FootprintsintheWind.com

I have a bigger workshop
With a bigger playground

:- Doug.

What brings you to wonder?

:- Doug.

When did you stop playing with wonder? Can you get it back? For the good of all of us?

:- Doug.

I’m asking grandchildren of wonder
What have you learned?
Why are you here?
Can we do human wonderfully?
About what do you wonder?

:- Doug.

What can we say of value to
What can we hear of value from
Our children 11 times removed?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2086

The course of my life, I am thinking today, will be a study in conversations: wonderful to terror-filled, and all between. What makes a conversation that makes your life? If we discover this, we can lean into conversing across the centuries, and across our dinner tables.

Please pass it on.

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Imagine you’re at a reunion and you meet your cousin 11 times removed, and you start comparing the wonders of your lives.

:- Doug.

What have you learned in your lifetime? What has life taught you?

:- Doug.

What game would you offer to play with them to find our common humanity? What is the qwoan that makes us human, recognizable to one another?

:- Doug.

After you get past all the questions about What does your house, work, and transportation look like, once you get down to what life is about, how would you find what worries and quandaries and wonders we have in common?

:- Doug.

What questions would you ask them? What questions would matter to you, and to them? There’s where it is weak in wonder—what do we do after we have a name?

:- Doug.

To keep insisting on the segregation of the ages holds back all humanity. No, all life. We need each other for our strangeness.

:- Doug.

How could we make this conversation wonderful?

:- Doug.

This is my Big-P Play.

:- Doug.

Imagine. . .a person born 300 years to the day after you. What’s their name? Imagine playing with them, being curious about their lives. . . . Play with me. . . .

:- Doug.

This is the culmination of my life: to observe. For humanity.

:- Doug.

I am extending the human capacity to wonder and be wonderful and to converse. I have an astonishing proposition to test: the world is made in and by conversation. As we talk, we are making the world. As others talk, we become. I think those two things—wonder and conversation—are related. Can you help me figure out how?

:- Doug.

Wonder is a dollop
of the infinite and timeless
adding a pinch of yourself

:- Doug.

What I have learned from living life, is that—

—Homes are usually bigger inside than out
—Laughter and tears are kept in the same locked box
—Stupidity is a gene shared by all humans
—We overcome stupidity with playfulness
—Playfulness is a carrier of wonder, and wonder a carrier of life.

:- Doug.

The blood of the qwoan is the blood of us—conversation. Of the many essentials of life, the essential essential is conversation—this one pulsing.

:- Doug.

Allow conversations to grow subjunctive character: nails a bit too long, whiskers, and caves, dark waters, tears, and frivolities. I don’t know what this means: it came to me on the waning edge of a dream this morning.

:- Doug.

If wonder stems from our reach toward beauty, then wonder is the principle of conversation: beauty, fascination, and wonder are revealed through the others in the conversation.

:- Doug.

This substance (this stuff of the world—remember, not a thing, an action) then is weather—the storming and caressing of conversation, and when we really know what it is, it is the qwoan. We take the task of revealing it. Progressively. Incrementally. To ourselves as much as to others.

:- Doug.