FootprintsintheWind.com

Let me propose this thought experiment for your next conversations: Examine yourself. How much of your intricacies are you prepared to open to your friend? Consider then that your friend will likely match your proportion of openness. So if you are eighty per cent open, so is she. Then augment for the parts neither of you know or at least cannot name, but will be opened too. Perhaps another ten per cent? Then consider the multitudes each of you contain. These are both offspring, and if you will, offsprung from. How many of you are there? There.

:- Doug.

Where shall we turn to learn our conversation? To theater, to architecture, to design, to poets, to novelists, to dreamers, imaginers, and reverie-ers.

:- Doug.

Say less
Hear More

:- Doug.

Conversation shows up in cooking for someone.

:- Doug.

People are the bodies; persons are the complexities who meet you.

:- Doug.

How many persons are in your conversation?

:- Doug.

Look for the little miracles: they live in the ordinary.

:- Doug.

Conversation has a potential for doing good. We ought then with that play well.

:- Doug.

Think on conversation as an act of kindness.

:- Doug.

We have reached the end of November. Thanksgiving has passed. Now gratefulness may set in.

:- Doug.

We each live on a shifting spectrum of needfulness. Sometimes we feel strong: we can handle anything. Low on the scale. We break a leg, we go to the high side of the scale—till we learn to use our crutches. We are blinded, or have Downs syndrome, we are toward the high end. Here, subtly, that shifts as we discover others need our sensitive hearing, touching, loving. As Sara Hendren says, “We might make friends with that.” I hear her statement two ways: We can recognize needfulness as essential to one’s humanity and as running both ways; we might use our vulnerable likeness as the best way to make friends with others. I also begin to learn that finding my needfulness is necessary to finding myself.

:- Doug.

Our saying “seeing each other as less than human” reflects that what someone makes available to us, or what we choose to “see” in a someone, can be a partial person. In such case, the “seeing” misses.

:- Doug.

In conversation, it is a question of how many of our person-aspects we make available to one another.

A politician, a salesperson, each only choose to make available to us less than unity. I did not choose that word unity, but it offered itself to me. It seems appropriate as being evocative. We can become unity with our other only if our other allows it, makes him or her self available to us. Open is another word for available. Whatever the word, there is something more than us available to us if we allow for unity.

Think on a teenager, slumping in her chair, only demonstrating a small amount of her being. The curious factor is, she wants to be seen as a whole person, real, substantial, all the while she withholds!

:- Doug.

Do we sometimes with a ball play in less than three dimensions? As in when we watch a ball game on a television? As in when we look at it and do not pick it up?

:- Doug.

So much depends upon
Our willingness to meet
Another living being

:- Doug.

The work is finding the corner of the eye.

:- Doug.

What is the essence of this dying?
A hint, an aroma, a taste?

:- Doug.

Far away
here

:- Doug.

If I were to make a poem of now
To where would I go with you flying?

:- Doug.

Conversation is where you live.

:- Doug.

Conversation is everywhere.

:- Doug.

Secret
Sacred

:- Doug.

You don’t have to say it all at once. You did not grow up overnight, did not get to your present age without events. People will wait. People will be grateful for being given important things along with enough space to absorb the importance.

:- Doug.