FootprintsintheWind.com

Complicating the narrative is a way of better getting to know one another.

:- Doug.

Big flakes rush, straight down
reel my eyes in, in, in, in
two geese, fleet, aren’t lost

:- Doug.

Waterways mind ways glass
Kaleidoscopes steel people
Memories eyes moon
Wind everything two
Billiard balls kissing
Equal and opposite reactions
People and their dogs
Poems camera lenses
Clouds floating the sky
That Alamo park bench
A few things reflecting

:- Doug.

Look closely in your eyes to see
That all who enter into these
Live and shimmer in those pools
And all who ever entered there
Mother father puppy dear
Brother sister friends today
Are still awaiting you to join their dance

:- Doug.

Each conversation, each story, each episode of life reflects us back to us. We cannot deny our truth any more than our fingerprints. This ghost follows us all our days, probably leads us. We might be wise to reflect over this.

What is our reflection? Do we, can we, fight it?

Reflect: whom do we reflect? Parents? Spouse? Friends? Children? One or a dozen particular teachers, remembered or not? What words and phrases echo every so often in our skulls? Are we indeed the reflection of something, someone, else?

Maybe a good portrait to put on your grave would be a mirror.

:- Doug.

Say Here is Something
Name Moral Beauty
Connect—allow me

:- Doug.

What are you doing in a conversation if not allowing goodness out to play?

:- Doug.

Stories we know are condensed bundles of happenings, truths, wishes, and all that. So too are words. Condensed tomato soup can be reconstituted with water. If I reconstitute with milk it resembles the original, with a different taste. If you use soy milk or almond milk is the result tomato soup? Yes, and it may be better than the original. If someone uses kerosene? You can the soup; you have no control over the final reconstitution, do you?

:- Doug.

The news we take in is about the exceptions not the rule, so no, the world is not getting worse: that is just the meal you are being fed.

:- Doug.

Do we talk at the edges of our experience—or mostly about every day things? This might be a flag of remarkable conversation and the forgettable: do we repeat the ho-hum This is the argument I had with my wife today, again; or do we open ourselves to talk about our pains, our vulnerabilities, our worries, our quandaries, did I make a mistake saying that?

:- Doug.

When the person across from you speaks, ask your body where it all lands, where and how it oscillates in your skeleton, muscles, and organs. Don’t mistake this for their story—it is your story. Then ask what you feel as a result of what landed. Can you shh your mind from giving you words? Your body, given space, might give you a fresh word or image. Explore here.

:- Doug.

Let’s get curious about the complexity swarming in each of us.

:- Doug.

I have faith in meeting.

:- Doug.

Lost for a way to get closer in conversation? Ask for a story.

:- Doug.

Are you in the house of stories just to visit, or do you want to settle in?

:- Doug.

Conversations can be broachers and movers of community sense-making.

:- Doug.

The galaxy spins
And all the stars in it
Groundhog returns, burrows

:- Doug.

Conversation can be your act of roguish creativity.

:- Doug.

In meditation, ask What else?

:- Doug.

Freedom overdone becomes riot.

:- Doug.

In some way not yet fully conscious to me, I am softened. And maybe it would be good if this light sense were not to become wholly conscious, for having it pre-conscious makes softness come without having to think it through each time. Compassion becomes the starting point.

:- Doug.

I like my writing. I like this last insight, the words, the named folks. They can speak to me. I can speak of my crackles. Write precisely crackles.

:- Doug.

What crackles in me about Alexander’s work, and Friere’s, Boal’s, Buber’s, Kimmerer’s, Lawley’s and Tomkins’s, Blake’s, Whitman’s, and all the other fireflies in my shimmering night sky? Write about that. Don’t write a book: write precisely that.

:- Doug.