FootprintsintheWind.com

Meeting has the feel, the draw, of home, Mom, womb—M sounds and to a lesser extent, H sounds. It does not seem to draw to a dreamed former idyllic time, but to some possible new place and effort beyond now.

:- Doug.

What then is the province of meeting? What is its work?

:- Doug.

Conversation is woven out of a rich basket of conscious and non-conscious yarns. Some indeed are the silk of tall tales, stories, and dreams, waking or otherwise. Some are shorn from the backs of passing sheep and goats. What’s in your basket?

:- Doug.

Meeting is the basis of oral culture.

:- Doug.

There are no linear climactic plots in real life. The same is true of conversation. Instead, each takes the form of an epic.

:- Doug.

Conversation is complexity’s threads pulled apart and rewoven.

:- Doug.

As its own primarily oral culture between us, conversation uses narrative to store, organize, transfer, exchange, and build up what we know.

:- Doug.

What is the role and use of space in conversation? Consider presence. Consider conversations on Zoom and on telephone v. those in real space, in physical space. Consider the size of the space in relation to the number of bodies. Consider the size of the space in relation to the activities.

:- Doug.

Maybe, maybe, there is in conversation, art in the form of a search for beauty, life, and an ineffable something.

:- Doug.

At the end of this exploration we might arrive where, from drinking to the full the way of conversation, it has become our way of living. We then no longer think about one another containing multitudes, we live among these all about. We no longer open to one another, we live openingly. We are friend to all, all the all.

:- Doug.

We have something in us we are sharing in conversation: something of life.

:- Doug.

Am I, in my writing, interpreting teachers I find instructive? Have I been translating? What are the ways to translate and how might looking at that inform how I write?

:- Doug.

Speech is from inside my body to, first, surround you and then, enter you through the ears and perhaps whole body. My inside enters yours, forming us into one. So too, but more profoundly, presence unaccompanied by words operate, the stuff of glances and gestures and nearness. In the lap of grandmother too is a homebeing presence.

I am not quite there. We soak into the one hugging and embracing us. They at the same time soak into us.

Is there, more, an element of remembrance of the womb? We might hear the heart, the gurgle. Or we feel the purr of the kitten. Haptic is perhaps closer than sound. Lovers cuddle. We don’t know why. But we also know why. It is a body-knowing.

:- Doug.

If you become presence with your friend, what do you do to accept theirs with you?

:- Doug.

Literacy encourages us to be visual; orality encourages us to be aural—and immersed.

:- Doug.

What if conversation were not the same as communication? Are they different levels of something more basic? Ephemeral we meet, ethereally, being to being. Do we move from body to aural and words? Do these move from gross → Fine? Do these move from communication of “Just the facts, Ma’am,” to something more world shuddering?

:- Doug.

What is it about touching one another, especially hugging? Few animals hug—chimps, horses I expect.

A wiley old dog thinks—Why make it more physical than it needs to be? We’re just two persons (complexities) smelling out how our relationship will be.

:- Doug.

Today I write
mystery
poetry

:- Doug.

Conversation lives in with.

:- Doug.

What then is the lowest note I can perceive on the dog scale? What is dog profound?

:- Doug.

Is it true that if we can’t hear what dogs are saying, we can’t hear humans much better?

:- Doug.

What is it like to talk human? We don’t know how to talk human.

:- Doug.

I want us to dance with our friends. I want us to get to the third octave down, to the notes that shake not our eyes, nor our skins, nor our viscera, but our bones. Where do we live? What does it feel like to be a human?

:- Doug.