FootprintsintheWind.com

What are the fruitful faces of conversation?

:- Doug.

Everything causes everything else. Or at least everything else it touches. Or everything it relates to, keeping in mind everything relates with more than the ear hears or the imagination dreams.

:- Doug.

Leaning in we focus
people
not mere attention

:- Doug.

A friendly window
giving soft light
a quiet spot
near the flow of people walking
two or three good souls
leaning in
inviting conversation

:- Doug.

Does it generate tranquility in me? If not, reject it. Don’t sell the litmus test: just openly use it.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2194

It is not about growing. I have written much about growing. Thought much about growing. But for one, growing has aspects of time, which may not be a real thing: time seems to be a human construct. For another, growing brings up notions of heaven and afterlives. Mainly it suggests that we are not living for now but learning for later. Education: being drawn out. Into what is real. Yet this too is real. We have a life to live, while we are educating, learning, planting, harvesting, paddling a canoe, hugging. Growing can be as well a step along the path with no end. What has no end—the path or the growing or the stepping?

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© c 2023, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

In principle, a conversation is the sanctification and illumination of a life. Between is a cradle, a gathering together of your thousand joys and sorrows, laughs and sobs, a receiving place for your lives, a fount of your imaginings and things you could never have imagined apart, the coming together, what your spirits might be.

:- Doug.

It is more important to get the individual conversations rich and beautiful and full, than it is to have a coherent “plan.” Just make each conversing beautiful, fulfilling, in its own place-time, in its light and in its quietness. This seems very much aligned with the Eastern notion of being fully in the place where you may be found. This is good, this leans us to the good, because it is about living of life, not forcing some program upon it.

:- Doug.

We invite conversing by inventing, and inviting to, a quiet place with soft light. The light attracts us.

:- Doug.

The problem is the should. I want to get to the is. If it is not what you want, then figure out how to get from here to there. Even that is missing some of the point: it is re-introducing the should in the form of want. Does the is preclude choice? Are we simply to take what happens? I want to say we can choose to make better what is. We are part of the is and cannot in fact choose not to have an effect upon what is affecting us. So we do choose. Then we can choose to have effect for good or ill.

:- Doug.

We’re both here at the same time so we must have some common ground. What do you guess that might be?

:- Doug.

Only this and this at the full.

:- Doug.

The purpose of stretching is to stretch.

:- Doug.

Let’s not convince anybody of anything. Let’s watch: together, for. Beauty that was first not beauty. The thing in your path that did not exist for you before you swerved.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2193

To live is to converse. To converse is to live. Ain’t no more. Ain’t no guilt. Ain’t no fear.

Please pass it on.

© c 2023, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/274-5353, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation happens
between
any two or more

:- Doug.

Life is our monkey bars of conversation.

:- Doug.

The truth of the world is us. All us.

:- Doug.

One can never capture all that one believes, the whole of what one lives within—only live it out, set it free, witness. Accompany. Eat bread with it.

:- Doug.

You may feel you have lost some thing. (You have.) This is freeing. You are of community. You are of larger. You are in charge. You are even responsible. But the results are not your concern.

:- Doug.

Home. You only think it is here. It is moving.

:- Doug.

We are not alone in the world. We have each other. All the us. We have conversing to prove it. Conversing brings us to belonging; conversing makes our home. How then shall we live? Making home for those around us, those of the microbiome in us, those swirling through us.

:- Doug.

Purpose of our intellect
unfruitful to ask
but what use
can we make of it
what good
in this now

:- Doug.