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Today, the felt sense of my reading and writing have been peaceful, a calm readying with a reaching out. The quality question is the butterfly awing.

:- Doug.

What is the quality of our communication?

I like that quality question. First I liked it to describe the work of the communications committee of Friends. It gives serious concerned spirituality and reach to our work. Second, I like it as a question for us to ask one another in our daily converse: we can weigh, mark, and value—not just evaluate—our meeting and conversing.

:- Doug.

I have as much right to be the world as every other being. I also have the responsibility to do so.

:- Doug.

Mirror and thesaurus are good tools for me to be in conversation: Mirror back to a person her last 4 or 5 words, and she will often tell you more. Saying “It sounds like” or “you seem to be” fine tunes your hearing for just now.

:- Doug.

Meaning may often be a lazy word for, or unveil, motivation.

:- Doug.

Write a distinct piece, beginning, middle, and end, in 60 seconds. Find each word’s weight, texture, color.

I am not sure there is much value to me in sixty-second writings: I do not like the pressure element. On the other hand, it is a chute that can pinpoint my mind. Will it convince others? That may not be its purpose or main worth—which may lie in wait for me.

Story was the easiest way to do that. What of description or persuasion? What of haiku?

:- Doug.

That piece (on betweens) would not yield to me, to my pen. Could it be that if I gave myself a game with a restraining rule or two, it would give up its profundity and vigor? Write it like a roadmap, or a cartoon? Make it a pair of reading glasses? Pick a book title from a list? Throw an obstacle, a maze.

Second rule: tell it slant. Never use the word between.

:- Doug.

This is important. Steep awhile here.

:- Doug.

What are the rules of dream time as in Finnegans Wake?

:- Doug.

The teller draws out, educes, from the hearer something she knows. But also more, for our hearer assimilates what the teller wishes, and accommodates herself to the outside pattern coming from him, shifts the pattern to say music. Making speaks to sensing, sensing bends speaking in response. From whence the patterns of a moiré?

:- Doug.

Let us enter a space set aside through the gate of silence.

:- Doug.

What might we do to create a bounded sacred space for our conversation, a temenos? Here exceptional events might freely happen. Light a candle, turn down the outside light? Remove the cell phones? Clear the space? Remove the table or sit back from it? Set out two plain clear glasses of water and see into them? Call in the sacred, the set apart, the silent? Tune attention? Attend body and breath, stomach, legs and fingers?

:- Doug.

Try nonsense conversations: speak in sing-song gibberish. A child learning his toes, play with your verbal instrument for tone, volume, speed, rhythm, percussion, intent, friendliness, animosity, anger, calm, enunciation, impeccability. . . .

:- Doug.

Why is the focus of focusing on pathology? Can it be applied to expand imagination or spirituality? Could it develop conversations and meetings?

:- Doug.

What are the physical and spiritual moves of good conversation? What gestures of face and stomach and wayward feet steel your talking, steal your hearing?

:- Doug.

In Nachmanovitch’s Free Play last evening I ran across the notion that the purpose of literature is not to prove nor sell but to invite thinking. I stopped running and stared. Yes! That is what I have been about in this book. To vex people into thinking. Together.

Thus, having written it is enough. It is play, and that is its purpose.

Is it to be lasting? What lasts? Nothing forever. What did the cave painters communicate? But they do speak to us. There is a thread.

Threads are pregnant. We are their children. Gestating.

Play with me. Think.

:- Doug.

We’re not teaching. We’re calling forth.

:- Doug.

Conversing, like play, is useless. Only after, we might sieve its use, that is when our conversing becomes an It.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2202

This morning I described my place in life as being done with my Sisyphus activities—no longer pushing a new snowball uphill each morning. Ha! Sometimes it gets large quickly and becomes near impossible to get it to the top. Sometimes it melts before it starts, with same result: it doesn’t make it to the top!

Please pass it on.

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I play that I play. I play there in converse that I play there.

:- Doug.

Canst thou converse unmindful of past or future, unmindful of gain or loss, unmindful? Then thou canst enter converse.

:- Doug.

For meaningful conversation to emerge I and Thou must disappear.

:- Doug.

Conversation’s task: to tease two Thous from a state of not being able to play to a state of play.

:- Doug.