As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

Various random experiments, cut-ups, fold-ins, juxtapositions, timed writings of other kinds, the "objects assignment" which involves dream, adventure, ancestry. Writing outside, writing on moving vehicles. Looking at paintings in the grand museums of the world in a proscribed way.Little strategies to keep the lalita - play or dance - going. Sometimes it's lonely you know, just you and your own imagination.

World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There's a kind of wakeup call.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.

I had a student some years ago whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project. I had a student who had to escape this very intense, born-again fundamentalist Christian background that was very much like a cult and of course they struggle to get to Naropa. And they have cut themselves off. They don't look back.