FootprintsintheWind.com

I am a puzzle.

:- Doug.

Something’s curious about last week.

:- Doug.

You invite me into your world. I invite you into mine. In this mixing, we find a third and more. Say 3.3 worlds in this conversation. Fractional worlds, fractal worlds: what can those be?

:- Doug.

Anything within
one lifetime
is short-term

:- Doug.

I found that hearing was not only ears.

:- Doug.

We might talk about how to get our conversation to healthy and whole. We might take five minutes in the midst for this exercise. What is healthy conversation? What is wholeness realized in conversation?

:- Doug.

A metaphor reveals
A metaphor hides
When best to jump off?
Prose reveals
Prose conceals
Nouns and verbs, things and processes
All the way out

:- Doug.

Deep, in hearing, means enfolded.

:- Doug.

I can take any book that interests me and turn it into something that leads me out in conversation.

:- Doug.

Gentle the giant in your ear.

:- Doug.

A central question to ask of conversation is “What’s important here?” I got to this question from reading something from Mitchell Feigenbaum who observed that what we pick out when remembering past civilizations is not their great wealth nor their power. Rather, we look to their art. Art asks What advances us as a species? What lifts us up? That is, What lasts, What is important? To answer the What’s important question for conversation with “how well we communicate,” is to miss the mark. Such an answer issues forth words when you ought to be still. Conversation is wondrous stuff. It carries immensity in small packages.

It startles
Finding big stuff
In your ear

:- Doug.

What is the human conversation over geologic time? Mandelbrot once famously asked if the earth had a climate. What he seemed to ask was whether earth had a usual, a predictable climate. This prompted me to ask if there is a usual, a predictable conversation over history and before history? How could we find out? One way would be to look to our stories, our folk tales and our myths, not so much for what we usually seek: wisdom and history of thought. Rather to seek out how we conversed. Can we inspect the Grimm brothers collection? This collection is barely more than 200 years old. But it probably collects stories transmitted orally for hundreds of years before that. But what do we know about tales around the campfires and at the streams for millennia? And the songs that we sang before we knew fire? How might we discover them? What might they tell us about what it means to converse humanly?

:- Doug.

Not even love of money is the root of all evil. More fundamentally it is fear, that is, fear of dying. Money we think can forestall dying, maybe make us immortal. Those who bet on it are soon parted from their money.

:- Doug.

So much of what is available to read about communication treats it as two dimensioned. A point is one dimension; a line is two dimensions; a hamburger is three dimensions. So I was wrong: it is only one dimensioned, since we are not given to see the line between us as persons, only the point here and the point there, that is, you and me. What might be second and third and more dimensions? Intention and subtext might be a second. Environment, such as background noise level may be a third. Energy a fourth. Imagination and its level of activation a fifth. Attraction of personality a sixth. Relative powers of the two and their perceptions of them a seventh and eighth. Others?

:- Doug.

How does a glacier touch and interact with land and air?

:- Doug.

Metaphors teach too in difference as in likeness.

:- Doug.

Imagine if you will a land of hills and mounts, rivers and deep valleys, hidden places and grand views, a wrinkled land, a land of sloughs and caves beneath caves and great rushing rivers beneath those, critters who have never seen the sun, and others aboveground of fin and feather, fur and skin, many unseen and unnamed. This is your homeland. You came from this land. You became a person here. This land is called by a gentle name: conversation.

:- Doug.

What is our responsibility to our conversational partner?

:- Doug.

Resistance is a necessary experience.

:- Doug.

He could not talk the same way anymore.

:- Doug.

I wonder if. . . convection arises in conversation, and if so, where from? If so, must it be dissipative? Does dog-kick enter in?

:- Doug.

With you out there, conversing, we can never have the last hot chocolate.

:- Doug.

This may have to be a book of letting conversation teach me its secrets.

:- Doug.