FootprintsintheWind.com

There is more available when talking with your friend. Ask what else? Is there anything more?

:- Doug.

What would it take to make your conversation poetic?

:- Doug.

Maybe, just maybe, “Why are we here?” would be a good conversation opener.

:- Doug.

We don’t have to get better. That is a symptom of our perfectionism.

:- Doug.

The words give you openings to the persons who speak them. “I have been acknowledged,” T said. She wants to be seen, heard, received. Or so I guess. “Getting better instead of being perfect,” T went on. Perfection then is important to her. She needs her efforts acknowledged. See, I am learning of T. See, learning seems important to me.

:- Doug.

We need differences. We need irritation. Seek out these. This is life. Life is growth. Life needs growth. Male needs female. The Why may be generations off: new generations looking for flowers and scents and the reverberations of tympani.

But irritation takes an opening—to your own tendency to close down in its face, as well as to the other’s new thing. A tenderness too, and a searching—of you and your other.

So I need to seek out irritation and conversations with persons I already know rub my fur backwards.

:- Doug.

Why do we need irritation?

:- Doug.

Why do we expect dogs and dolphins and gorillas to speak our language? Where is our real Dr. Doolittle?

:- Doug.

Mess mates come close to soul mates. Break bread together as often as you can. Bake bread together.

:- Doug.

Plenty are the “mores” in our lives and available to us. What varied phrases do we create combining “mores?” If you start with words like “look,” “eat,” “available,” “sleep,” and “want,” what phrases are possible? So if we have a “vocabulary” of different “mores,” we’d ought to be able to create varied phrases, pointing us to untried “mores,” yes?

A “more” might be found by writing or reading a science fiction novel, something to get you asking what is possible for humanity. You might unearth a “more” by casually asking someone, “Why are we here?” When I ask you “What Went Well this week?”, you might answer truly, primally, and then we both will have touched a “more.”

Then once we have these “mores” on our lips, we might create more places to find still more “mores.”

:- Doug.

Try new things. You will eventually find new things.

:- Doug.

The folds in your mirrors are soft. Fall into them.

:- Doug.

The finer your mesh the more persons you catch. How many? Infinite in number? Indeterminate? It is not a math problem. It is an infinity and maybe an eternity question.

:- Doug.

The strangest books teach me conversation.

:- Doug.

This conversation stuff is learning a language. It is our native language, this conversation, yes, but the words and phrases might be new to us, or buried. We can yet go home. Take my hand gently. Say something close to the bone. Show me. Encourage me.

:- Doug.

Presume the conversational competence of your friend. Presume your friends desire to belong to you.

:- Doug.

Don’t seek private goals: seek the good of all.

:- Doug.

What Conversation Went Well this week? One that really had you thinking about it for days after?

:- Doug.

There is an intermediate between what you think and what I think, between your needs and mine, between your acts of helping and mine. In this meeting ground we have obligation and need, ideas and malleability, and something even more. There is dependence.

:- Doug.

We must both ignore and deliberately build upon the unallowed fact that life continually changes.

:- Doug.

Tell as many people as I can.

:- Doug.

One of the miracles of conversation is that it plunges a reflective person directly into the heart of mystery.

:- Doug.

Some of you is in the way of some of you. It is a fireworks day when some dying visits.

:- Doug.