In ’96 and ’97, I did full-length interviews for New Dimensions Radio: “Living Deeply and Mindfully” with Mark Walstrom and “Beyond Illness” with Michael Toms. “Beyond Illness” was cited as one of the best-selling New Dimensions interviews of 1997. Please visit New Dimensions for audiotapes of those interviews.

The following is an excerpt from an interview I did with David Bradt, which appeared in its entirety in The Plum Review (Fall 1996, Issue 10).

DB: You’ve been described as a Romantic. Is that a label you are comfortable with?

MN: Yes, but not entirely. It’s like defining the sea by its surface. Romantic is a term that’s been badgered and diminished through the years. Today it’s linked with a sappy outlook that is fueled by unwarranted optimism and sentimentality. In fact, it has always, at its best, been an outlook on the world that assumes there’s something larger than the individual, and all this energy surrounding such a view arises from the belief in interconnectedness and the experience of wholeness. I am a Romantic in that I believe feelings are the threshold of the spirit. I also believe deeply in the act of expressing, that it helps one move toward being complete and whole. Perceiving, feeling, thinking, and expressing are parts of a process that for me are tantamount to inhaling and exhaling. They are essential to being alive.

DB: Do you believe in the notion of intuition?

MN: Very much so. My sense is that reason is one tool of many and is often an intermediary for a quicker, deeper, more elusive facility. It’s the difference between ladder thinking and constellation thinking. I feel things more quickly and more deeply than I understand them. I understand things more quickly and deeply than I can speak them. I speak things more quickly and deeply than I can write them. One of the keys to being prolific, and I am fairly prolific, was giving up the notion that I had to understand what I was doing before I could put it down. Since that time my writing has become an ongoing curriculum, because I no longer record what I understand but explore what I feel. I write because I have questions, and often the writing leads to more questions and not answers. But in the process of expressing, something happens that’s valuable to me in the act of living. This touches on my feeling about readers. I want to connect, but I don’t think of a reader at all when I write. Instead, I try to visit the common center that we all share. The result, if blessed, is that in the same way that flames give off heat, I believe that if my expressive search is clear enough and authentic enough, chances are the heat of that fire will warm others.

DB: Is intuition Divinely inspired?

MN: Yes, but I want to enlarge Divine to include the Taoist notion that the world is informed by an elusive and incomprehensible yet all-powerful current or life-force, whether we call it God or something else. Lao Tzu says, find the current and things will open up. It’s like water running over a rock. The act of living produces oxidation, tarnish, moss on the rock. The act of feeling and perceiving and expressing, like water running over it, cleans it off. When the rock that is me is clean, then I’m most open to the current.

Intuition is getting out of the way. The mind tries to measure, weigh and discern things that are beyond its capacity to measure, weigh, and discern, so there are times when we have to suspend those activities. In order to eat we have to chew our food to make it small enough to digest, but once that’s done, it in no way resembles what we took in. The challenge is not to make everything we take in—spiritually, emotionally, mentally—assume our shape to enter us. But for us to find ways to open up so we can take in things that are not our shape and therefore be affected by them.

DB: Let me ask you about your work habits. Do you write on a regular basis or when inspiration comes?

MN: My work habits have changed. Early on, I was driven. I’m not driven anymore, which has a lot to do with my experience with cancer. I’m more drawn to things now. Early on, I did nothing but work; I was a work-a-holic. Rather than finding time to write, I had to find time to live. My life is more integrated now. I’ve learned to slow down, to allow myself to actively care for things, to bear witness. When I made this shift, I thought my energy would be gone, but it hasn’t changed at all. In fact, I’m probably more productive now. I tend to work in the morning mostly.

There’s also been a change in the terrain of what I write about and how I go about that, a change precipitated during my cancer journey. Early on, I had a spinal tap, and it forced me to be still for six hours, or I would be in pain. I was on the couch, looking up at a tree outside my window and I realized—in a visitation—that if I were to live, I would have to write directly about life, and God, and the Universe, and living, and what-is, without a plot. Rather than contrive to bring things alive which are already alive, what if I bring myself to life and take the risk to keep myself open so I can see what plot is there?

DB: Did you make a conscious decision to be a poet? Was there some kind of epiphany?

MN: There was, but I didn’t make a conscious decision. I started writing in high school. I’m not sure why. Soon after, I met my first love, After two intense years, she dumped me. I was devastated, of course. At the time, though I was involved in a number of groups, I didn’t have any close friends. So I started, through writing, to talk to myself, to befriend myself, and it turned out to be healing. Once better, I realized I liked writing; it was healthy; it felt good.

In college I couldn’t write creatively in the English department. This was before the burgeoning of creative writing programs. But a Theater professor, Doc Palmer, took me under his wing, and told me if I became a Theater Major he would take care of me. So I started writing plays; that was part of the deal. I’d sign up for his courses, but he’d give me different assignments. I had to partake of every aspect of theater. He wanted the experience to inform my writing. And it has stayed with me. Inherent in all my writing is the theater principle—show don’t tell—and I think my writing is better for it.

But I did have a moment, an epiphany. I was coming off the top of a hill—in Cortland, New York—toward the encircling town below, and a wind rushed the back of my head and off my cheeks into the space before me. I stopped and watched it gust across the valley, watched as the same clear wind swept through the trees on the distant hill. Somehow, in an illogical way, at that moment I knew I was a poet. I think I understood the reach.