What dream do you remember most vividly? What message do you think it bears?
In my most vivid recent dream I’m walking around downtown almost full-term pregnant. People I know are coming up to me, smiling, to touch the baby through my belly, and the sun is warm. What’s weirdest about the dream is that I can feel the baby moving, oh that sounds so Alien. But I can, I can feel her moving around and kicking, and I’m standing up and unlike other pregnancy dreams I’ve had in the past there is no anxiety, just this movement.
Why don’t you listen to what the universe or your mind or your body or your god whispers ever more closely to you?
I do listen! To mind and body and perhaps even, from time to time, god and universe. What does the universe sound like? Music of the spheres? An earthquake? Is the whisper close, or is the god close? I suppose it doesn’t really matter, “closely” is what matters. Sometimes its hard, with body, mind and world to be sure you are hearing anything at all other than traffic. Maybe its not about listening closely or otherwise, but more about the feeling and responding to feeling. Oh, Stein.
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?
Impossible gift? Part of me wants to say I’d give my eyes. I guess what I’m thinking is that it would be pretty amazing to let someone see through your eyes, and you through theirs. What would they think of your perspective, and what would you gain with theirs?
Describe a person you love. How would you know them without their face?
I would always know my love by his walk. I use to joke with him that he sounded like an elephant. And then the new neighbor in our duplex, she had the heavier step, and so she became the elephant, and we laughed at her together. I’d always know him by his step, and by his laugh and his smell. He smells amazing. And how he always wants to get close, and to snuggle.
How did you first know you were in love and what makes you unsure of it?
I knew I was in love when I realized that I couldn’t bear to see him go. Even just for the night. The date, any date until any time, any moment wasn’t long enough. And so I’d pull up in front of his house and we’d sit with the heat on, cause it was winter, in my sister’s jeep with the heated seats, and I just smile and smell him across the way, across the stick shift. And twice we sat so long, lights on, car going, that the cops pull up next to us to ask what was going on, to see if we were drunk teenagers. I guess they could sorta smell it too, whatever was in the air between us, cause they just smile smartly and forget to say, “Move-on soon.”
What besides love do you doubt and what makes you doubt it?
I doubt my writing. It doesn’t stop me, though. I don’t think anything could stop me. But I guess I’ve been getting rejected, and for all my fire and brimstone, it irks me, rankles me, and, indeed, causes me to doubt. And I wonder about the desire to be published, and I doubt myself and my needs then more than ever.
In what way have you betrayed or disappointed yourself or others? In what way have you been betrayed or disappointed?
I told this really, really big lie once. It was only intended to hurt, to sort of prove my, what? I don’t even know. i just dreamed it up and served it out to this person who had sort of crushed me. And I think about it sometimes still, this lie. I’ve never fixed it, told the truth. But its funny how I think about the lie more than I think about the person to whom I told it, the person who I felt had sort of destroyed me. The lie is more real than he is anymore. I wanted to tell the truth, back then, at some point, but my friend said to me, “Why does he have to get everything? Why do you want to give him everything?” So I just kept it, kept the lie.
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?
Right now I feel like my world is only as large as my desk, and my desktop mac screen. But, no, it is spring afterall and the world outside has gotten so much bigger with the warmth in the last few weeks. I feel like i shuttle between desk inside, to park outside and that is all. Oh and sometimes Park Hall, where the fluorescent lights never fail to give me the most awful of headaches. And then I’m just me inside my head and everything shrinks back. I guess my headaches and neckaches draw the line for me––when my body starts to scream out in pain from in-action I go outside. and outside is such a beautiful place these days. and, oddly, i often feel more focused in the garden or in the yard than i do within.
Why aren’t you more involved in trying to better the world of others?
I can’t barely get a hold on myself and my turmoil and triumphs. i guess that is small-mined and selfish, but i do want to go out there and make a difference, it just seems to be too much right now. I mean, i guess that is why i like teaching. cause i just get to work with one sort of control group at a time. and I get to know them and they me, and maybe if i say one thing in the course of a semester, or inspire someone else to say that one thing, that they will remember in 5 or 10 or 35 years, that’s enough influence to make me both happy and a bit scared.