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The liminality of conversation contains a bit of incorporation: we are brought into the play of this “time” of coming together. This we can expect, because the jet of separation enters the domain of the together. The liminal is the place that shares in each by touching each.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2331

I was lost and now I don’t want to be found.

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© c 2024, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

next to post to Web Immanent and transcendent are not merely opposite ends of a continuum: they are more descriptive of moving, movable segments of a circle, of all circles. They belong to human capacity as well as divine.

What is immanent and transcendent in human conversation? We can be immanent when we truly meet another, make ourselves available to that one. The friend can be immanent to us in the same way. We can be transcendent in two ways: we can be absent when with another: checking our watch or phone; pointing our shoes away; thinking about the shopping we need to do. The second way is to lift our friend to new possibilities, hidden capacities.

It seems immanent and transcendent in conversation are each a matter of choice. You can choose to activate both at once by attending your friend to hear now and to seek for capacities and sparkles.

When are you here and everywhere? Remember that infinities can overlap. Take up no space.

:- Doug.

What if what we are trying to put words to is not going into yourself, but a going out. Finding not your self, but your possibility for good, ill, evil, grace, or ugly?

I am called to this idea of we are moving not into ourselves but out. Is this out from, or out to, or both? Probably mostly out to.

:- Doug.

Ritual has the intention to effect a change, even if it does not bring about change. This intention appears to be lacking in conversing. But then, the intention might be present even if unnoticed in the beginning. What in our conscious thinking is our intention in conversing? What in our unconscious thinking is our intention?

:- Doug.

Deep is the word said after we’ve considered its opposite; out beyond the mowed area; out past the previous explorations; here there be dragons, the realm of the dragons.

:- Doug.

How can we show the way for conversation or meeting? Perhaps not quite standards of conversation, but signs pointing a useful path? For example, here is something never before said.

:- Doug.

Is there a priestly conversation and a shamanic one? Two poles, two strange attractors?

:- Doug.

How might we learn to converse? Like an infant playing at babbling, like feet dancing before we recognize a dance, like Peter Elbow teaching writing before reading: by playing at it, by jumping in, by making it up.

:- Doug.

Conversation weaves us.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2330

Maybe a pattern-seeking animal is a pattern-making animal. If so, ought we be seeking non-patterns, such as the random, the stochastic, the guessed-at? For instances: the music in the wind’s vagaries, the way some birds fly sort of with the flock, sort of not, the route of smoke on a still day? Let’s go farther and further afield from those. In looking in these places, we are even now looking for a pattern. What is a non-pattern? It has to somehow exceed the question of What patterns are we incapable of seeing?

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© c 2024, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Call me friend.

:- Doug.

Why are you curious? Are you naming someone as different, strange? What are you curious about? Whom? Why are you the one curious? Would someone be curious why you are curious? What does your curiosity say of your day, your direction, your thought patterns, you? Is curiosity always good?Are you curious about how someone presents themselves to you or others? How is it to be curious? What’s it like to be a bat? What’s it like to be an old bat?

:- Doug.

What is hidden? Might it be between us? What is hidden between us?

:- Doug.

Hidden is not only what’s placed away. What are the varieties of hidden? The hidden can be generated by the between of us.

:- Doug.

Say to him, “Here”
Say to her, “Now”
Leave only air

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2329

I had a dream. I became Thou.

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© c 2024, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

The secret
In the vase
May be sacred

:- Doug.

Like a child, if it is to thrive, a conversation must be wanted, fed, and cared for.

:- Doug.

The work of conversation resides in what seem to be opposites: We must at once focus our minds on total presence to all the other says, to the tone in which he says it, to the surrounds of both of us; and we must lose our minds and selves forgetting who and where we are.

:- Doug.

The art of conversation might be found in poetry.

:- Doug.

This is not an exchange of words. It is a conversation. It may even become a meeting.

:- Doug.

The work of a conversation cannot be known ahead. We find it as it goes. More precisely it and we find one another. Even more precisely, we find us together in this stew. Still more precisely, we make this stew—out of us. Into us. If we don’t get somehow lost, this stew is not fully made. We expect never to be fully made: We do not understand a word like transformation.

:- Doug.