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The primal function of conversation is not information transfer: rather the growing of community, between you and I, between you and a larger group. More so, converse seems to grow spirit, and not just in individuals nor groups of people alive now, but among people alive across times, perhaps beyond time. Spirit grows. Conversing grows. These may be the same thing.

:- Doug.

Gravity is a field; electromagnetism is a field; waves are fields. We each have a field, perhaps one of personality, perhaps one of the energy we elicit from others. We each are a field. We each enact a field, multiple fields.

:- Doug.

Coming from a place of joy, presence, discovery of other and together and worlds, conversation has this capacity to cause life to overspill its bounds.

:- Doug.

P₂X₃: To open up the requisite variety for our conversations means practice, play, exploration, exercise, experiment. So how? When?

:- Doug.

How does hearing out work and with what results?

:- Doug.

Curiously admire.

:- Doug.

Wow! The spigot was opened today and even last night! Lots of insights—four sides of 3×5 cards. The reading in Nachmanovitch’s Free Play was triggering me. He was taking me to different parts of my mind, holding up a menagerie of metaphors, having this converse with that, telling me there were other intricate possibles out there, telling me that intricate is itself a word too tame. These things were in me. More: many cornucopias of universes are in me. All the while. And they are in other persons too. My book, my task, my books are to call the kids out to play!

We are the kids! We are allowed to play! This is our world!

:- Doug.

This is valuable. It must out. To others. Perhaps not in my way nor in what I saw but in the fact of seeing, hearing, being able to express—a bit.

:- Doug.

Releasing, releasing, releasing!
This book like many past is turning loose
This devil this angel this trickster
I know not which (witch?)
This about, around, through: this me

:- Doug.

What does phonesthemia think, and what do you think of it, and what especially does it think of you?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2201

Conversation asks
continual surrender
of your old story

Please pass it on.

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Context is always bigger than context. Not only that, but we humans gain by extirpating the “weed” from the “garden,” by pulling something kicking and squirming into a new context.

:- Doug.

To follow tracks in reading is to go to earlier times, for every reference is to something valuable the writer read. Imagine reading the opposite direction! Or along a path yet bigger!

:- Doug.

Resistance is necessary to conversing and all music.

:- Doug.

Syncopated synopses
Synaptic scavenging
Play!

:- Doug.

Improvisation converges on conversation
Conversing has the feel of improvisation
Everything echoes everything else

:- Doug.

When you hear of deeper, ask, What is this? What do I understand by this word, just here? When you hear of meaning, of spirit, of understanding, of inner: ask the same. We do not dare define these—do we?—for we cannot. And yet they speak to . . . something. We perhaps must each one for that one’s self alone, decide.

:- Doug.

We are called not to a vision quest but to a telling quest.

:- Doug.

Conversing arrives seldom in a straight line. Even less in a zigzag. More it comes more concentrically, or all at once. No, now I see it does not arrive, rather travels through.

:- Doug.

And the between is really the whole speaking through the parts, actually the seeming parts, us. So, seen right, it is we who are the between.

:- Doug.

Maybe our muse is Ganesha’s taking dictation, struggling to keep up and to understand, while we are the inspiration. Why do we wait upon something outside us for what we are?

:- Doug.

Deeper is somehow just bigger than we are.

:- Doug.

Rounding is called forth by reality
spirit will tell us when our story
needs more dimensions to come alive

:- Doug.