FootprintsintheWind.com

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.

To oppose well, we must expose our real selves. If we hold back, hide behind a shield, then we do not oppose, we merely take pot-shots and things do not improve. To oppose means we must truly meet, and to do that, we must be truly present, transparent, vulnerable, and as open to being transformed as we want our partner in dialogue.

:- Doug.

Jesus said
The Kingdom is like
this thing touching our bodies

:- Doug.

Look for the ripping
begin to see the cloth overhead
how we are related to
all there is
that all reality is open to
our ripping
so then we may
touch

:- Doug.

There are times when we are overloaded with words, clarity and illusion. It is then perhaps we need to go for the dark and wet, to stop seeing the clarity, to open our dark eyes. Perhaps I need to do that, to open dark eyes, to let things arise from the earth. Barely seen things, things wet and juicy and pregnant.

:- Doug.

Correlation and chore-relation
the dance of neurotransmitters too
—creating dendrites and axons—
who can tell which came first—
my picture of you or you?
or me or my picture of me?
in you?
Invisible filaments
popping in and out of existence
as we spin and turn
round and round
you and me and she and he
sound and no sound
real filaments we hang on to
so we stay in orbit
who can draw this wondrous choreography?
we can know place or direction or speed
but never—and only—
together

:- Doug.

Are you connecting-up?

:- Doug.

If you think this is dangerous stuff, please stay away.

:- Doug.

To my good friends–

Intimacy is a fearsome thing. It also gets in the way of making money or watching games on television. Perhaps we need to be reminded of our fear. Perhaps this fear needs to be not ridiculed but increased, made more threatening, so that we see the reality of it and our need. Intimacy is not even primarily sexual—it is spiritual: it is connecting with another without masks and knowing that we are vulnerable and that the other is pointing to our most vulnerable place.

Why do we need intimacy? In order to be who we are. Can we ever be our highest and best unless another sees us as we truly are? Can another see us as we truly are? The paradox is that the other can touch us and hold us in the palm of their heart and know us as we truly are and still find there is more of us to know.

So it turns out that intimacy is irrelevant to our age. We want nothing to do with intimacy. Intimacy scares us to death. It ought to: we have need of dying to the false little people we are and to rise from those ashes as persons, large and real. Be irrelevant. Meet: be intimate. Find out. Be found out.

There is One who can be intimate with us. It takes work and courage to be intimate with this one. It takes opening. It takes daily and minute by minute work. It is here and now, in the body, not in some distant never-world. It is in our meeting and our sweat. Intimacy is available through this One in every one.

What is just beyond this verge? What can intimacy hold? Everything and nothing. Is it not more likely that it holds everything rather than nothing? Are we to fear everything, or is it on the whole good?

Ordinary life is seeing through a veil; when we rip the grey cloth we see colors and they touch us.

Who we are we barely, rarely know: until we rip that grey cloth. Then there is—life!

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 684

In being heard ordinary people become extraordinary.

Please pass it on.

© c 2006, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Intimacy enters through the window of irrelevancy:

I must ask others How have you come to be the paradox you are?

What is your most intimate irrelevance? In what do you feel most invisible?

Who are you when others see you not?

:- Doug.

If reality is determined by what a group of observers agrees upon, then getting a larger conversation going leads to a larger reality.

:- Doug.

The way of conversation leads to mystery.

:- Doug.

I roll over as the old earth rolls over to face the gentle morning light.

:- Doug.

I invite a radical shift in perception. Why do we need a radical shift in perception? Is the world working for us all now? We cannot create a new earth let alone a new Heaven by logic and degrees. We must die—not a pleasant prospect—for us to be born more open.

:- Doug.

We don’t know how to start a conversation, particularly with our familiars.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 683

What don’t we know about conversation?

Please pass it on.

© c 2006, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Open Space Technology is to: 1. Find out what really matters to people 2. Get on with it.

:- Doug.

Open the G*d channel.

:- Doug.

The living edge of life is meeting.

:- Doug.

Conversation is love.

:- Doug.