FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation can be in turns conflict and conviviality. Each can be meaningful.

:- Doug.

Can We (Ever) Converse?

:- Doug.

When can bleak look open and a space for emergence?

:- Doug.

Is it ever possible to have an I and Thou conversation? Is meaningful possible, or is it only a settling, an unsatisfying mingling of words, notions, dreams, and old fights? Are we doomed to keep trying and never getting through to one another? Or is possible possible? Or, are we best served to be alert to surprise, giving up our infantile play at control?

:- Doug.

To be meaningful does conversation require reflecting? What does reflecting within or after (is there an after?) conversation even entail?

:- Doug.

I do not always like surprises, yet I seek them.

:- Doug.

Why are we conversing?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2196

Some dirt, a bruise
a beer, a tear, a roaring laugh
o so profound is this
—and all of this—
the bottom of it all
we hid away
our aspirations
may we yet find
the essence of our lives
breathed upon
yes, breathed upon

Please pass it on.

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What are our problems of conversation?

:- Doug.

I facilitate a change process in how we converse, and in what direction. So seek and present surprises. Surprises to get us reflecting. Surprises to get us asking layered, crowding, cutting questions every time we think we have an answer. There is great and perhaps lasting worth here.

:- Doug.

Our hidden ground: Fire, Imagination, Spirit, and Surprise. Hidden because we often hide it. Or hide from it, frightened and little.

:- Doug.

In conversation what you give should be at least in part idiosyncratic. And peculiar to your conversation mates.

:- Doug.

The value, ours, is in surprising conversations.

:- Doug.

This is about how conversation expands our possible possibilities.

:- Doug.

You never can tell what is going to happen in a conversation. That’s the fun, challenge, evocativity, and tragedy of it!

:- Doug.

Intricacy gives the gift of possibilities un-thought, unexpected, unpredicted. It does not push us to choose, but puts these on a store display shelf.

:- Doug.

Conversation, that is, life, intrinsically implies meeting. (Or relation, gathering, family, . . . .)

:- Doug.

Body, situation, language, and persons are the minimum required elements for living. And so conversation.

:- Doug.

I am seeing Gendlin’s philosophical writing as leading me to a series of forks where the first fork is meeting People, the second is Intricacies, the third is Possibilities, and perhaps the fourth is the Crossings of Intricacies and Possibilities with other Intricacies and Possibilities: a whole mess of tangled roots! The result is that we ourselves and our acts stem from many roots, and might flower in many ways. Or we can shrivel up and not take nourishment from any others, humans, plants, humus, or fungi. This suggests that our human root system extends beyond ourselves to other living beings, and we can be in symbiotic relativity with all.

:- Doug.

People are choice agents, not so much in their lives, but in their situations with people, non-humans, and events. They meet one or some of these and choose responses.

:- Doug.

In conversation we seek words (phrases, ideas, slots, . . .) where we can play among the intricacies!

:- Doug.

How does Clean Language relate to looking for implicate intricate slots?

:- Doug.

“Intricacy is alive.” (Gendlin, E. T. (1991). Thinking beyond patterns: body, language and situations, p 30, in B. den Ouden & M. Moen (Eds.), The presence of feeling in thought, pp. 25-151.) To me, implicit in that is: Intricacy defines living, but does not limit it.

:- Doug.