What dream do you remember most vividly? What message do you think it bears?
I’m kissing the boy I thought of as the love of my life until I met the actual love of my life. There’s a small stone in my mouth and I don’t want him to know it’s there. Because if you are going to keep a secret there’s a lot of work ahead of you, and people will find out anyway, sooner or later.
Why don’t you listen to what the universe or your mind or your body or your god whispers ever more closely to you?
For one thing, I think they whisper differently—I don’t feel a unity of all those things you said. So sometimes the whispers conflict. But maybe the conflict is actually what I should be thinking about? I think about “should” a lot. Maybe I don’t like being told what to do, even gently. Maybe what I should be paying attention to is that I assumed they were telling me what to do. Maybe they’re just giving me some information. I like information.
If you could, what gift that is impossible for you to give would you offer and to whom? Why this specific gift to this specific person or persons?
I would give my beloved an indelible sense that he exists and deserves to exist and has the power to make things, including changes. Nothing would be able to take this sense away. I would give it to him because he doesn’t have it.
Describe a person you love. How would you know them without their face?
This question makes me think that the person in question is dead or hiding from me. I don’t want to answer it.
How did you first know you were in love and what makes you unsure of it?
This question has a bunch of answers, because the first person I was in love “with”, I was and he wasn’t, but in is definitely the right word. I was in. Boy, was I in. I couldn’t see out. (This is the person in the dream.) It was a pretty standard and stupid and self-fulfilling feeling—I was ecstatic when he was nice to me and miserable when he dismissed me, which was most of the time—and I think I recognized it as love because he had so much power over the way I felt and feeling good was part of that (if it wasn’t, I would just have hated him, I hope). What made me unsure of it—and eventually abandon it—was realizing that he treated every other woman approximately his age that he knew more than slightly exactly the way he treated me. He was special to me, and I wasn’t special to him. Eventually I let myself see that doubt and made a command decision.
There are a few sub-answers about the person I’m in love with now (with and in) but here’s the moment that stands out most clearly and feels the most real: we had spent the day together in our apartment—maybe it had been snowing or something? don’t remember—we were already married, I know that—and he said, “You’re the only person I can imagine spending the entire day with and enjoying the entire day,” and I realized that the same was true for me, only the other way, of course.
I never have been unsure of it until this winter. It felt like I was looking into a wastebasket.
What besides love do you doubt and what makes you doubt it?
I doubt that the help I give to others actually reaches them in a way that they can use. I doubt that I’m putting my energies, my focus, in the “right” place. I doubt my ability to meet a severe crisis or loss—I’ve never had to deal with a really bad one. So I doubt myself, mostly, I guess.
In what way have you betrayed or disappointed yourself or others? In what way have you been betrayed or disappointed?
The ways in which I betray or disappoint others constantly—by not doing enough, by doing the wrong thing—are constantly on my mind. I betray people who have less than me by not giving up almost everything I have. I betray my beloved by talking when I should be listening, after promising to listen. I betray the possibly better world when I don’t give time to bring the actual world closer to it.
I’ve been betrayed and disappointed by silence and perfection.
What are the parameters of your small world? How do you decide where to draw the line, where to focus your energies, what to give your attention and time to? What, if anything, do you do to enlarge it? If nothing, why not?
I restrict my world to what I do well. Sometimes I feel the walls hardening.
Why aren’t you more involved in trying to better the world of others?
Weakness. Fear.