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What are the question areas being opened? Can we do over a conversation? Why is conversation so desultory, peripatetic? Why do we pick out the real person over hours and meetings, but not in a few sentences? How do we end a conversation better? How do we get to complete? What prompts us to pick up the same conversation? How do we get to group mind, good or bad? Why do we lose our orientation and intentions in conversation? Why would people resent it if we tried to keep the conversation on subject? What would make it easier to see what is going well in our conversation and surround, and where to build on this good, true, and beautiful?

:- Doug.

This is slow going, and on purpose I need to slow it more. Rather increase the times (and speed?) of going deep.

:- Doug.

There is a lot of good in our surround and in our conversation—let’s look for it, see it, and grow it, perhaps making just a little better something next to it, something that was almost as good before we got to it.

:- Doug.

John Cage used chance operations to create his art. Often, we find ourselves using chance to carry forward our conversations. We know not where they will go. Even if we want them to go southeast, soon they are headed northeast and before we catch up southwest, and we never get to southeast. Sometimes we just abruptly stop. Other times we are complete. What’s going on?

:- Doug.

Reading the interview of John Cage in Musicage is difficult. Frustrating even. No single thought is carried for three pages. Little goes to depth. Why in conversation do we jump around so? This is a more profound question than it appears.

And then, over the course of several hundred pages a sense of the person and the person’s art emerges from the waves.

Eventually we know when the conversation is at an end. But how? Often we run out of steam. A few times we feel complete. To continue would undo.

Then another day we find ourselves renewed, picking up where we left off, carrying it deeper.

Is this pattern showing us how an individual mind works? It it revealing how two people act as one mind? Or three of us, or a whole people?

How deep goes the mystery?

I can’t take a lot of this transcript in one sitting. I need many breaks. At the same time it invigorates, dusts me with fresh directions of thinking to pollinate me for new ideas.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2121

Ya gots ta be curious.

Please pass it on.

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What if we re-“wrote” a conversation? Tried it all over, moved parts around, used new words, different ideas, fresh subjects for the conversation, unusual subtexts? Uncooked the potful?

:- Doug.

We need peacocks: the cocks and hens to get to work picking the insects and grain off the ground, arranging the site; the peeks to look ahead, see the bigger picture, show off to gather a larger flock, consider the moves ahead.

:- Doug.

A common project allows not just focus but graduality.

:- Doug.

So what are we doing with conversation? What do we not know to do? To not do? There are no quick answers. This will take real work: thinking work. If we are to meet with another, what is the opening? What do we bolster? Certainly not peace for the sake of peace. Nor arguing. It needs to be life and love of life. If that is our guide, we might progress. It becomes difficult in the particular, in the presence of one another, in this thing he said or did not say. We have to guess for our setting what builds up life in this moment, and accept that we may get it wrong and have to go back, smooth over.

:- Doug.

How do we help a conversation?

Conversation involves us
does not need us for it can substitute others
but then it is a different conversation

So the question might better be, How do we take our part in conversation? It goes beyond etiquette, for we are not just behaving properly, we are here to make life.

Smoothness is not the end, but more life is the stretch.

:- Doug.

This morning I have been a little down thinking there is nothing we can do to make conversation better, it just has to unfold on its own. We can only allow. Allowing I surmise is about not getting in the way. Doing then is getting with the way. Perhaps.

So that starts the answer to me: it is in the movement, the dance, where life is attended. Not in the nodes. Not in the centers, perhaps not even in the whole.

:- Doug.

For all the good OST does its main good is to get people together, talking. But it says nothing of what happens in the talking, how they talk, what they say, the nature of conversation. I wonder whether the other engagement methods do any better? Do they all walk us to the door but never open it?

:- Doug.

In a conversation, or even conversation itself, we get an inkling of what we can do: allow. Allow the gradual rubbing together of its processes, namely talking, reverie, reflecting, silence inviting and accepting, good will toward one another, life-attending.

:- Doug.

How important is it that in my book I distill things to the most startling points, the places of new insight? For now, I think that is important. If anyone is to be helped, then I must help them find the stronger seeds, the likely good spots in which to plant them.

:- Doug.

Largering is our activity.

:- Doug.

We are not passing scraps of poetry from hand to hand, but hints of our larger, larger ear to ear.

:- Doug.

“More here than meets the eye:” this is true also in the sense that vision is not our only sense.

:- Doug.

Alexander shows that science knows the mechanics, but has so far failed to examine the whole and how it guides the mechanics. It points me to start looking at the whole of a conversation: we know the mechanics, but what really is going on? (We don’t yet know.)

:- Doug.

It takes small to concentrate; large to gather context.

:- Doug.

The canoer’s J stroke imparts energy and then direction. A person conversing has an opportunity to deftly do the same.

:- Doug.

Where can we stand to hear all the living beings, all the stars, and all their stories? This is the hearing that conversation requires of us: to hear from the whole.

:- Doug.

Gal Beckerman in The Quiet Before, pp 208-209, speaks of spaces to work together but also apart. This is a kind of respiration as in a conference with breakout sessions. What good does this serve?

:- Doug.