conversation (n.) mid-14c., “place where one lives or dwells,” also “general course of actions or habits, manner of conducting oneself in the world,” both senses now obsolete; from Old French conversacion “behaviour, life, way of life, monastic life” 

In the farmhouse all those years ago, I stumbled into conversational intimacy with a stranger and felt the whole course of my life pivot in the encounter.*
David Whyte

Conversations are becoming endangered –
Texts and voicemails and tweets are pushing them
to the edges of our lives,
Small screens in buggies cause us
to wonder where the skills will be learned.

We are losing the
“I had no idea we were going to
talk about this when we began” for
“I’ll tell you what I think (and
I’m not interested in what you think)” –
At-ness not with-ness.

I have a sense, though, that
conversation will make a comeback because
we are human, and
this is where we desire to live most of all:
I’ve found that every want
can be distilled down into one:
connection.**

(Dreamwhispering is,
Firstly and foremostly
a journey of conversations.)

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**Katherine Morgan Schafner’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control.

When you’re present, you don’t have control, and you don’t care. When you’re connected to your power, you don’t need control. … What matters is that you understand that being open is powerful.*
Katherine Morgan Schafler

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.**
Viktor Frankl

The fourth elemental truth^ states
You are not in control,
And yet this does not mean that you are not
powerful;
Learning for life,
The endless openness to more,
Without and within, is about
learning to be powerful –
Openness provides choice and
choice is powerful:
Education is personal or it is nothing.^^

Surely we ought to know our minds?,
Doesn’t openness suggest weakness?

We learn to be our own person,
Our true person, and using the
whole of life rather than some smaller part
to make this so:
A creative person.
initiating, enacting.
Using their lifetime to find
their original face,
to awaken their own voice,
beyond all learning, habit, thought.
When the human community finally knows itself,
it will discover that it lives at the centre.
People will be artists in their life and labour.*^

*Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
**Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
^Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return;
^^Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds;
*^M. C. Richards’ Centering; I have replaced Mary Richards’ use of the masculine pronoun to highlight this is for everyone.

It is the nature of the earth and our dust to be in constant contact with the impulse of life. If we listen, we will hear the continuous tread of love, moving up our limbs like sap, like an electric current impelling is to “stir and step out.”*
M. C. Richards

Art is the human act of doing something that might not work and causing change to happen. Work that matters. For people who care. Not for applause, not for money. But because we can.**
Seth Godin

When it comes to what to ask,
Which door to knock on,
Where to begin looking,
What is already inside of us will guide us.

The inside of you is akin to the warehouse
pictured at the close of
Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark.

What you have to ask,
The doors you will knock,
The places you look
will make the kind of difference that
we need.

Notice it and focus it:
How much of the beauty of
our own lives is about
the beauty of being alive?
How much of it is
conscious and intentional?
That is the big question.^

*M. C. Richards’ Centering;
**Seth Godin’s The Practice;
^Joseph Campbell from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.

Each of us is a voyager. This is what the universe invites us to be in our lives and relationships, because the universe keeps changing, unfolding, evolving.*
Philip Newell

When we get to where we’re going … perhaps we should stop. Unless the going was the point.**
Seth Godin

*Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
**Seth Godin’s blog: When we get to where we’re going.

This is the song of significance. This is what motivates people to do the work that can’t be automated, mechanised, or outsourced. And this is the song that humans yearn to sing together.*
Seth Godin

For I know no trouble in life which does not stand as a counterpoint to some positive capacity.**
M. C. Richards

Significance grows in the soil of humility;
If we embrace who we are –
Not grasping for more than we are or
less than we are –
Then we find freedom in who we are and:
Innovation is the child of freedom and
the parent of prosperity.^

Which brings us to another reality:
Significance grows towards need;
What we love to do will
change someone’s life for the better.

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
M. C. Richards’s Centering;
^Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works.

And so it’s worth asking: what actions – what acts of generosity or car for the world, what ambitious schemes for investments in the distant future – might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you would come to terms with never seeing the results?*
Oliver Burkeman

If you’ve signed yup for way finding, forgive yourself if it takes a little (or a lot) longer. Because if we knew the right answer we’ll have found it already. That’s the hard part.**
Seth Godin

… can you help?

I may need to pass this on to you,
If time runs out;
Not to do it the exact same way,
but somehow,
In your way,
To keep making the gift available
to whoever knows it is for them.

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**Seth Godin’s blog: The wayfinding premium.

Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing, and full seeing seems to take most of your lifetime, with a huge leap in your final years.*
Richard Rohr

The world is alive, generous, and waiting patiently for us to figure it out.**
Tom de Blassos

We were told by our parents,
“You look with your eyes, not with your hands,”
But that isn’t true –
There are many ways of looking:
Our looking develops our talents,
And our talents grow our looking.

We are made for looking;
Sometimes we get our looking wrong,
But sometimes we get it very right, and
we want to sing a song of joy –
And when we do, it’s as though the world joins in.

I determine never to stop looking and
you’ve got the look, too.

*Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward;
**Claudia Bedrick and Maria Popova’s A Velocity of Being.

Sometimes I feel caught between two opposing selves — the “false self” imposed by society and what I would call my “true self.” How often we confuse the two and assume society’s mould to be our true self. … I saw that the entity I had taken to be “me” was really a fabrication. My true nature, I realized, was much more real, both uglier and more beautiful than I could have imagined.*
Thich Nhat Hanh

When Eve saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her Adam, who was with her, and he ate.**

Alas, there are no shortcuts to wisdom;
Knowledge remains only that
until we begin to live with or in spite of it.

Seeking to know ourselves is the
beginning of our path to wisdom:
We will not enjoy all that we discover about ourselves, for sure –
There will be some enjoyable surprises, too;
If we try to begin somewhere else,
This is where we’ll be led back to:
It’s the human condition.
We call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens
… which means”to taste” or “to know.”
The species that knows and knows that it knows.
And noe maybe we need to live ourselves into
owning that name
by cultivating awareness
and awareness of awareness itself
and let that be in some sense the guide
as to what we’re going to invest in … .^

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: How the Great Zen Master and Peace Activist Thich Nhat Hanh Found Himself and Lost His Self in a Library Epiphany;
**Genesis 3:6;
^Jon Kabat-Zinn from Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise.

Talent is cheap – you have to be obsessed, otherwise, you are going to give up.*
John Baldessari

I found myself telling him … that I felt stopped at a crossroads, looking for direction, unsure of my next steps. I told him I was beginning to feel a few icy tendrils of cynicism around what work might actually mean to most of the adult world, and with a long work life still ahead of me, I wanted to know what it took to find a life and a work such as he had found, a work into which you could really put your heart and soul.**
David Whyte

If Richard Sennett is even half-right^ about how
the first industrial revolution took away people’s skilful hands, and
the second industrial revolution incarnated in the computer
took away our skilful minds,
The AI will only compound our forfeitures.

We are meaning-making creatures, and a part of this
is meaningful work to shape our days with purpose.

There’s never been a more critical time –
How often have these words been spoken through history? –
To identify our talents in which a deep passion resides,
To notice what we are doing when we are feeling highly energised,
To inscribe these things within our values,
To stop waiting for someone else to dictate our story and
to pen our own.

*Austin Kleon’s blog: You have to be obsessed;
**David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
^Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.

To know yourself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.*
Brother Dave

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.**
Jesus of Nazareth

Who is the most humble person in the world?

No-one knows, but they must be having
a whale of a time,
The grandest of adventures.

I come to this place at the beginning of the day
to calm and quiet my soul,
To meet with larger thoughts from
greater lives –
Not to become more like them or
do what they do,
But to become more who I am
and do what I must do:
Sooner or later we must distinguish between
what we are not and what we are.
We must accept the fact that we are not
what we would like to be.
We must cast of our false, exterior self
like the cheap and shiny garment it is … .
We must find our real self,
in all its elemental poverty,
but also in it great and
very simple dignity … .*

*Ian Morgan Cron’s The Road Back to You;
**Matthew 5:5;
^Thomas Merton from Ian Morgan Cron’s The Road Back to You.