FootprintsintheWind.com

One part of what we give one another is the autotelic experience.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2368

The flood between us
We pour one into the other
Each is bottomless to receive
Each has endless holy to billow
A leaf falls on the churning
On the leaf a lacewing
Calling in words we know not

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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

Can autotelic activities point us not just to and about the “real” world, but toward becoming a new person?

:- Doug.

Have I fallen into the Lutheran sermon fallacy? The one that says a sermon must be twenty minutes? Who says my chapters need to be ten pages or even one page long? Have I found a good place to stop? The Buddha holds up a flower.

:- Doug.

Why do you converse? To test your skill? To open your heart? To extend your mind? To enter flow? To find joy? To find companion? To start a movement? To take part in a secret? To escape? To love? To serve? To contribute? To offer?

:- Doug.

Flow is a form of dying to our self-project. In ritual we die to societal structure. Much the same seems true of meditation. I found it curious that Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi holds flow is not real life. Then it came clear to me. These are nice baubles on the necklace of life. They even help. But life has a larger work.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2367

What would it be to converse artfully?

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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

But we must be kind as well as effective, or we be not human. So we give each other opportunity for tastes of meeting and flowing, but somehow move us along for our common good and a larger common good. The world grows ever more, ever more, complex. Back of seeking I-Thou is a necessarily I-It world. We are in ludus for brief times, and mostly in interludes.

:- Doug.

Meeting is for flow; conversation is for work.

:- Doug.

Is conversation (and life) only and finally about flow and enjoyment? Or is there a more that turns us toward some action?

:- Doug.

Can we surpass
Anyone
In our goodness?

:- Doug.

It may be outside life, but it leaves one feeling it is the whole of life. It is conversation.

:- Doug.

Not the river
the flowing

:- Doug.

A bully forces your attention on you—and therefore on him. But in conversation your awareness is best placed not on either of you, but on the flow of the conversation.

:- Doug.

This richness is the shoe horn—after that, the foot and the shoe are one.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2366

Conversing we form a moire
not even a pattern
see?
But we see not
don’t have to see

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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

Why, for you, are those things enjoyable?

:- Doug.

Is there any single core of our being? Why do we assume there is? Maybe there is no bottom to get to. Maybe we each are more far flung, more a community of voices, cacophonous. Maybe we spread out to the edges of the unknown universe. Maybe we are coterminous with the all there is, only a little thin at the edges. I can never know you. I can never know me. Always I am surprised. When I bother to look. I want it to be When.

:- Doug.

Is life an affront to dying?

:- Doug.

But I don’t want to write a chapter on how and why conversation is like ritual. Rather, can we explore what fun we can find in or put in conversation when we use lessons from ritual? Not “deep fun” but rich fun, rich enjoyment.

:- Doug.

I have been writing of the effort and the work we need to invest in the conversation and the preparation for the conversation. This, as if it were the difficulty, the thing we want to avoid. Both may be true. But more true is that the work is the enjoyment.

:- Doug.

Conversation is like chess, only with infinity pieces, each with innumerable possible moves, on a board of innumerable dimensions. See how many strategy books there are for chess?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2365

Allow your friend’s humanity to touch you; then allow this touch to be visible to others.

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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