FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation can serve as context for other conversation. So what do we not know about that?

:- Doug.

Can we be moved by doing our conversation work better and more beautifully?

:- Doug.

Conversation requires craftsmanship as well as technical knowledge.

:- Doug.

Where is the edge of conversation, its borders? When you turn your face away from your partner do you find this edge? When you look around the room to see who else is here? When you leave the room? In your study later reading the book she mentioned? When you are pondering the ramifications or simply having snippets pop up in your mind “for no reason?” In your dream two nights later? When you cannot forget?

:- Doug.

Allow, allow
open space
here’s more

:- Doug.

Always look to see a larger view.

:- Doug.

Converse, converse, converse.

:- Doug.

Seeing form with symbolic sight opens us to new compasses.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2133

A cloud has floated
into this bright blue sky
friends, they are, conversing

Please pass it on.

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Investigate you own posture and body movements for clues to you.

:- Doug.

How are you? How would you like to be? These are not merely a wise guy’s joshing with you. They are explorations of experience and (inter-)personal process.

:- Doug.

Metaphor moves. People. Concepts. And it runs away or pounces.

:- Doug.

“Describe what it is for you to . . .” is the opening to the wooded path.

:- Doug.

Metaphor is perception, loaded with shadings and plaiting. These comparisons are foundational to our consciousness.

:- Doug.

It might bear succulent fruit to gather around metaphor and practice clean language. It is likely to endow us with something we can use later that same day.

:- Doug.

Metaphors are wholes, gestalts rich with meanings hidden just inside, and more often deep in their caverns.

:- Doug.

The mind’s work, in all conversation and otherwise, is to make distraction.

:- Doug.

What are the unintended consequences of conversation? On the surface are things like everyone comes out with something no one carried in, stirring up an argument, finding others do not understand or do not care as you do, or you fall in love with a stranger. Deeper? Perhaps you find yourself doing things you never had the courage to do or even imagine yourself doing. Let’s think together on this.

:- Doug.

What are the unintended consequences of conversation?

:- Doug.

One of the early things we don’t know about conversation is what it is. We have no single all purpose definition.

:- Doug.

That one insight points me to what is important to me: life, humanity, beauty. Luhmann’s theory, as an article by David Seidl is explaining it, attracts me: it takes further the old theory of communication as message encoded, transmitted, decoded, and adds two steps: this message is understood by the other party (without which there would not be communication; but note that what the other party understands is likely to be at variance with what the first intended); and then the first party or a third, responds with his or their understandings. What is lacking I am seeing is a direction or purpose of the whole called conversation: why are we even talking in the first instance? It seems to me there is a purpose, maybe even in chit-chat: to show I am friendly, or to show I am worthy of your attention, or to share a laugh, smile, or tear.

:- Doug.

What is the ladder we take from communication to conversation? Here: under Luhmann’s social theory of autopoiesis, as I understand it so far, communication does not address purpose, nor direction: consequently this communication lacks life and humanity.

:- Doug.

Spatial/temporal words—in, on, under, before, then—are first stage vanishing metaphors. Words of journeys and containers—also being words, like is and are—are even more sneaky.

:- Doug.