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The power in the ritual of conversation is both ineffable and effective.

:- Doug.

If ritual is designed to change a situation, our attention is called to assess the “situation” and then to “design” the change.

:- Doug.

Oft times
I see most clearly
Just awakening

:- Doug.

Conversation is one way we take care of each other.

:- Doug.

You and I can be
in different
times
at the same
time

:- Doug.

What is hidden? Some thing niggling you? Or the throbbing part of you?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2332

Participating
in the conversation
means you are creating

Please pass it on.

© c 2024, 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 work of conversing and meeting is to effect transformations—beneficent ones—of the two, the communities they touch, the worlds they move within and move. Tom F. Driver writes of this in The Magic of Ritual, p 174: “life is not something to be treated. . . but something to be enacted. . . . The clearer case is moral: when we understand ourselves as agents active in a world made up of other purposive beings, our sense of self and responsibility is heightened.”

:- Doug.

Conversation and meeting should be subject to moral and intellectual critique.

:- Doug.

To hear is to receive, to sit next.

:- Doug.

In beginning
In ending
In relation
Holy is
Here: hear

:- Doug.

Coming to gather
We sometimes find
A coming together

:- Doug.

The liminality of conversation contains a bit of incorporation: we are brought into the play of this “time” of coming together. This we can expect, because the jet of separation enters the domain of the together. The liminal is the place that shares in each by touching each.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2331

I was lost and now I don’t want to be found.

Please pass it on.

© c 2024, 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

next to post to Web Immanent and transcendent are not merely opposite ends of a continuum: they are more descriptive of moving, movable segments of a circle, of all circles. They belong to human capacity as well as divine.

What is immanent and transcendent in human conversation? We can be immanent when we truly meet another, make ourselves available to that one. The friend can be immanent to us in the same way. We can be transcendent in two ways: we can be absent when with another: checking our watch or phone; pointing our shoes away; thinking about the shopping we need to do. The second way is to lift our friend to new possibilities, hidden capacities.

It seems immanent and transcendent in conversation are each a matter of choice. You can choose to activate both at once by attending your friend to hear now and to seek for capacities and sparkles.

When are you here and everywhere? Remember that infinities can overlap. Take up no space.

:- Doug.

What if what we are trying to put words to is not going into yourself, but a going out. Finding not your self, but your possibility for good, ill, evil, grace, or ugly?

I am called to this idea of we are moving not into ourselves but out. Is this out from, or out to, or both? Probably mostly out to.

:- Doug.

Ritual has the intention to effect a change, even if it does not bring about change. This intention appears to be lacking in conversing. But then, the intention might be present even if unnoticed in the beginning. What in our conscious thinking is our intention in conversing? What in our unconscious thinking is our intention?

:- Doug.

Deep is the word said after we’ve considered its opposite; out beyond the mowed area; out past the previous explorations; here there be dragons, the realm of the dragons.

:- Doug.

How can we show the way for conversation or meeting? Perhaps not quite standards of conversation, but signs pointing a useful path? For example, here is something never before said.

:- Doug.

Is there a priestly conversation and a shamanic one? Two poles, two strange attractors?

:- Doug.

How might we learn to converse? Like an infant playing at babbling, like feet dancing before we recognize a dance, like Peter Elbow teaching writing before reading: by playing at it, by jumping in, by making it up.

:- Doug.

Conversation weaves us.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2330

Maybe a pattern-seeking animal is a pattern-making animal. If so, ought we be seeking non-patterns, such as the random, the stochastic, the guessed-at? For instances: the music in the wind’s vagaries, the way some birds fly sort of with the flock, sort of not, the route of smoke on a still day? Let’s go farther and further afield from those. In looking in these places, we are even now looking for a pattern. What is a non-pattern? It has to somehow exceed the question of What patterns are we incapable of seeing?

Please pass it on.

© c 2024, 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