already inventive.

:- Doug.

The question is why we don’t understand about conversation.

:- Doug.

If you want to learn about conversation, you’ve got to study architecture, Vodou, forests, underground rivers, and octopuses. And opera. You must study opera.

:- Doug.

How sure can we be that big things are composed of smaller? There is a school that holds that the big bring about the smaller. I suppose these two are simply looking to explain the same reality from different mountaintops. What do we do with these notions, so as to learn of conversation? Does the conversation bring about these two persons? Do the complexities draw up as from a well the persons to embody them? Are we parts of one another because our species has an in-bred tug one of the other? Does the novel call the voices, and then the voices call the characters?

:- Doug.

What else is happening? What is trying to stay hidden?

:- Doug.

Arguments are rarely complicated, however complex their roots.

:- Doug.

Beware the single—it limits how far you thinking can travel. For instance we may be tempted to speak of the quality of life when qualities might serve us better.

:- Doug.

As hand in hand
we sway up and up
our breaths labor
we pull against our connection
then together
we attain the summit
we know what we have known
but now only vaguely
and with certainty
that the coming
and the lostness
and the together
made us

:- Doug.

This is of what we’re capable
Of what are we capable?
Are we sure that’s all?

:- Doug.

Conversation is an exploration. We get lost in a metaphor of planet spinning in devoid space, a ball with hot molten rock somewhere in the middle, when maybe we are a field, a curtain of curtains, a territory wild with tame places.

:- Doug.

What if we sit and lament on each other as at a funeral or wake? Old Doug, I will miss his ___. Rob about made it to ___, but gave up a little too soon. Or maybe something happier.

:- Doug.

Conversation can take on the role of scrutinizing the surround, both in time and space, both life and us and community.

:- Doug.

Conversation is steel on flint
when we meet
conflagration! existence!

:- Doug.