So, here we are in Japan. Far away from the known world. A perfect place to let my mind go free. Surely you’re not surprised to find yourself living in a small hotel room with a mad woman -- you cultivated her carefully. Working with a seed nearly dead from years of living under fluorescent lights, you provided the red hot light of your own madness, knowing that it was imperative for me to match any shade offered. Now, you are a working man, and I am left to burn alone. Each day, I stare into the mirror, knowing I must love the mad woman, or she will destroy me. I lay on the small bed, close my eyes, and deconstruct my mind, knowing I must put it back together before you arrive so you don't find me in pieces. It’s not easy. The pieces keep multiplying and getting smaller. They’ve got jagged edges. They no longer fit into a coherent whole.

I miss my friends back home, but they can’t see me as you do. They perceive me as normal, slightly eccentric, but fun. When they've had enough, or get too scared, they disappear, then come back when they're ready for another escape from their mundane world.

I think back to the day I was talking freely like this to my father. He said my words were enough to have me locked up. Locked up for what? Saying that the consensus world is not the only option. That it’s not my choice. Can you imagine the trial for that?

A permanent transformation is taking place. I'm frightened, sometimes, by the instability of a world collapsing with the disintegration of my mind. Will I emerge with anything in tact? I, like the Hopi, am entering the cycle of the fourth world, and like the world outside me, I am full of war and natural catastrophes. Full of a premonition that something important is about to happen. Will I survive? Or will I be pulled down into the chaos to begin again as a protozoa, all movement and sensation without thought, directed only by an urgency to survive?

As you know, I have dreams of being a god, where my mind comes into its full potential and the world is constructed out of sheer imagination and wisdom. Where there is none of the drudgery of building brick-by-brick, where form gravitates towards an idea and emerges as solid as any tree. The problem is, matter constructed out of the molecules of the mind are subject to collapse. Gravity cannot hold in a world not governed by natural laws. It is a place where emotion reigns, a dangerous place for someone who has not taken power over fear. For someone who has not learned to love her own madness. If I could learn to walk there with confidence, I could show you things you’ve never imagined possible. What else have I to offer the world. I have the blood of the shaman in my veins. Why then is it so slow to reveal itself? I am impatient at how long it takes to learn, at how easily I am sidetracked by the hard surfaces I find around me, the illusion of value in making money, getting a degree, making contact with those life forms that are the product of some other god's creation. And, how shall I escape to freedom when the very language I use belongs to someone else and is predetermined to describe the world as it was given to me at birth?

I am in need of a new dimension, unexplored territory, a good case of amnesia. I have a propensity for creation and cannot bear duplication. Strange. I reject the life of the protozoa for myself and yet describe a state very close to that as an ideal. As a beginning. What I need is a break through where the knowledge of the world is retained, but the vision changed -- a shift in perception, or rather, a prism of perception, where all possibilities can be seen at once. I myself am the unexplored territory, but my mind is too full of old recollections held together by a need to present the world a face it can accept. I cannot imagine myself an old crazy woman alone in a cave, which is necessary for this kind of work. I cannot imagine myself surviving without someone to love me, to call me back into the light of day, to make me eat, and wash myself. I wonder if you are strong enough, and see enough value in me, to give such energy and patience. But then you are in need of the same from me.

There are times when I wonder if I am to be a sacrifice to your mind’s journey. That cannot be. You have seen me disappear, just as you have disappeared, missing from the world for long periods of time. Trust is critical, but so hard to summon at such times. We must construct ourselves carefully, if we are to survive the worst conditions. So precarious. So easily transformed into absurdity. Can two floating minds exist together? Can one survive such a journey without another who has been there and knows the way back. We are intelligent, but whether that is an asset or the seed of destruction I cannot say.