FootprintsintheWind.com

Partial conversation, partial wholeness.

:- Doug.

Does conversation have a right, and a sacred nature: to be whole and health-giving?

:- Doug.

What is the unconversable conversation? For our generation? For example, how willing are you to allow humanity to end? What are your prerequisites before you will acquiesce to it?

:- Doug.

What dear friend is human beauty? When did you see it in another, this week? Think hard for it was there. It was probably in an encounter—maybe you saw it face to face, or maybe it chose to shine through you, or maybe you heard it across a room.

:- Doug.

As a microwave oven to a pan on a stove top, so this little thing to chit-chat.

:- Doug.

What is the concept I am seeking in the word “spiritual?” Thrill (to pierce, penetrate, hole, shivering, exciting feeling). It is an uplifting, a possibility of doing the impossible, being the impossible. Being more than we thought possible.

None of these are it, only nip at the skirt.

That little thing easily smothered that begins a conflagration.

So much for not being able to name it. What is it? Maybe that is the best, the better way: say what it does. This little thing in conversation like spirit may be more verb than noun. Conversation does things. To us. Conversation makes persons, changes us, engenders relations, starts fires. This little thing in conversation is what instantly boils the blood.

:- Doug.

Conversation is response, and that is a realm of Thou. This expresses belonging or longing or giving of self or hearing of like or receiving or interchange or flowing.

:- Doug.

What is the character of this conversation I study, and what justification have we for approaching it with respect and awe?

:- Doug.

Buber says we can stand in I-Thou relation “with beings and things which come to meet us in nature”, (pp 124-5). Some original peoples of North America hold that non-human animals and plants are persons and deserve to be met as such (e.g. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p 56: “know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents.” This one is “Someone, not something.”) Might the latter enrich the former? More specifically, are words necessary for conversation, or even for meeting?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2156

The big question right now is why and how recognizing our relation to plants and animals, knowing again their personhood, relates to our study of conversation. In one sense it is obvious: relation and person are basics of conversation. Yet we in western thought mode, especially since the rise of science, do not admit that living beings besides humans can be persons. That is, can have value as individuals. So one thing we do not know is how this mosquito, this dandelion, this moss can have worth as an individual. Another is how we might meet.

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So I am seeing a desire to make spirit central to my study of conversation; and to look at specific areas or uses of conversation—to make it concrete. If conversation is central and not a tool, then what is specific, what is concrete? How do I give it framing, put meat on the bones? Conversation is perhaps how we stitch spirit to spirit, or reveal the stitches. Not so much stitches as tendrils, living bits reaching out to other living bits. Softly, tenderly stretching to meet. That is perhaps the beginning of a frame.

:- Doug.

Conversation gone askew: role of foreign actors in US social media.

:- Doug.

Conversation realms to investigate: women’s education; continuous supply energy; food; water; health; ecology; rights of women, children, aged, disabled, workers, prisoners, refugees.

:- Doug.

Is conversation a near-deliberate sharing of spirit?

:- Doug.

What is it about conversation that we find undertones of sacred?

:- Doug.

Converse! It’s what we all do.

:- Doug.

There is now a great patch of blue, medium-deep, highlighted by bright cumulus clouds surrounding it. Beautiful! Thank you!

:- Doug.

I want to get to studying and to writing: to making sense and headway in my books. I may at the moment be thinking there is no stream through it. Then again, the droplets from the melting snow do not know where they are going, but are pulled and follow. Mighty rivers from little melting snowflakes grow, by only following gravity.

:- Doug.

Conversation is life
Quenching our thirst
For belonging
Giving us strength
For giving to others

:- Doug.

But how do we touch the shared imagination? Shared first with another one or two people; shared ultimately with the 11th generation?

:- Doug.

I read again today in George Lakoff’s The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant, and am finding some wider angles on it. The question I am asking now is what is the picture of a more conversational world that life-enhancing people will want, and Lakoff is bringing me to asking How then do we frame what we want? These share an essence: a leaning towards.

And leaning in toward each other has been a meaningful image for me.

102: “Morally based framing is everybody’s job.” 100: “It is about which values will [enliven] in our society.” 98: Meet “definition with definition” “sanctity with sanctity”. 97” “love and commitment, family and community.”

Turning to One Another is the book by Meg Wheatley. That is a good image. Leaning in toward one another, hearing one another, intent on one another. These are somewhat, perhaps softly, evocative images. What will seize our imaginations?! Stir the blood (Burnham)?

That is perhaps the perennial question for me, yes? What is the most exciting picture you have for the generations of your children? First, why are you not making a bigger more exciting picture? Second, how will the higher futures be sterile of conversation?

:- Doug.

Gathering in arms
Dancing
All are wanted
Rhythm
Love is
Conversation is
Not ever a balancing

:- Doug.

Thinking About Talking

:- Doug.