FootprintsintheWind.com

The purpose of conversation is to engender conversation.

:- Doug.

If we merely research what people have written before, we are not finding what we do not know. Where it might be useful is to bounce and collide and spark: a stochastic process.

:- Doug.

So how can we get beyond not knowing what we don’t know? What might be some ways we can open windows, doors, and skylights? What do we not know, and what do we not know about getting there? First, perhaps, there is no thing out there to know: only perhaps a knowing flowing, even an unknowing flowing. A relating asking us to relate to no thing not relating. It is not word games, but life.

:- Doug.

Yet it is not merely an exercise in developing imagination, nor in self-revelation. It is about opening our doors, windows, and skylights to perception.

:- Doug.

This is a struggle, a good one just now, to work out what we don’t know about any particular thing. What are the edges we might test? Right, west, up, swim, random juxtaposition: all these tools are there, and still we are surprised. Last evening I was reading an author who writes in her journal one line on top of the previous over and over so that she is hidden even from herself, and she finds this is a way to uncover herself. Why would that be? Perhaps it gives her permission to say things she would not want anyone to see or know of her. It is similar to “The Guest Master” in The Magic Monastery, destroying the “bible” one wrote for a whole year.

:- Doug.

This little balloon of ours, how do we discover what it touches? What’s out there? How do we develop our tentative reaches, our nose for new colors and ‘phanies?

:- Doug.

What do we not know about the conversation of the conversations?

:- Doug.

How many dimensions are in that question?

:- Doug.

Who are we in conversation done well? By we, we mean the relations of us, our among and betweens. By done well, we mean ever more humanly, but as precisely and as undefinedly as human can mean. What do we not know? Whom do we not know beyond ourselves?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2110

Conversation runs through sport, it runs through literature. It runs through silence and through mystery and through creativity. It is all relations. It is perhaps the essence of life. So how do we do it well? How do we do it better? It, like life, is not a tool for some purpose or goal. It is the context, larger context of life.

Please pass it on.

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We know not the singular aim of conversation, rather we try out admirable purposes, such as emerging consciousness and interplaying with our environs.

:- Doug.

Freire has problem-posing education; so too we might propose problem-posing conversation—something to work on as co-equals, not something one sells to another. What are we working on? Our together, our betweens. What, who, and how will we be together? The action is in all directions, not top down, seen necessarily and initially as horizontal given our relationship with one another, but in reality 360 degrees, since “we” includes the whole of our context.

:- Doug.

The tree starts here
branching tangling roots
paths that nourish futures

:- Doug.

Let us start a national small conversation about humans in complexity.

:- Doug.

What will continue (because something will)?

:- Doug.

Where is the edge of your conversation?

:- Doug.

Our work is to produce compost!

:- Doug.

Cultivate your bewilderment!

:- Doug.

Then today or last night, reading in Musicage, I found where he said he did not hold with intuition and inspiration. His approach was not to wait for these things, but keep working. Yes: this seems right to me: inspiration comes in the midst of working. Inspiration comes when you are doing other things. Inspiration comes when you are working and reworking the words. So not inspiration, work!

:- Doug.

Today I am heartened by the research question, What do we not know? This is one we cannot outgrow. It can be turned to precision. It is an excellent start.

:- Doug.

Then I remembered my toy balloon metaphor and realized too that I was wrong about looking for questions that were ambiguous. No, they can be precise: they can tell me to sit in a chair on the other side of the desk, to look through a different window. Search beyond the skin of the balloon.

:- Doug.

What do we not know of conversation?

:- Doug.

We need questions which open us up and out. What if we smelled slant?

:- Doug.