FootprintsintheWind.com

When we’re family we still come at things from starkly different directions. He walked out of therapy carrying his crutches in his right hand. “Hi” he said to me, I said “Hello,” and noticing his surgical boot almost said “That makes you dangerous,” but he was past me quickly. Five steps back his daughter (I guessed) hustled to catch up. “You’re trouble,” she said. I hazarded she approached the little event from safety, he from feeling free. I could be wrong about what they each saw; but am I wrong about starting points?

:- Doug.

No rhyme
No meter
All matter

:- Doug.

Conversation is imagination.

:- Doug.

Curiosity offers respect
All are created
Equal in dignity
Which of your stories
Withhold?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2380

I have a vocabulary that I practice day by day in my poetry. That comes easily. In making I leave far behind the daily. It does not exist for hours at a time. It is not needing in my making. When I return I am lost. The language there is foreign, the words long unused, and so fresh. Is that excuse? Or is there some fact?

Please pass it on.

© 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

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2379

When we seek to converse artfully, we are measuring the talking by what we put into it, words and spirit, not by what we get from it.

Please pass it on.

© 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

I’ve been saying conversation requires and is about hard work. Yes, it is hard work, but that is not what it is about. It’s about imagination. An imagination calling forth curiosity. An imagination calling forth playfulness.

:- Doug.

Are there really ever outcomes?

:- Doug.

Holy curiosity
Meets
Holy grievance
Waits
For Thou

:- Doug.

Conversation is a commitment, not an add-on: a commitment to humanity, to sisterhood, to Being.

:- Doug.

Together = Conversation

:- Doug.

How do two get playful, together?

:- Doug.

What is
That excess of life
You carry?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2378

What if you dream’d
And what if in your dream
You conversed with your friend
And what if you awoke
With your phone in your hand?

Please pass it on.

© 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

An adventure
Each conversing can be
Tripping over
A friend to inspire
A home

:- Doug.

Endless the depths
of our night sky
Scientia imagines
our universe rounded
just not measurable
So we find ourselves
each planet each person
at the center of the ball
moving apart
Or maybe we are on
the ball’s surface in
a viscous fluid
gathering ‘round
a hearth
these depths
out & over & held
are not, perhaps,
deep & out & over & held
but

:- Doug.

We know more of a friend at a later stage of our development than an earlier. Why should it surprise us that we can always go back with curiosity?

:- Doug.

When you were speaking, what of your friend did you take in? Go back—was it his face, what her hands were doing, whether she was distracted or bored? Early in her dementia, when irritated with me, my sister would bend her fingers and unbend them in a characteristic way—what was going on for her? While speaking, what did you hear of him—laughter, snicker, an encouraging hmm, farts? Did she reach to touch your hand, your shoulder? Did you catch an aroma or even taste? To what extent did you escape from your words and gestures so you could receive? Receive from his or her multitudes cascading over your head?

:- Doug.

The things you want most to give to others may be precisely what stands in our way—Being’s way.

:- Doug.

When others stand in your presence, what of human Being do they hear? What through you do they taste, sniff, see, feel? What breeze of Being lifts a hair on their head? Can you stand out of the way?

:- Doug.

In conversing we are opening windows, doors, and skylights into each other’s worlds—again, we are deciphering the poems we are—then entering—then coming back into our own world, now larger.

:- Doug.

To enter into one other person’s life—to seek to understand that person’s history and ways—to walk in his moccasins, look out through her eyes—is to somehow touch the lives of all persons. Each one of us is a microcosm. Each one reflects all. Said another way, all are jewels on Indra’s net.

:- Doug.

Anger and pain can be overcome if only in part, by reaching out of my little balled-up self and entering by imagination into the life of my friend who has hurt me, or whom I have wounded. Of course, it only goes one way, heals only one side, my own. But there is a chance it touches my friend.

:- Doug.