FootprintsintheWind.com

In the 24th century there may be a new richness of us.

:- Doug.

Who are the standouts in your collection of humans?

:- Doug.

What you see and what I see are faces of human. How do they play light and shadows on the essences in human?

:- Doug.

Something we really care about—this is an essential of the qwoan of a conversation, of a person.

:- Doug.

In conversation we mold space—so that it facilitates our life. We are shaping not life’s quantity but its volume—its fullness, its girth, its rippling.

:- Doug.

Does this conversation help each person to be more fully themselves?

:- Doug.

Maybe the deep part of us is the part where we are attached to the sinew of our fellow living beings.

:- Doug.

Conversational architects—me!—take up seriously our responsibility for the beauty, order, wholeness, and life of all conversations in the world. Do we gasp!?

:- Doug.

No straight lines. My mind seems to start at the periphery and radiate.

:- Doug.

Theodore Zeldin says, p 147 of The Hidden Pleasures of Life, that meetings can reveal of a person “a different voice or mask.” In this last situation, mood, conversation, or challenge, what different voice or mask did you uncover in you?

:- Doug.

Let’s embody the younger elder.

:- Doug.

What are some things we might do in a conversation to unroll life?

• Address feelings, facts (5 Ws), tell a story, ask for help, tell the (hard) truth.

• From inside a conversation, how to unfold life? I like the idea of asking for help. It is counterintuitive that it would draw us together, but it does. At least if the person asked is of a giving nature: most are.

• Telling the hard truth: this is akin to stepping into the fire. What advice does Arnold Mindell offer? Seek trouble. This might be a good book to draw on for the course. p 191: “say the lowest most gruesome things and the highest most spiritual as well.”

• Say what the group seems to be doing. Say “ouch!” Remind us of something forgotten.

• So this can be a fruitful exercise, and there is no end in sight, only if we do not keep looking.

:- Doug.

Mock up in your mind the surrounding terrain of this conversation: the people and events and land and weather. Then the people specific to this conversation: their personalities, mood, and wounds of the day to the extent you can guess. What little sweet or savory can you unfold from these that will let the life out?

:- Doug.

First: to find and witness the feeling of this conversation.

:- Doug.

What is the life in this conversation? We cannot know going in. We must intuit, again and again, what it might be, try it out, test for what fits. We must be awake, alert. What will bring real life to this meeting?

:- Doug.

My Work is Grandparent Experiments in three specific things. One of them is How we make each conversation more wonderful.

:- Doug.

Alexander does not draw the whole of the timeless way; Kazantsakis does not tell the full story; Zeldin leaves out chunks of history: it falls to us to do the experiments.

:- Doug.

Each conversation can be a critter of beauty, alive.

:- Doug.

Our process is slowly, step by step, to unfold this living ground, where the play is alive. The play of conversation is alive. The play of human is alive. The playground responds.

:- Doug.

To be wonderful means this conversation is a being. This action called human is a being. Sentient. Opposing. Moving.

:- Doug.

There is no way to make conversation wonderful, no way to do human wonderfully: wonderful is the way.

:- Doug.

This is a surprise course: I, facilitator, want to be surprised by where we turn.

:- Doug.

What do we need to study to make conversation more wonderful?

:- Doug.