Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.

How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.

I'm concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there's no real wilderness left and so there's a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down.

I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.'

The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.

In a way, America's the shadow of everything I do, everywhere I go, everything I carry, no matter if I travel to the ends of the earth. And I live frequently on the spine of the continent, near the Great Divide. Then there's the side of it being the real energy center for a truly post-postmodernist poetry mind, which is also archaic, because we can still be close to the land.

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them. And it can be grand and vast and you can create a realm where you can dwell for a while. Where things are perfect symbols of themselves, no manipulation. And that connects to me to the Buddhist view. From that perspective we can wake up on the spot, be conscious of our world, think of others.