FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 685

We are not in competition with the universe
We are not in competition with each other
We are part.

We are not uncaring,
Trampling earth’s species
We are opening our eyes
We are part.

Please pass it on.

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What did Thoreau and his friends converse about in the woods? Do we require a place apart in order to converse?

:- Doug.

What did I just say? What did we just do? Can we observe and learn to meet better?

:- Doug.

To my good friends–

Is it possible we don’t need to learn how to listen better? By blaming listening we have not solved the “problem” of dialogue; we have not even named it. Listening is not discrete from speaking—it is integral with it in meeting. We do not know how to listen because we do not yet know how to meet. We listen “critically”—which means we are thinking how the other is wrong or what our next point is. We are not meeting. We do not even listen to our own thought and its methods. Neither of us is even getting heard. Meeting is more than either of these.

After all, listening is something you do to someone; meeting we do with. Being heard does not so much partake of a passive nature as at first it may seem, but of a shared nature. I allow you to come in when I hear you; I even allow me to come in when I truly hear myself; there is an intermingling of the selves. As ten year old boys we thought by holding cuts together we’d become “blood brothers;” here we find its living fulfillment.

Here there be possible new life. Here there be. Here we be.

:- Doug.

Is it less about listening and more about being heard? Being heard by others and yourself. We think others should listen better to us. We think there is a “How” for us to listen better to others. Yet we are unable to bear the fright and effort to follow the tracing of our own thoughts through the bramble into light.

Show me where I am mistaken.

:- Doug.