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Or we are about finding the joy, unalloyed, in each other’s full presence. Our attention is called. We immerse.

This is a direct, unmediated, experience. We are aware, with every cell and tingle! Without running it through intellect. We are fully here. No outside pulls. Humanity is felt in aliveness—this what pulls—pulls us home.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2387

Life goes on
In the next person

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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 mirror reflects but is not that. It remains mirror.

:- Doug.

The Last Hot Chocolate is a long drink of what it means to try our hands at being human in the early twenty-first century.

:- Doug.

Are we finally the caring, nurturing, uplifting god long forthtold? Are we asked to prepare a house of wildness, of nativity for all?

:- Doug.

We need not so much self-compassion, as inter self compassion. Here inter does double duty. Its first is between two persons. Self here points to persons: foregrounds; real; known, but only somewhat. Compassion is a surrounding (see the compass?), and feeling together (com). The second duty of inter is to hint at the intimate nature of the human project. This is its larger duty, the one most essential. For we are not human without intimacy.

:- Doug.

One cannot be human alone.

:- Doug.

Wherever two or three are
Gathered, look there in the
Midst of them

:- Doug.

Is this conversation helping us?

:- Doug.

Mutual vulnerability
helps us brew yeasty talk
making us unknowable again

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2386

When I look out at my back yard
I see activity
Grass playing with light
Maple leaves catching a breeze
Sending sugars up ever down
To make woody parts
To feed roots
Roots deciding, roots reaching
Roots negotiating with mycelia
When I look at you across hot chocolate
I could see if I tried
In a thousand ways
Your essential parts at work

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

There is in every café
Grieving
Invisible as it is
Is it plain
To you?

:- Doug.

When your friend leaves you
In charge of the world
. . . .

:- Doug.

I’ve been saying conversing is work. But it’s not work like you might imagine. It is the work of receiving—as in a gift, as in graciously, as in thankingly. It is the work of receiving even when you want to say “I can do it myself.”

:- Doug.

No, not like: Art is beginning a sentence before you know its ending. Perhaps no sentence has an ending.

:- Doug.

In making art of conversing, and especially of meeting, you are changing yourself, making yourself, re-making yourself.

:- Doug.

People are background; persons are foreground.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2385

What have I understood of conversation that I am using?

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

Is love
Is conversation
Is life

:- Doug.

Even in an argument, can we find we have no sides?

:- Doug.

Sides—no
us—just
earth—rounded

:- Doug.

No sides
a rounded earth
only us

:- Doug.

Among
humans no
sides. Us.

:- Doug.