FootprintsintheWind.com

Conversation is a skill not to learn, but to exercise—find—enter.

:- Doug.

Offer questions, one to another
In questions, beauty, flight, calling out—
Can you come out and play?

:- Doug.

To have left a note would have taken away from him the flights of his mind.

:- Doug.

Think, in conversation,
You become permanent?
Nay, permeable

:- Doug.

In conversation we call into being
not the permanent person we seek
but the more beautiful permeable one

:- Doug.

Poetry is how we know a person
For surely her complexity
As we approach turns and dances off

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2364

Every bridge
is reflected on waters
and a path toward waters

Every conversation
is reflected on one another
and a path toward each

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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

For all I know it started at the top of the stairs—that bubbling and laughing from my parents—I wanted to talk—it took fifty, sixty, seventy years—who knows?—to shut up and hear out the complexity of each person—and just today there opens to me that they are music and pulse and circling—poetry!

:- Doug.

Music it was that mysterious thing
My parents downstairs bubbling and laughing
So it started I wanted to make that
Behind the talk words
To discover I needed to listen then hear
Persons are complexities
Complexities are poetries—music!

:- Doug.

If guns is the answer
What is your question?

:- Doug.

Did you know you activate
A rising physiology
When you bring your curiosity?

:- Doug.

To activate
your rising physiology
open up your curiosity

:- Doug.

Conversation brings forth inchoate flowing phenomena.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2363

Default to wonder.

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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

The empty spaces
where they can flow
where they do flow
are not empty but open
be

:- Doug.

Journey further
On the terrain
There is no deep

:- Doug.

Fleeting
is the quality
of continuity

:- Doug.

Also on our rounded planet
Every down and in is through

:- Doug.

Before,
They were to me tall weeds with blooms
Now,
I know her first name, Lobelia
Brilliant cardinalis, my dear friend
Backwoods
Fount for hummingbirds and papillon

:- Doug.

complexities
of conversation
are we

:- Doug.

Two squirrels playing on the tree
round and up and down across
this one waits for the other to catch up
that one bounds out to limb to startle
does the same one chase as yesterday?

:- Doug.

Shall we recognize that our own world is multiple, is fluid? Therefore must the same be of our friend’s . . . person?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2362

Dōgen advises:
Investigate mountains thoroughly.
To investigate is the work of mountains.
I say your friend is your mountain;
do not tell her.

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