FootprintsintheWind.com

Life from conversation

:- Doug.

In conversation we are discovering the possibilities of our relationship—that is, life.

:- Doug.

We are conversation-makers, makers of persons, makers of relations, neighbors, friends, action-workers, movements, potlucks, ties across supposed frontiers. We are the makers of worlds, our worlds. Between us, conversing, we make living things by imagining them, by simply saying their names.

:- Doug.

When are the conversations to stir our blood? To shake our imaginations? To transform us? Conversations get written in the crinkles of our eyes, the shapes we leave in the land and in our places. From our beds, conversations pull us up by our shoulders and stand us in our mountain-climbing boots.

:- Doug.

Ways conversation touches—
Whole-making
Identity-revealing
Grocery-providing
Pharmacy-dispensing
Relationship-growing with all living
and with all earlier and later living
Sacred-revealing
Self-opening
Life-making

:- Doug.

We restore conversation and conversation restores us. This springing and soaking nurtures redefinition of culture, blossoming of meaning. When we take care for conversation, conversation takes care of us.

:- Doug.

I am learning about conversation by studying its neighborly living processes.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2157

Paddle or get out of the canoe.

Please pass it on.

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Touching beyond touching
Conversation

:- Doug.

Where is this going? Where is the path to. . .what? Profound, weighty, penetrating, sacred, meaning, larger, keen, life, qwoan, intimate, known, rooted, grounding, completing? This is an opening of ourselves to some power or skill inherent in us, generating a knowing of persons (human or otherwise) and being known as person. This a grasping of hands, and grasping of essence.

:- Doug.

Our work is not merely permitting the conversation to do its work. We can be intentional. We can bring in the food and drink, and the living parts that have become separated from their optimal places. Consider the compost heap: we can bring our table scraps and put them on the pile. Living things will go to work and create rich black soil. But the little critters which do the work would work better if they were not starved. We know that compost works best with both green things (the table scraps and cut grass) and brown (like autumn leaves and wood chips): then the heap starts heating up. Work is done. Life is heated. Similarly our job in conversation is to go out to other persons, show up to stay there, bring food, water, green ideas, brown combustible material, and knowing patience.

:- Doug.

Several insights this morning, foundational in some way, sounding depths in me. They relate to conversation, and they go deeper (would like to have a better word than that) than I have been going in my studies. I feel as though my metaphors have not plumbed far, the bob is hanging by its string, has not yet touched, has only encountered some of the dirt and rock outcroppings on the way; maybe the hole has twists at many angles.

:- Doug.

The conversation knows what to do when we do not. More fruit. More birds. More seeds dropping. More ants transporting. More life sprouting. Enriching life. Juicy.

:- Doug.

If we make space in our lives for forming our relationships, what then? Relationships form our cultural identity. Even our personal identities. One or two persons at a time, we restore rightness. We breathe health into our lungs. Beyond human to the humus and all that live in, on, under, and over it.

:- Doug.

Sacred Conversation

:- Doug.

What does it mean to be sacred?
A river runs through it, yes
A river runs under it, too

:- Doug.