FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation is one of the most creative things we do—probably the most creative. For every time we truly meet another we are making life. This conversation may be enough to carry us forward one more breath and one more step, or a little further. Life itself is made in conversation.

:- Doug.

Our life is in this conversation
Our life is us

:- Doug.

Consider that death is the vase from which conversation flowers. We may lose this person and the life she can bring us. Soon. We must meet, and now.

:- Doug.

This is sacred
That is revered
This again moves
Nouns, ever reified
Grow cold

:- Doug.

What’s the most beautiful question on which you’d like to be working?

:- Doug.

Bubbles floating on
spring air, clinging, solo too
Pop! Watering life!

:- Doug.

This whole book is my prayer to you that our tiny bubbles might twirl and some merge into larger. What then happens when we pop?

:- Doug.

First the feeling of being
then the feeling of being me
then expression—the crying out
Then ever the reaching to all about me
Later later words and thoughts and prayers

:- Doug.

Our task then is to find where our friend is now and go there. To receive. To welcome. To be with. Or, to bring our friend where we are, if, on this occasion we are legitimately paramount to him or her.

:- Doug.

We are in the moment always. As humans our stock of moments includes memories and imaginings. This is our primary complexity. Untangling these time constructs displays the possible simplicity of the animal.

:- Doug.

We are instantly more complex and less complex that we supposed.

:- Doug.

We are making one another. Not with hammers and wrenches. With our skin and lungs and souls releasing, taking in, and metabolizing molecules from one another—breathing in and out each other.

:- Doug.

Does conversation benefit from being contained, constrained, boundaried?

:- Doug.

Conversation is non-binary: Conversation is a multiplicity.

:- Doug.

Our metabolism takes in what is not us and discards what has become us, changing us in the process. Just so does our conversational metabolism take in what is not us and emit what is us. Each instant we are changed in our own estimation. We create and recreate ourselves.

:- Doug.

We living entities can turn water into blood. With the help of the vine we humans can turn rain water into wine.

:- Doug.

Conversation is a process of creating an identity. Here though it is more: it creates identities for friend one, friend two, their together, and indirectly by ripples, the world about them.

:- Doug.

My reading does not so much give me thoughts but prompts me to question and thus to think.

:- Doug.

There’s much more to conversation than you…

:- Doug.

Changes are what attracts the eye—any movement for instance. Not just your eyes and mine, but deer and cheetahs and beings with no eyes. We seek out difference. Something—there!—stands out from the background, or we miss it. Therefore our interactions arise to get movement, which is change, which is difference. Therefore there are degrees of difference, differences of differences. Therefore irritation and argument are only more of what we want.

:- Doug.

Water coming down the stream
Pushes the earlier water on
Seems the stream is its own cause
Or maybe the future moves the past
Just what do we mean by cause?

:- Doug.

In the best of conversations you might find your essence being absorbed into your friend’s imagination.

:- Doug.

Little old man at the end of the road—is that you, or me?

:- Doug.