FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation is a place we can seriously and with respect make sense our our pasts, our futures, and our lives.

:- Doug.

Into the betweens we may find our selves dissolving.

:- Doug.

Imagination has an important rational element.

:- Doug.

What is your responsibility for this conversation?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2338

Wonder: are birds and others of our cousins so un-nuanced that their world is all sex and predators and no poetry? Or is this just the limit of our imagination?

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© 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

Questions we can ask each other midway into our conversation: What have we oversimplified? What is often oversimplified? What question does nobody ask? Where do you feel torn? Is there anything else about this subject?

:- Doug.

Together, create a list of 17 questions—for each other, for experts, for how others approach your subject.

:- Doug.

I’m curious
How can we help
Each other
Get more curious?
Are you curious about me?

:- Doug.

Why have a conversation? I have no great answers. None of us does. Do it anyway. Prepare to be surprised.

:- Doug.

At support group today, a lady told about keeping a log on everything her mother did during the day, so that she could pick up on patterns to tell her mother’s doctor. I wonder if we might together keep a log of our conversations and get some value from our patterns.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2337

In conversation, your friend is at once your window, door, and skylight to other worlds.

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© 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

In our conversation maps we might think we disappear. But what happens is “we” are everywhere, pouring through, over, and around each of us: soaking.

:- Doug.

A purpose of conversational tasting, trying, and nosing, is to enrich our cultural, our human, repertoire. We add to our inventory of story.

:- Doug.

You’re right. If I were in your shoes, I’d feel exactly as you do.

:- Doug.

I’m not sure what this book is about. I’m less sure than when I started what conversation is about. I have some hints in the idea that persons are complexities. I have some hints in strange words like “temenos” and “Papunehang.” The edges just keep getting fuzzier.

:- Doug.

When in doubt
in a conversation
write a poem

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2336

Some use a string
to find their way returning
I seek a thread
to find a way into
the forest’s dark and bright

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© 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

Maybe it’s not an earth-shuddering breakthrough. Maybe it is only progress. Celebrate the step made forward, back, or other-ways.

:- Doug.

People have a right to choose how revelatory they want to be, occasion by occasion. Allow it to them. Be gracious. We have a lifetime, maybe more, to get to close. Time is a construct, a Humpty-Dumpty-like invention that “means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

:- Doug.

Maybe we don’t get heard the first time because we didn’t hear ourselves fully. We don’t need double checking (by the hearer) as much as double talking (by the talker). Sometimes.

:- Doug.

We have an instinctive pull to solidarity and it is much stronger than the one for fighting. It is there in our family. It is there in our social nature. It was what we dearly missed in lock down. We submitted to lockdown for us.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2335

The work has no finis
The artist and the work
Disentangle one another

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© 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

I’m not trying to prove anything works, but only that it is possible. Try. Do. What have you got to lose? If you don’t, only a friend you could have had.

:- Doug.