FootprintsintheWind.com

We are about renewing relationship.

:- Doug.

To converse is to gather.

:- Doug.

“In” a conversation, words and meanings get “in the way” of “seeing” what’s happening.

:- Doug.

What does the conversation want?

:- Doug.

Doing conversation with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity.

:- Doug.

Plan for our conversation
Things I want you to know
Things I want to find out
Surprises

:- Doug.

Even if the conversation contains the cosmos, we can start with our neighborhood: the land under our feet. Dance for this home. It is conversation enough.

:- Doug.

How would we study this long-flow conversation? In geology. In the ontogenesis of the children and plants (apparently phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny has been thrown aside by biology). Cosmology.

:- Doug.

This is a new direction. It takes me past the building and teaching metaphors into the ageless flow, too slow to catch our attention. And yet including the too fast for us.

:- Doug.

This seems significant, this inventing a world bigger, taking part in a conversation bigger. In a sense the conversation bigger is there and we hardly recognize it. In another sense, if once we start attending this larger, might we take a more appropriate part in it? Not to direct it nor to profit from it, but to enrich it?

:- Doug.

What if conversation were inventing a world bigger than our mouths, ears, and horizons?

:- Doug.

Our task in some conversations is to wade into the wetlands to learn reciprocity.

:- Doug.

A Conversation Bigger

:- Doug.

I need to take care of my body—to keep it active—so I can get out this significant work.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2153

Conversing is an act of reciprocity: giving to the world in return for all given to me. Pause, consider.

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

Let the conversation teach you
Not the words
Nor the people
Nor the talk
The conversation itself

:- Doug.

We may be in a conversation bigger than we recognize.

:- Doug.

There is a conversation which is longer and broader than we notice—it could be within our ken if we attended. The bees and the flowers have changed the colors and probably other aspects of each other over centuries. Different species have combined intricately to make lichens. We carry in our bodies other living beings to make up our microbiome. All this did not happen yesterday, but over millennia. Some conversations are so slow we miss them. Some conversations are so quick we miss them. The only thing ours has going is that it is the right speed for us to participate.

:- Doug.

This all is turning a corner: life is the hidden name of conversation. Our task is to expand and extend life, to stretch, to make bigger. We engender life not merely through bodies coming together, but through notions trading genes. Notions can come from all of life, all the thousands of species, not limited to one full of itself, but lacking hair and claws and roots.

:- Doug.

I may have a far too small idea of conversation. It’s office may be out beyond humanity. It may be to extend and expand the work of life.

:- Doug.

I’m studying something that has never before been studied: how do I touch your imagination with it?

:- Doug.

Conversation makes persons
Conversation makes thinking
Conversation makes relatives

Conversation births life

:- Doug.

Conversation is work because it is thinking together. Thinking is always work.

:- Doug.