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What is the preparation for conversation?

:- Doug.

What are the foundations under conversation? Are there any, or is conversation the foundation?

:- Doug.

What invites people to conversation? Why do people have such a hard time avoiding it? Or do they? From where arises our difficulty getting to intimacy and vulnerability?

:- Doug.

What kinds of conversation do I intend to study?

:- Doug.

Why are silences sometimes pregnant?

:- Doug.

What are the ever mores in conversation?

:- Doug.

What do we not know of [engaging] betweens?

:- Doug.

What do we not know of [engaging] contexts?

:- Doug.

What is in the meetings and betweens of conversation and story? Of conversation and questions?

:- Doug.

What is implicit in conversation?

:- Doug.

This was a fruitful walkabout even if it took me afield.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2123

Tell the fascinating thing fascinatingly.

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What are the edges of this proposition that conversation makes persons? On one level we know that it takes at least a physical conjunction to make a human being. Deeper, the question asks what does it mean to be a person, and how is that a more nuanced and complex drawing out or enticing? That is a question we cannot answer finally and forever, for the threads branch and become finer, finer. The edges have no necessity of ending in life, but in nature it may be that even death and destruction are put to the service of making life.

:- Doug.

Some guesses as to how conversation creates persons: It gives them names. It sees them as existing, standing forth, as from a background. It expects something from this one that could not come from any other (this is a step beyond separation from ground). It gives this one a presence and expects from this same one a power. Do we know any of these things beyond allowing that they might be true?

:- Doug.

Are there gentlenesses, lightnesses of conversation we seldom, perhaps never, tap? For instance, do we tell our dreams? Our nightmares? Do we allow the clouds to pull us past our dreams?

:- Doug.

How? Why? When? does conversation make persons?
How? Why? When? does conversation invent ideas? Actions?

:- Doug.

If conversation makes persons, then it is likely to also alter them, bring forth new identities.

:- Doug.

There is a specificity to a conversation in that we mean these people and nobody else. Perhaps this is for concentration, for working the thing more thoroughly, finding and finding again.

:- Doug.

What is the beauty of light in conversation, if you cannot say it is the knowledge nor the ideas? Maybe it is physical light? Maybe it is unnoticed?

:- Doug.

To add life to a conversation means to do what you can in the next moment to help the others “follow their bliss” as Joseph Campbell used the phrase. And help the conversation follow its bliss. What is that bliss? Ahh, that’s the thing!

:- Doug.

How is it that the profoundest stories are often found in death and tragedy? Say these specifics are not necessary for a conversation to get to profound, and say stripping away our normal cloaks may be necessary: what are the elements of vulnerability that allow us to get there? Is there a path other than vulnerability?

:- Doug.

We tend to live out the supermarket theory of conversation—some from this aisle, but what might be tasty in the next? If we want health food or Indian we would have a richer experience in a specialty store. Which is to say, go vertically instead of horizontally.

:- Doug.

The waking dream I had of my parents the night they died showed me that reality is more than we allow. Given that on the surface this is not a conversation, what does it unfold that can benefit our conversation? It changed me and my approach to living.

True, conversation can change us and our way of living. But to say we need more imagination does not get us there. It does not tell us how to imagine. Books have been written on creativity, a cousin of imagining. One thing we don’t yet know: we can get us together and use some process to imagine, but how do we imagine, together?

:- Doug.