I wanted to start by asking you: what do you think I'm doing?

What I think you're doing with your life? Or with this project? Or during this time that you've been here? In what context?

What am I doing here?

Well, I believe you explained that you are here to try to strengthen the family bond and have some down time in between your major projects, taking advantage of that time to build upon the family unit. Is that fairly accurate?

It's not about accuracy....

You're the only one that can know what you're doing.

What does it seem like I'm doing from your perspective? How do you interpret this project?

This one today?

What I've been up to since I've been here.

I think it's a kind of regrouping, and you've been on some major escapades over the last few years and you decided you needed to figure out what you want your next move to be.

So it seems like down time?

Yeah, it seems that way. I mean I know that you're working. I don't see what you're working on, but I don't have to. I don't know what you're like when you're working on your own. I know you've been preoccupied in your room and on your computer and being alone and you don't always share it and I think that's because you are still figuring it out yourself. You have shared a lot over the last couple of months, you have shared a lot of insight about where you see yourself going, so that's all been very enlightening and comforting.

Do you feel like I'm concealing something?

No... it seems like sometimes you might be frustrated thinking that maybe I don't understand what you're saying - and that's true to some degree that I don't always understand what your mission is - but I still want to hear about it and know about it, even if I don't completely understand or respond, I still want to know what's important to you and what you're working on.

Why?

Because I care about you and I'm interested in your growth and your development and how you are affected by the world and how you effect the world.

If you don't understand it - maybe this is a bit rhetorical if we're not referring to anything specifically - but if you don't understand how do you perceive or receive what I show you or discuss with you?

I think that I do understand. I think that you don't think I understand, or maybe I don't respond the way your friends respond to things, maybe I have a different response, and you take that as a lack of understanding.

What about my reaction make you think that?

What about your reaction makes me think that you think that way?

What do you perceive in me, in my response to your response, that communicate dissatisfaction? What do you see in me that reveals my belief that you don't understand what I'm offering you?

I get it. I think that - not every time but occasionally - I've seen you cut the conversation off and pick up and leave. I think "ok I think he has told me all he wants to tell me." But that's not a criticism... it's not an issue, just an observation. I realize that you see things differently and live a little differently and have a need or a desire to have a plan for the future, and at this point in your life that's probably a good idea, once you're out of school, to know where you're going to live and how you're going to live. That doesn't seem to dominate your thought process though...

The planning? What do you think is dominating my thoughts then, if anything?

Creativity, expression, and how to get it out in the world.

What do you think creativity is?

For you or in general?

Is there a difference?

Yeah, it changes for the individual. Everyone may have a different perception of what it is.

I'm asking about your perception as an individual.

Well, I think it's taking things and making them through an expressive way, or having an appreciation for things as they are, an appreciation for nature, but wanting to express that appreciation for it in some way. For me, my appreciation for nature is to bring it indoors and arrange it in some way so that I can appreciate it on a more intimate level. For someone like you, it's taking it into your head and expressing it in a different way, through music or sculpture or some other container. That's how you express your appreciation for it.

So creativity is an expression of one's appreciation for nature?

That's just one aspect of it. I use nature as an example, but you could have an appreciation for women and want to do portraits of women and different aspects of their lives, in song or painting or sculpture.

Your medium is plants? You see that as being creative?

I like to think so. Yes I do, I think that everyone has the potential for artistic ability. Mine is much more - not mundane, but common perhaps. My expression comes out through my home and what I make of my home, the color I use and the representations I use to live with, and cooking. I like to be expressive with cooking. That's still more of a challenge for me because I don't have that gift of being able to use spices other than the way a recipe tells me to. I haven't developed that part of my creativity yet, it's still a work in progress.

How do you see cooking as being creative?

What can you do with a dish of beans to make it appetizing, to make it delicious, to make it look good? With spices and ways of serving, beans or potatoes - one of my favorites, cooking with potatoes, they have a lots of potential for expressing my creativity.

Why do you like beans so much?

I think I just have a savory craving to them - they're my craving now, more than when I was younger. Earlier in my life it was a sugar craving and somehow that turned around so that I don't really care for sweet anymore, I like the savory. I like to eat - you know that.

Doesn't everyone like to eat?

There's a difference between liking something and needing something to exist. You can just eat a bologna sandwich because you need some food, or you can create a fabulous casserole and eat it with pleasure.

Do you eat for pleasure?

Sometimes I eat because I need nourishment, but I also like to eat for pleasure.

Are the creative expressions of cooking and arranging your home also based in pleasure, or would you say that's a need?

A lot of it is pleasure. The need is having a roof over my head. I like to have four walls and a roof. I need shelter, but the pleasure comes from making it my personal space, having people come in and see who I am.

How did you develop this appreciation?

Well I think I've always had it, always had a nurturing side. I think it came from whatever spirit is within me. I can remember as a child - we used to make blanket tents and play house, and I always had to have the blanket tent set up a certain way. I've always had a desire to arrange things, making the best of whatever I have available at the time.

You inherited these traits from a spirit which resides within you?

It's in me, it's part of me, it's not all of me. You have several different spirits, and mine are those of nurturing and place - my place is important to me.

Can you tell me more about your understanding of these spirits? Does this have something to do with nature?

You get to know yourself. You are getting to know your self aren't you? You question and analyze your actions and behaviors, question why you are driven to do certain things... don't you feel that's how you get to know yourself? You analyze your behaviors and reactions and wonder "why am I doing that, why did this upset me so much, why is this so important to me?" Then you realize that it's an ongoing pattern, and that pattern is who you are. It comes from within, within my heart, within my being. Anyways, it's not a revelation of any kind that everyone is trying to get to know themselves, and that some people like themselves better than others, and others do not like who they are, but yet don't seem to be able to change who they are, to make themselves better.

What is this thing that resides inside you that describes your being?

It's not a thing. When you meditate don't you feel yourself? I feel... (tears) Just give me a minute... I feel goodness and peace and I like who I am. I like the person I am. I've told you before that there is a dark side, but it is experienced less and less as the years go on, and that's because I don't put myself in situations where that defense mechanism has to kick in as much. I think that's when it comes out, when I feel threatened in some way, as a reaction to the threat of others, but now I'm much more at peace and contented with who I am and my place in the world. Do you feel that? Do you feel an introspection when you meditate?

I feel that way constantly, obsessively. What I'm trying to figure out is where that comes from, those feelings and questions and how we articulate those questions and how we feel in relation to them, how we decide and make decisions about the self they are asking about. I'm interested in the process of the thinking through those states.

Don't you feel that when you're born you have a basic concept of being and that your experiences, your environment - some of it is nature of nurture, an old argument, but some of that comes into play. If one was raised in an abusive household, physically harmed on a regular basis, they would have a different perspective. It depends on the person, but some might take that internally and believe that they must have done something to deserve it. Others might think that they don't deserve it and refuse to take it anymore. It's interesting to see how those individual natures emerge, and depending on how you're nurtured that develops as time goes on, and the more time passes and the more experiences accumulated and the more influences encountered that help you to grow one way or another... you're constantly in a mode of "I'm going to accept this" or "I'm going to go with that" or "I'm going to reject that" or "I'm not going to subscribe to that way of thinking" or whatever. That's life, and we're all constantly doing that.

How do you decide which thoughts to subscribe to and which to reject?

I think we all have things that are important to us, so we follow the paths that align to that course.

How do they become important?

Well there is the core of your nature. Everybody has a core, and I like to think that everybody has a good core, but then when I'm out in public and I go to public places and witness how people behave I wonder how they can be so mean... I think it's good though, like a little universe inside of you, your own little universe in there, and it has all your things bouncing around and you are either positive or less... the degree of positivity in your universe influences a lot of the decisions that you make and I think that's why some people go bad and become evil or psychopathic killers and others become compassionate, giving, generous people, and I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm not ever going to be a psychopathic killer, but you know what I mean. I'm more good than evil. I don't want to hurt anybody and I don't want to be mean to anybody.

How can you tell the good from the evil?

If it's hurting anyone or anything then that's more evil than good. I think there's a lot in the world that doesn't harm. If we go walking out in these hills, that would all be good, unless you fell into a cactus patch... but there's nothing evil about any of this.

How do you know?

Because it's nature and nature can never be evil. People make things evil.

Aren't people a part of nature? Is humanity separate from nature?

Yes I think so. People can be unnatural sometimes...

Can we go back to your description of the universe? You were telling me about another universe once, one that is outside of us, a system that connects people to each other, where they come from...

I remember you took issue with my use of 'physics,' as far as us all breathing the same air and returning to the same dust, and returning back to the earth when we die, returning to the all and becoming a part of all that again. I think it's a combination of physics and biology and nature and spirit. The spirit comes from the combination of everything that's out here circulating, and it comes to you when you're born and goes into the physical, and that's your core when you start, your little universe core when you start out as a person, and through your experiences and influences it all makes you into the person you become. I don't think it's a physical thing, but it exists, just not like we see things... the trees, the grass, the rocks... it doesn't exist like that, but simultaneously with the physical world. It's another world and it's here with us now. Do you ever feel that? Do you feel that spirit, or do you take it all on a physical level, letting your brain decide if you are unhappy or not? Is it all neurons firing?

I think that we don't know, and that there's a certain truth in that not knowing, which is perhaps the only truth, and we might speak the truth by admitting that we don't know. I wouldn't say that I discount the possibility of other worlds or universes or fields of reality existing or being present alongside this one... it seems more plausible that there is than there is not, but I do not believe that - for a variety of reasons - we are able to access it or interact with it or really understand or feel it at all, and this is a kind of truth, and this is the human experience. I cannot say so confidently that "it is," but I don't have a working understanding of spirit any more than what I've glimpsed through human mythology. It seems to be a very human way of telling a quintessentially human story of who we are and where we come from and where we may go or what will happen to us beyond our physical bodies, a way of explain to each other and to ourselves our birth and life and purpose and death, locally and ultimately. In terms of my own belief, or if I believe it is something greater than my own being, I think that all of the world is made of these human stories, that physics is another kind of story, a mythological narrative in its own way, which becomes real to the extent that we keep telling it, that it informs us as we are informing it.

But I think physics has been proven, isn't that why it's called physics? Because it's been proven as a physical phenomenon that will always occur when A + B = C, that it defines physical laws, that define our biology?

Well, it's a scientific understanding of the physical universe. Now, as far as what the 'physical' is, I would offer that it changes according to what language we are using to describe it...

Physical is anything you can touch or see or feel, right?

Well... "see, touch, feel"... maybe this is more of a phenomenological description that one of physics, which is to say that what is "real" is what can be interacted with through our senses, but physics tells us that one never really touches anything, that on an atomic level all matter - which is to say both our bodies and the object we are supposedly touching - is defined by repulsion, atoms pulling away from other atoms, never actually making contact but sustaining a distance, even between all the matriculated matter of your own body. If one looks at anything close enough it would appear as mostly empty space and so we could say that we're never really touching anything, never really physically interacting or sensing with anything, except through absence, continuous repulsion. Maybe our senses are a form of self-deception, an illusion or a delusion, a hallucination that prioritizes a biological 'reliability' in the world so we can get on with the business of living. Whether we agree that physics is a reliable truth, or phenomenology is a better explanation, or some better form of understanding is debatable... there is a wide-spread belief in spirits inhabiting our world alongside of us that are able to jump into people and possess their bodies and determine their behaviors, occupy their agency, and people have killed each other because they believed they were acting in service of a greater being, or that perhaps that entity was acting through them, or that they were responsible for abolishing a demon in human form back to some other plane of reality, or that argued that they should not be held accountable to their actions because they were being willed by some other being, or force, or spirit... To get back to physics, to the extent that we understand the motion of physical matter, it's based on small snap shots, brief pictures we have taken with highly invasive instruments, requiring a biased observer. There's an understanding in science that one cannot observe any system without influencing that system, interrupting the nature we are trying to witness. So we could say that physics is real to the extent that we have made it real, allow it to explain what is real, that this is a decision and a construction. Is it creative? Is it truth? I don't know, but I believe the only truth is that we don't know, and that inspires me to ask so many questions.

You're right, we don't know for sure, and what becomes challenging is that people insist that they do know, but they don't really know either, but when they become so adamant that they do know it becomes unbearable, I can't even talk to them anymore.

You strike me as being a very intuitive person...

I have a lot of empathy. I can feel what others are possibly feeling, but I've been wrong, because some people are a lot more hardcore.

You mean their core is hard?

Exactly. So I can feel when people feel badly and I try to offer them some comfort, and they can retaliate and say "I don't care, I don't care about that, that doesn't mean anything to me." Then I'm shocked that they felt that way about it, whatever the situation. And I think "oh ok that didn't bother you? I should have."

Is that a physical feeling?

My empathy? I don't think that it's a physical thing - maybe - maybe that's what influences me when I perceive someone to be in pain or happiness, in feeling it with them.

When you're picking up a feeling from someone and feeling it yourself, how do you know that you're feeling it from that person and not yourself? How do you recognize that as a feeling in yourself? Is feeling for others or through others the same as feeling in yourself or through yourself?

It just comes up from the inside, up from the core - I'll see someone dealing with someone and all of a sudden it's consuming me. It comes up. I have my core and I'm observing something... it can be in a book or in a movie, it can be a real lived experience interacting with someone, talking one to one, and the feeling comes up. Do you get that? It's me interacting or interpreting a situation. It depends on the situation. Sometimes I can definitely put myself into another persons place, but other times I can't really but I can see that they're in pain even though it's not really affecting me.

Do you think that there's a separation between your mind and your body?

I think they are connected, because you can see when people are constantly sick also have an emotional issue occurring that they can't let go of that prevents them from healing physically. They're separate but connected, as mind-body-spirit. The spirit can definitely affect the mind, but it's not the mind. They all work together and we need to pay attention to all three to stay healthy. You can't ignore your body, can't ignore a cut because it become infected and cause serious issues. You mind is the same way, if you're constantly reading the wrong things or being with the wrong influences that can definitely effect your head and have negative consequences, so you have to eliminate that from your life. Spiritually as well, if you don't pay attention to your spirit and honor the things that are important to you then your spirit will suffer, which will make your mind and body suffer. All three need attention and none can be ignored or all will suffer. I know you believe that because I can see it, because you take care of your physical and your spiritual and your mental.

What if I told you that I don't differentiate between mind and body, that I don't have a spirit, that I in fact don't have a mind or a body but I am a unified being, that my mind is me but I can't differentiate between my self and my understanding of my self? My body is also me and I cannot differentiate between "me" and this thing that it's supposedly contained in. I don't perceive an inner state, but just a state. I don't feel my body as a mechanism that I have, but that I am this meat and I am mental. The spirit is something else altogether - in my opinion - closer to the stories we tell each other about the universe than it is something in or about me.

Your meat is your vessel right now for everything else that is going on.

"Vessel" is implying a container, filled with something...

And it is! It's definitely what gives you the ability to communicate, to create, to move around and do things. Your body is your vessel and if you don't take care of it you're not going to be able to do anything.

How did you come to this understanding?

Over time and experience, gaining knowledge, reading, talking, listening, observing.

Would you say that your perspective is informed by being a woman?

No, I don't think so. It's unique to me, but I don't feel feminine. For instance, I have a good friend and in our relationship I am more of a male and she is more of a female... I don't feel feminine or girly, but I recognize I am a woman through my biological functions, ability to give birth, but other than that I'm still just a human and the only thing unique between men and women are in these biological differences. I've known a lot of men who are compassionate, intuitive, sensitive, but were still men. I've also known women who were much less compassionate, more hardcore, even violent... so I don't think it matters what gender you are, you could have those characteristics regardless of your genitalia. We have a difference in biology and the hormonal differences are all individual, they can be controlled and balanced - if one wants that. I feel like this isn't really the answer you were hoping for...

Why? What kind of answer do you think I wanted?

I feel like you weren't satisfied with that. I get that feeling from you.

What does it feel like?

Like that's not what you wanted to hear, but what you wanted I'm not sure. I'm curious what you might have thought I was going to answer because you didn't seem pleased. I want this to be a two-way conversation, but sometimes it seems like you're disappointed with my responses or maybe you don't really like them.

Well, I can tell you that I don't feel that way and it seems like from my perspective that feeling may be coming from you.

That's very possible.

I'm a separate person from you and you are reading something in me with your physical senses, or maybe some extra-sensorial manner, but you are perceiving something and I'm telling you that I'm not generating that, at least not consciously, not with intention, not in my immediate awareness. You're telling me I seem disappointed but I don't feel disappointment, I don't think that's happening, but you picked up on something, so what do you think is more reliable? The thing that you felt or are feeling from me, or what I'm telling you about how I feel?

I think that the thing I felt was relevant, but the fact that you are telling me that it wasn't what you were feeling allows me to let that go. I still have a thought that you had expected a different answer from me. It doesn't change the fact of what I felt.

There's a reality which you are active in making, through this intuition, through this empathy, and then there's this other reality that I'm perceiving through my own perspective, and we are relating and interacting, something is passing between us, so what I'm asking is which or where would you call it "reality?" Is it in what you feel, an inner state...

That's my reality, and your reality was different. We don't necessarily have to share the same reality, obviously not.

How do we understand each other while inhabiting these different realities? If I'm in one dimension of existence and you are in another and we are screaming across this void...

We just talk to each other and I say "I thought this" and you say "well mine wasn't that" and I say "ok that's fine."

Do you think reality is based in language, or in our ability to communicate?

Some of it, just a part of it. Some is absolutely intuitive.

Can we talk about intuition and your feelings? Through this language can we articulate ourselves, articulate our realities, and come to understand them? If it's based in language it would seem to be that becoming more articulate, more response-able to express, would allow for a higher fidelity of speaking and understanding in each other, like a sharper image on a screen. Maybe there's another part of it that is based in feelings or intuitions that are difficult to describe, but do you think that those more invisible, foggy realms of emotion or intuition or whatever you may call it, is it useful or necessary or even interesting to apply language to it? Should we be trying to articulate that more clearly? Or is that an impossible project?

I don't think it's impossible. I think it's something people do on an ongoing basis, when they have the time, when they spend time together. That's why they spend time together, so they can communicate what they're feeling and what they're feeling. We don't always have that luxury because we live apart from each other - you and I - the luxury of communication.

Communication is a luxury? It's not necessary?

For certain things, to get to know each other it's necessary, but in our case it's a luxury because we don't often get to do it, yet I still feel that we know each other.

How do you understand this understanding, this process of making meaning for ourselves or through each other? As people, as humans, as individuals, personally and generally... how do we dispense meaning to the things in our life? What is your understanding of that, how do you do it? Where does it come from? Does everything have meaning or is there a void that is meaningless?

Not everything has meaning. Some things are meaningless... I can't think of what they are right now, but a lot of things, most things, have some kind of a meaning, and when we prioritize that it all comes into play, physically and spiritually and the way the collide and make you feel, it gives the meaning... (tears) It makes me emotional... because I question myself sometimes, why things that seem to have meaning for so many other people don't have meaning for me, or as much meaning for me, and over the past couple of years I've been thinking about that a lot. Why am I not affected by these things? Births and deaths and acquisitions and separations, just different things that people seem to react so vehemently towards, I don't, and I wonder if that's a character flaw, but it seems like something that has developed recently because I can remember feeling very much meaning for various things. It's funny how things can affect you. For instance, when David Bowie died I cried for three days. Why? I didn't even know the man, but other people that I have known, I didn't cry when they died. Why is that? Why does that happen?

What happens when you're crying? Does crying have meaning?

That's a good question. It has different meanings. There are cries of sadness and cries of happiness, cries of mourning, mourning the loss of something or someone, cries of frustration... This is a frightening cry. Sometimes you find out things about yourself that you didn't really want to know, I mean, that you want to know but also wish that you didn't know, and I don't want to think of myself as a cold hearted person, but I know that there is that side of me, that I can turn off and become stoic, untouched, when I make a concerted effort to say "I am not going to be affected by that." I hope I don't choose that behavior incorrectly - that's the wrong word - I mean without compassion. I hope I am not doing that in a spiteful or mean way.

Do you have control of your emotions, of what you will be affected by, or what you will not?

That sounds cold hearted. I don't want to be without heart. I've been doing some self analysis on this very topic recently and I haven't quite figured out what it's all about, but it's a kind of revelation for me to realize that I can be a little bit hard-hearted.

How do you conduct your self analysis?

When I meditate, and introspect, and talk to myself. I'm curious about what comes up so I'll read articles written by someone who has studied those states in people.

Is the meditation and speaking to yourself two separate things?

Yes.

So it's a rational introspection, more than emotional?

Yes.

You're analyzing your emotions with reason?

Yes definitely.

Would you say that you could analyze your body with your mind? That your feelings or emotions are rooted in your senses, in your physical meat, or that your reasonable or rational mind consists of some learned knowledge that's not so physical? Maybe that there's a difference between the directly felt knowledge of the body and the learned knowledge of the mind? When you're choosing to be more aware of your emotion or feeling, could you say you are choosing your body instrument, and when you are prioritizing ideas of your self or a rational introspection, at these moments you are choosing your mental or cerebral instrument? Is it a rational process of deciding what you are feeling or not feeling, letting yourself feel or not, a kind of cerebral control or observation over the flow of feeling?

Yeah... I think the body is the last thing to come into play. The mind and the spirit are the first interactions in any given situation, then depending on what is decided or deciphered on that level will determine how the body reacts. The body only reacts to what the mind or spirit allows it to, and that's the same with just about everything, I think.

Is meaning an emotional state or a rational state?

I think it depends on what it is we are giving meaning to. If the house burned down tomorrow I would feel bad but I wouldn't be devastated. If something to happen to you or Jeff, that would definitely devastate me... (tears) So physical things, material things, don't have nearly as much meaning to me as relationships. Although I do like my things, I do like my books and I do like my plants, and I have some stupid little things in my drawers that mean something to me, but mostly because they remind me of something that I enjoyed, and again, if they disappeared tomorrow I wouldn't feel bad. "That thing is gone, that's too bad, that was fun." Relationships have the most meaning.

These things seems to supplement your memory.

They supplement my memory, but my memories will always be with me, and these things just spark it.

Do you think you put something into these things, that they contain some aspect of you, some feeling maybe, like the way they spark the memories that are always in you?

Only as far as the memory they invoke, for instance if there was a spoon of mine and every time you used it you thought "oh this is my moms spoon" (tears)...

Does that make you cry?

Yeah.

It's a rhetorical spoon right? What about thinking about that spoon - which isn't physical, isn't here - sparked a powerful feeling in you now?

I don't know, just thinking about you having something that would give you a fond memory of me... Ok that's enough of this, enough crying. I didn't intend for that to happen. Anyways, this was a good talk and I wish we could do this more often. Next time I'm gonna ask you questions.