Fifty-three nurses have been involved in this course. Interest, appreciation, wonderment, effort, and investment characteristically depict their response. They convey that the humanistic nursing practice theory reflects what nursing means to them. Their hungry approach to the suggested readings has both surprised and pleased us. Our amazement persists over the participants' ability to concentratedly discuss abstract theory and concrete nursing practice for weekly day-long sessions over six-to nine-month periods. Presently requests to participate in the next humanistic nursing course are mounting from nurses both within and outside the Northport complex. The course, the theory, and this book are the fruits of our individual and collaborative efforts. While sharing seminar responsibility for graduate students in 1960, we began to dialogically and -dialectically struggle with professional and /clinical nursing issues. Discussing and searchingly questioning ourselves and our students became a value. Through conveying, struggling for clarification, openness to honest argument, we grew in our awareness that each was moved beyond her beginning thoughts. Through reflection we have come to view, describe, and distinguish our dialogues as struggles with, and not against, others' ideas. Differences in response are valued for what they can tell us of our chosen area-nursing. So dialectical dialogue has gradually become our predominant teaching method. We convey our ideas, are open to others' questions, struggle to clarify and really communicate, and question ourselves, and others. In the process of the humanistic nursing course, using this methodology, which is deliberate and, yet, natural and authentic for us, we and our professional nursing staff students have learned and become more human, more questioning, more clinical, and just, more. We value our moreness. Appreciating and valuing the effects of our actualizing selves as human beings, we must attest to our existential modes of nurse being; our inner mandate is: share. Hence, Humanistic Nursing has come into being. To find the meaning of nursing we have returned "to the thing itself," to the phenomenon of nursing as it occurs in the everyday world. Our reflections on nursing as a lived experience flowed into the realm of metanursing. Obviously, these thoughts are only a beginning. They are offered in the hope of stimulating response and further development. Dialogue may be difficult at first because humanistic nursing represents one of our discipline's less articulated streams. Yet, it is a stream traceable to nursing's foundation and, as such, is related to nursing's artistic, scientific, and technological currents. It is not being, cannot be, developed in opposition to them.