I’ve felt frustrated lately; I want to accomplish things that don’t seem to come fast enough. I want things to happen that…haven’t. I talk with people who I want to respond in a certain way that…don’t. I’ve felt this building feeling of stressed impatience. And so, last night I watched a french swashbuckling movie, in which a swordmaster, instructing his students said:

Fencing is a conversation between arms.

My ears perked up, and I came back to myself a little bit.

This feeling of conversation – and I do mean “feeling”, like the feelings of softness, or hardness, or a swaying motion, or tension, or relaxed calm, for me “conversation” describes a real feeling – carries such an enlivening power.

I can sense back-and-forth in there, an exchange, but even more so – a sensitivity. What you say, I allow it to change me. And what I say, you allow it to change you. I feel interested and open, as do you. When aggression, or a loss of sensitivity, or a loss of generosity, enters the picture, the conversation transforms to discussion, or a debate, or even an argument.

This reminds me of Martín Prechtel’s discrimination between courtship and seduction – one has no agenda except experiencing a relationship, the other has a strongly felt agenda.

How many conversations happen in political life nowadays? I see none. Zero. They’ve completely left.

And therefore, how many politicians that I know of, knowing their current behavior, would I freely allow in my living room? Maybe 1. Probably none.

But what about me? Have I kept close to this commitment of conversation?

I begin to go down the list of everything in my life – did I make that a conversation? Did I make this a conversation? I’m hearing a lot of “no’s” in response.

This reminds me of becoming traditional. I keep needing to come back to the world as a conversation, because I’m never done with the conversation, and the human-made modern landscape contains a lot of well-crafted distraction from it. Conversations don’t increase profits, I suppose.

Everything honest feels like a conversation. Why “honest”? I don’t mean a valuation of “good” or “bad”, but I suppose I mean, with full awareness, perceiving the other’s personhood, with no hidden agendas, no deflection of responsibility. Or, in any case, to the extent that a humble adult can do such a thing nowadays.

I bless your conversations, all of you.

You may not be aware of a major new project I’m working on; the non-profit Language Hunters organization.

This holiday season we’re fundraising on kickstarter to complete our Irish Language Hunt project – a series of language game videos that simultaneously documents and teaches the endangered Irish language.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/242604490/irish-language-hunt

By doing this we’re working on a model usable by anyone working in language revitalization; the ability to rapidly learn, teach, and document, via video and audio, the languages that are the soul of our families, communties, and identities. The words and songs that weave our lives into wholeness.

This holiday season please support this ground-breaking work we’re doing.