FootprintsintheWind.com

The strangest books teach me conversation.

:- Doug.

This conversation stuff is learning a language. It is our native language, this conversation, yes, but the words and phrases might be new to us, or buried. We can yet go home. Take my hand gently. Say something close to the bone. Show me. Encourage me.

:- Doug.

Presume the conversational competence of your friend. Presume your friends desire to belong to you.

:- Doug.

Don’t seek private goals: seek the good of all.

:- Doug.

What Conversation Went Well this week? One that really had you thinking about it for days after?

:- Doug.

There is an intermediate between what you think and what I think, between your needs and mine, between your acts of helping and mine. In this meeting ground we have obligation and need, ideas and malleability, and something even more. There is dependence.

:- Doug.

We must both ignore and deliberately build upon the unallowed fact that life continually changes.

:- Doug.

Tell as many people as I can.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2294

We live beyond our power to name and hold
ethereal lights in th’ heavens and across the table
blinking allow us no full comprehension
coherence never was the stuff of life
in breezes hiding mantis robin’s gone

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

One of the miracles of conversation is that it plunges a reflective person directly into the heart of mystery.

:- Doug.

Some of you is in the way of some of you. It is a fireworks day when some dying visits.

:- Doug.

Let me propose this thought experiment for your next conversations: Examine yourself. How much of your intricacies are you prepared to open to your friend? Consider then that your friend will likely match your proportion of openness. So if you are eighty per cent open, so is she. Then augment for the parts neither of you know or at least cannot name, but will be opened too. Perhaps another ten per cent? Then consider the multitudes each of you contain. These are both offspring, and if you will, offsprung from. How many of you are there? There.

:- Doug.

Where shall we turn to learn our conversation? To theater, to architecture, to design, to poets, to novelists, to dreamers, imaginers, and reverie-ers.

:- Doug.

Say less
Hear More

:- Doug.

Conversation shows up in cooking for someone.

:- Doug.

People are the bodies; persons are the complexities who meet you.

:- Doug.

How many persons are in your conversation?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2293

Conversation ought to be
Complex as life

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

Look for the little miracles: they live in the ordinary.

:- Doug.

Conversation has a potential for doing good. We ought then with that play well.

:- Doug.

Think on conversation as an act of kindness.

:- Doug.

We have reached the end of November. Thanksgiving has passed. Now gratefulness may set in.

:- Doug.

We each live on a shifting spectrum of needfulness. Sometimes we feel strong: we can handle anything. Low on the scale. We break a leg, we go to the high side of the scale—till we learn to use our crutches. We are blinded, or have Downs syndrome, we are toward the high end. Here, subtly, that shifts as we discover others need our sensitive hearing, touching, loving. As Sara Hendren says, “We might make friends with that.” I hear her statement two ways: We can recognize needfulness as essential to one’s humanity and as running both ways; we might use our vulnerable likeness as the best way to make friends with others. I also begin to learn that finding my needfulness is necessary to finding myself.

:- Doug.