FootprintsintheWind.com

Meet
the One
who means me

:- Doug.

What value is there to be found in tracing the development of my experience and thought around conversation? Can there be a dialogue with dialogue, a meeting with a real Thou? Is this akin to Buber’s relation to art? How to avoid this becoming I-It, categories, and generalizations?

:- Doug.

It gives no peace evokes. This is this kind of conversation’s purpose. To be there for the other, to the other; to allow the other to dine on the heart of you: this distinguishes this kind of conversation from making mouth noises and from disguised monologue. It may not change your life’s trajectory; but it may.

:- Doug.

Where your attention is is your life.

:- Doug.

Conversation challenges: it tests; it fulfills. It gives no information nor peace.

:- Doug.

Now and then let us allow some other in: we can for this moment be sensible.

:- Doug.

I must actively be aware of what happens to me for it addresses me. But it is dangerous: allowing this in allows life to change my day, perhaps my very direction. Or my destination. Oh!

:- Doug.

Conversation goes both ways: I must be there; I must allow the other to enter my life.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2177

We are the care-givers of the stories, of the conversations. We give care because the stories and the conversations are our cognitive landscapes.

We can find a way to keep the stories and conversations alive in us, to us and all living things, for all living things.

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

Remind yourself to think about what you’ve read, to carry it further.

:- Doug.

Poetry
Mystery
Conversation

:- Doug.

This is the simple thing of conversation: becoming vulnerable, bringing your whole being. That is also the mystery and the unpredictability of it. This is the learning: learning yourself, learning this other, learning your betweens. This is creating: betweens and persons. This is finding. This is infinitely unknown. Unknowable. Even when you know, this is such a small knowing in a vastness.

:- Doug.

So what is conversation about? It is more than communicating information. It is this terrifying vulnerability making. We are everyday terrors meeting everyday terrors. We are becoming terrorists for one another.

:- Doug.

To reveal myself fully
To a mystery
Terrifyingly different
To myself
To what I expected
This is dialogue

:- Doug.

Be wholly holy here.

:- Doug.

Let’s converse till one of us reaches the edge of what’s comfortable.

:- Doug.

Misunderstandings are a well. Here we can refresh. For here we learn. Just learn. Here we can risk asking what the other means, even what we mean. We can be fully, openly, vulnerably present.

:- Doug.

The coming of the future conversation is not assured; we must make it out of our present betweens. Is it consciously sought? Conversation has had no meaning, no direction. We must make it out of the material we ourselves are, and bring, and that arises. Between.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2176

Progress is an ideology, a wish that “it’d go on forever,” based on an assumption that one kind of thing is only ever good. Like all ideologies it is an eye-shutting.

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

a pair of butterflies spiraling
spiraling softly round one another
conversing in whispers? primal dance?

:- Doug.

Philoxenia: love of strangers; eagerness to show hospitality; hospitality raises the idea of reciprocal duties of hospitality. Guest-host or host-guest.

I am entranced by this notion of host-guest. Reading about John Woolman this morning there is a related idea of putting oneself in the place of the stranger, for example the slave or the seaman in steerage, doing this imaginatively and through conversation with these strangers. Woolman does this through reading of scriptures, putting himself in the place of the exiles and the prophets and the masters. He is in conversation with the exiles and prophets and master, imaginatively. He is in verbal face to face conversation with the slaves and the seamen, as well as imaginatively. So imagination is part of, and a form of, conversation.

Juxtaposing these two, the host-guest and the imaginative conversing, what comes? The host has to put him or herself imaginatively and through converse into the feeling-sense of the other. Woolman’s term is “near sympathy.” Sympathy is a community of feeling. German Einfühlung, one feeling. The guest as well has been host and can imaginatively put on the apron and prepare the meal. And the guest can act as welcomer to the host, returning grace and story to the host. Host-guest is interwoven.

So then does conversation partake closely of the guest-host relation? Is host-guest an essential facet? Is imagination an essential facet?

:- Doug.

Humans realize relations.

:- Doug.

Conversation is inter personal, and so there are realms of the personal. For one, I am learning about family conflict, and family love-as-action.

What am I learning? What are the questions? What do I not know? Who are each of these people? Can I get beyond arguing for my point and direction? Instead, can we meet?

:- Doug.