WRECKER WITH A WINCH

Dream: Got in my old chevy van, it was raining, the brakes don’t work very well. I turned left at the intersection, there were children walking in the road getting wet. Then just as I see a man fall off a cliff, the van goes off the road. I think: “I need a wrecker with a winch.”

Getting off your natural path happens because you lose touch with your center of gravity, your natural intelligence about something specific. You were given a mission, something to accomplish, a vision and talent to develop, something to love and care for, in yourself and in the world. But you can get off your path because you don’t believe in yourself. You can fall off a cliff so that you suddenly need “a wrecker with a winch.”

You have to take your desires and attractions seriously. You have to listen to your deeper self, the self that keeps wanting something you may not think you can have.

I was in love with language and languages from an early age. My heroic scholastic efforts didn’t bear fruit and I thought I wasn’t talented or smart enough in spite of earning the best possible marks. I didn’t realize the fault was in the limitations of the method, not in my abilities. But thinking that, I turned in another direction, art.

But language does something I can’t do with visual art, at least the way I do art — it goes into ideas and all their permutations in a way that…