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let it go, let it come
stand away
and with live ears

:- Doug.

In my studies I found some things that startled me. Maybe you will find them important too.

:- Doug.

Iambic pentameter is the way to go
loosely, loosely now it comes and goes
some rhythm here some rhythm there—so what?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2208

We have in our day an epidemic. It is fear. We fear one another: meeting, talking with, an other: someone we do not know and who is somehow other than us. It leads us to shy away from stranger conversations. It leads us to make others into less than human in politics. It leads young people hopped up on testosterone and adrenaline to shoot one another.

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

If we have in English no word for the opposite of conversation, how serious has been our study of conversation? If we get serious about conversation we might learn about ourselves. I propose that the most direct route to getting serious about conversation may be to play with and at it.

:- Doug.

Spirit (as well as conversation) may have special affinity for play, as in such terms as “the play of inspiration,” “the play of ideas,” “the play of cosmological concepts.”

:- Doug.

The more I open up my life, the more of it beyond that will be opened to me.

:- Doug.

Let us take two minutes now to be with our old friend, Silence, and stand in his presence.

:- Doug.

One form of spiritual can be interpersonal closeness.

:- Doug.

When we are told there are two kinds of something, let us guess there are probably more: this is only where the writer’s imagination left off. Take it as “I have found two, so far. . . .”

:- Doug.

Separate out the questions. Leave them in. Put the speculative responses elsewhere, if they need to be there at all. Don’t even write the questions as questions. Perhaps start a journey. Or gather ingredients and start cooking, without a recipe.

:- Doug.

What you just said causes a string to sound in me, a string wending through something my wife said to me making love, something a theology professor said in class, a passage in Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, all the way back to one of my Dad’s sayings. The string snaps and I am back here, bringing all this along.

:- Doug.

Many things are working and roiling within you—some even have to do with this person in front of you. They are appropriate for focus and then bringing up.

:- Doug.

A sense of cosmic mystery is more than a mystery on the forest path or a murder mystery. In some way you want to enjoy it without understanding it or untying the threads. It encompasses you and beyond you. You feel larger.

:- Doug.

Approach my writing the other way to. Start with a conversation and search for ways to make it better.

:- Doug.

Possible factors to explore in a conversation: What is our relationship to: self, Thou, others, work, the project to be undertaken, society, God, feelings, how to do this project, motives.

:- Doug.

Open mystery conversation: How will we get the culprit (your Thou) to confess to the conversation?

Closed mystery conversation: What is this conversation about, what “crime” will we commit (that is, who will we be) together?

:- Doug.

Focus the reader on feelings, as well as and beyond thoughts and thinking.

:- Doug.

Give the readers some of the responsibility.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2207

Avoid judicious. Speak out plainly. No moderation for me!

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

“The spirit of peace.” This from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. To write of spirit is ghost-like. Nebulosity keeps reader and writer trapped in old thoughts. Not ghosts but whiches, writer! Tell us which spirit.

:- Doug.

Don’t conversations have to come at things directly? Is to ask the question to smash it?

:- Doug.

Build mystery by leaving open multiple plausible hypotheses.

:- Doug.