FootprintsintheWind.com

At election time we do well to ask ourselves, What makes us Americans? What makes us humans?

:- Doug.

Network is not the best metaphor for how people relate because it shows us a picture of lines, however complex. Humanity is related to itself in highly nonlinear ways: feedback loops, arisings, bubbling, dancing, bumping, fuzziness, inside and beyond time, belonging, boundary-shaping, intentional and not, expectations-filled, conflicts.

:- Doug.

The conversational culture has these hidden aspects: It limits the range of our acceptable actions and even thoughts, while our conversations create it.

:- Doug.

Dual is the role of conversation
This hand continually generates
(Meaning, ideas, pictures)
This hand coordinates
(The ever changing people)

We get culture—a people
We get considered choices
We get value—
Wisdom or
Progress or
Something else

:- Doug.

Kairos is surreptitious time.

:- Doug.

What is time? Time is what we say it is. Nothing more, nothing less. Who is this “we?” Ahh, that is the question—What is important enough for us to measure?

:- Doug.

Overcast skies, humidity in the air: moisture permeates our bodies and lives. Such is the nature of spirit: encompassing, embracing, infusing: igniting or incinerating.

:- Doug.

The time line of old folks, if it exists at all, might just be with a long past tail, an interminable now, and very short future headlights. If we then, as carefamily, are living in a time line where the past is short, the future long, and the now almost non existent, how do we begin to converse with one another? Our boundary lines are not seen and therefore tripped over by each other, our references do not refer, our logic makes no sense.

:- Doug.

To prepare for this conversation is to limit it. It would then not be conversation. Best to go empty.

:- Doug.

Oh, friend, this is such a large world, I cannot see it all. Large out there, larger in the betweens.

:- Doug.

The next step in unfolding will be creatures who to us will seem as gods. Same as we perhaps seem to the other species in our lives. Maybe they will not ignore us as we and the species ignore each other. Maybe it will be us, when we no longer ignore.

:- Doug.

Everything unfolds. Some things slower or faster than others, so invisible. Flowers abound.

:- Doug.

Human language is made of metaphor, of comparison to our nearer world, of this standing for that, because otherwise we cannot understand, we cannot take in, the other. So when we read anything, we need to be alert to metaphors in hiding. This is especially true of things for which language is inherently inadequate.

:- Doug.

There are rhythms of life in say a nursing home. The rhythms are like languages where people cannot understand one another. There is the long flowing beat of the older, the staccato of the staff.

:- Doug.

I am a poet who practices as an elder caring lawyer.

:- Doug.

We are blind and do not—perhaps cannot—see our blindness.

:- Doug.

What are your opportunities in making a Will and testament? To get rid of, to pass along wisdom, to connect generations, to proselytize? What are the profane uses, the sacred?

:- Doug.

Kairos and Chronos come close to marking the boundary between sacred and profane time: the time which we are in, and the time which flows by.

:- Doug.

The world is conversation
Just you and me
Thee and thou
Us and them
Him and her
Only us and us and us
All in here
And no out there

:- Doug.

What is the meaning aspect of conversation? Is it simply It, Thou, Us, Poetry, Making. Are these the only meanings? Maybe. On the other hand, can we see these as one domain together, and there being other domains? These all relate to how we converse, where we go with our conversation. We can have training, protest, creativity, reorganization. These can be mapped to It, Making, Making, Making and Us. What other meaning realms are there? There is religious and larger spiritual. There is activity—getting a job done. There is problem solving. There is screaming. There is relationship growing and mending. There is keeping others at bay. There is killing. There is building. There is working together. All of these map to these five. There is transmitting wisdom to the next generations. There is transmitting life. Still these five, stretched. Meaning may be a clue to what the next step is, and it may be where we are now: seeking meaning, led by Freud and Jung in the 20th century, and seeing now conversation. Could conversation be meaning? I do not know. It certainly can transmit and transform meaning.

:- Doug.

Maybe we are headed toward a coming together, to seeing a way to work within our diversity and multiplicity to something that speaks to us all? Life? Even that is not agreed upon, for some see a next life as reason to threaten this life.

:- Doug.

Wonder if embodiment, process, pattern, and meaning are the first four of more, and what the next step might be. We have developed as things, then life, cognition, and meaning. What is the direction of this progression? The fact has been that emergence is surprise, its appearance is not predictable from the past. We can only see it from the vantage of the furthest development so far. Teilhard sees a development toward an Omega point, a coming together in one. That may be what will happen. Was reflection predictable from cognition? Maybe. Double reflection, reflecting on our reflection might be, and then again is sometimes exhibited. Who are ahead of us, exemplars who might exhibit a way? Mystics? Computer geeks? Popes? Philosophers? Terrorists?

:- Doug.

The product of conversation is life—the conversation.

:- Doug.