Although many nurses have agreed in principle about the importance of this work, they also have expressed the feelings of frustration and discouragement attending it. There are real difficulties involved in attempting to describe something so real yet so nebulous as "the between." The descriptions must be derived from our own real nursing experiences. This means that we must develop habits of conscious awareness of experience, of recall, and of reflection. Then we must struggle with our language finding the words in our physically and technologically oriented vocabularies, perhaps even creating terms, to convey the substance and flavor of the experience of intersubjectivity. Furthermore, description of the intersubjective quality of nursing is difficult because of its peculiar pervasiveness. Whether it is consciously recognized or not, it is part of every nursing transaction. However, to consider and explore intersubjectivity solely as a component or constituent of nursing, even a necessarily inherent or an essential one, would be to see it out of true perspective. The "between" is more than a factor or facet of nursing; it is the basic relation in which and through which nursing can occur. So the question remains. How can our experiences, our angular views, our glimpses of this foundation, this necessary means of nursing, be conceptualized and shared? Once while reflecting on the nature of nursing against a background of notions about intersubjectivity drawn from experience and literature and testing them against my own real life experiences of nursing, I suddenly saw that _nursing itself is a particular form of human dialogue_. This insight occurred to me with clarity, conviction, and all the force of a brand new idea. It was so obvious, so distinct, so simple, so clearly a central intuition that could illuminate the phenomenon of nursing from within. I experienced the idea as fresh and excitingly full of promise. Yet, when I said it out loud, "Nursing is dialogue," the words seemed too meager to convey the true meaning of the idea and its real significance. There was, furthermore, an annoying shadow of familiarity lurking about it. It was almost as if I had expressed something similar previously. At first, I hesitated to share this insight with others for fear they would extinguish it by saying, "of course, everyone knows that," or "I've heard you say something like that before." Still, I experienced it as an idea I _had_ to express. Moved by the pressure of feelings of responsibility and desire to share, in 1973 I wrote a paper, "The Dialogue Called Nursing." {23}