FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2120

The US does not any longer want to be the world’s police force. But we can be a neighbor, helping in time of need.

Please pass it on.

© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Once you have invented a concept the theorems flowing from it are forced upon you. So, once we have proposed the concept of, say, making life in conversation, then we find we can start to invent things to do with that, like invite people we formerly thought were not like us, and search for ways we can add life to so-so conversations.

:- Doug.

Conversation makes life
Life makes conversation
All there is

:- Doug.

There is no conclusion. There is no formula to make all of your conversations wonderful or productive. There is only you. And me. And our work in every conversation, in every minute, to bring to this now, life.

:- Doug.

If we start by asking ourselves how we would go about making a wonderful conversation like that one, where does that take us in the search for what we don’t know about conversation?

:- Doug.

People are merely conversation’s way to make more conversation.

:- Doug.

What we most don’t know about conversation is how to make life. And that’s the job. All its faces.

:- Doug.

The two together, the pleasure from doing the thing, and the making of life, this is the value we get from making conversation a little better.

:- Doug.

As concerns conversation, we have too little awareness of how essential is its becoming.

:- Doug.

I have so many insights about conversation, how will I ever bring them together in a book, to where it makes sense to a reader, to where it is useful to a player in a conversation?

:- Doug.

This is not one thing. It’s a conversation. Not definable. No inviolable lines can be drawn around it.

:- Doug.

How Do Conversations Learn?

:- Doug.

The Conversation Ceremony

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2119

Learn something nobody yet teaches.

Please pass it on.

© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

I seek to have every conversation living.

:- Doug.

In a living conversation we are creating a story, and ultimately a story of our life by making this anecdote, this chapter.

:- Doug.

About conversation
What have we
Missed
Lost
Hidden?

:- Doug.

Trees have learned
To live long
Grow slowly

:- Doug.

The emptiness between us might at any moment become pregnant.

:- Doug.

Our betweens are not only what flows from you to me and back, but also the empty space.

:- Doug.

The old man rode upon a snowflake
Holding on but loosely, loosely
“Alive!” he shouts into the wind
And Wind returns his word to him:
“Your ember blown upon, now flames—Alive!”

:- Doug.

Snowflakes may be in conversation with other snowflakes, or maybe not. They are in conversation with the wind, floating along, perhaps wheeling when blown sideways-on. In reacting to the other—and even the wind is turned, minutely, upon touching the flake—is conversing. The flake converses with others when it lands, and with the grass and the ground, as it settles in, as it melts into the substrate. Just this little is conversation, is life. And the wind whistles to the wind.

:- Doug.

Are there kinds of conversations and are they different from their purposes? I am beginning to think that conversation has to be peripatetic, jumping from I am friendly to let’s get to work to let’s get down to business to hey how about this to joking to laughter and banter to something deeply complex, all within seconds and without prediction. There are no straight line conversations. We need relief from one direction every few minutes or less. Our minds are that way, riding this wave of energy and then jumping to a different train going another way.

:- Doug.