I dreamt last night

about asking questions on a forum I visit regularly. It’s a women’s issues forum and I rarely ask questions there but mostly read to ascertain the anger and judgment, opinions, outlooks and ways of thinking around women’s issues. But in the dream I was asking questions. I rarely ask questions there because there is a lot of rage and resentment around the topics that regularly come up and I think it largely stems from people’s difficulty in communication. Communication seems to be a simple matter, but it’s not really as simple as it seems.

For example and to illustrate my thoughts, my partner this morning was looking through his squinted eyelids watching the sun filtering through his lashes from the window. The sun, he described, was making kaleidoscope colors and designs. As he was relating the colors dancing, I imagined a long ago scientist or mathematician deciding that he or she had to research why this happens. As a communicator, I would not necessarily try to figure out how or why it happens but explain it’s characteristics with words. But I can understand someone who feels compelled to count angles and lines and research compound reactions of light on dust particles on one’s eye lashes. I can understand the drive that a mathematician or scientist would feel. I have the same drive to communicate as the mathematician or scientist. The scientist or mathematician would have information that I do not have, information that he or she would have built up over the years, experience to build on that I do not have.

In the same way, after a lifetime of needing to communicate, I have built up over the years a way of doing things, experience to build on and a similar type of reliance, a type of faith, in the process that will lead me to the end result. And so, with my dream I know that I am in a questioning phase of my own fixation with words, ideas, inspiration, impressions and concepts. I do not have answers now but I know I’m trying to sort something out through communication with people on women’s issues, listening and asking questions. Of course a women’s issues course would be helpful but for the time being, I’m just looking for answers to questions I don’t even understand yet but I know if I just keep going, it will eventually make itself known to me (that--or I will have wasted more time--but that happens).