FootprintsintheWind.com

There is a dose of cultural cohesion in those metaphors that survive and propagate easily. This makes sense in conversation. We see it often when as a group we feel excited from some new idea we have generated. This new metaphor has become a burr stuck to our mental pant legs.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2130

Watch to see if I am leaving no trace, and to see that my work does not leave a trace on me. Yes! If we are not leaving a trace on ourselves, then we are being gentle with the other players, with the betweens, the surrounds, and the conversation.

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Does speaking differently help us to think differently? Does using different metaphors?

:- Doug.

Quaker practice helps show how withholding words can grow us, can communicate.

:- Doug.

We ought not seek outcomes. In a world in process there can be no ultimate outcomes. Rather in human affairs we can seek reactions. Reactions always bring other players’s energy into the field. Ahh, dog-kick again!

:- Doug.

Social networks, like cells, produce both structural components of themselves and carriers of energy, information, or catalysts. But social networks do this at two levels. First, social networks produce bridges and gardens and cities; and they produce energy and ideas to share with community. At a different logical level, social networks produce first, more conversation, and second, meaning.

:- Doug.

of many folds
this page
unfolding unfolding
of many words
scraped and flaked away
of multitudes going
where? am I?

:- Doug.

Peeling down what I say
what I write
reveals less of that what
and more of me
and then? Am I who. . . ?
last layer?
I too contain multitudes

:- Doug.

Why is it necessary to separate our group from yours; why is it necessary to make war?

:- Doug.

An issue—perhaps the issue—of conversation is to know one another.

:- Doug.

Just how much time do we need to converse about a significant question? Clearly, if the issue involves lives and has taken decades or more to develop, then a 6-hour conversation is inadequate. What would be appropriate to even get all the cold and warm data into the room, let alone start working on ways forward? How many conversations?

:- Doug.

Hearing is far from passive. To hear someone is to take them in, allow their internal thought process to inhabit yours, even to the point of displacing yours. So it often is uncomfortable. You suspend your cherished notions like a mobile on a string above your head, while you try on his and hers. Those might even kill your darlings.

But if this were all, we had not begun thinking. Nor hearing. What lies in the territory just past here?

:- Doug.

My task in studies is to work out some boundary posts of the unknown.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2129

What next thing will have the best effect on the life of this conversation?

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© 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

Today, in my reading (Book Two, p 397) Armstrong is speaking of the profound mystery by which concentrating on feeling results in the project becoming more functional. This is perhaps a mystery of good conversation in that the conversation accomplishes good. In what ways? For one, good feeling toward the others in the conversation, toward other humans, other living things. For another, it helps us find things that actually will work because we will be able to help others accept the ideas. But in the sense he means, that feeling leads directly to function? We would actually use something more which is more inviting to us. If a tool fits my hand, it will be more effective in its working—I will aim it better, it will bite better whatever it is to bite, it will strike more accurately, and more efficiently. If it is a building and I do not feel comfortable in that room, do not see the use for that room, I will not use it, it will not function. Those all contribute to understanding the effect of the mystery. But they do not get us beyond mystery.

:- Doug.

Here in good conversation I am most highly alive.

:- Doug.

Good conversation brings forth the breath of life.

:- Doug.

Rather than something to be won
Conversation is a friendly undertaking

:- Doug.

Complexity is a way to intensify life; complication might kill.

:- Doug.

We work toward liking what we are saying.

:- Doug.

We cannot predict what will come out of this talking.

:- Doug.

The conversation pulls us in, wants our contribution.

:- Doug.

There is welcome when we enter the circle.

:- Doug.