I Hear Voices
I’m waiting for the muse with a capital M. Not the one that sends me to the garden to pick beans for canning. Or the one makes me jump on the trampoline at night and watch the moon. But the one that has me scrambling for a pen and scribbling on whatever scrap of paper I can find. My handwriting to be deciphered later.
The muse of my inner life has an authority I can’t ignore. It presses me to make meaning out of life, resounds in my ear like a bell and is different than the normal mind chatter.
In Muses Like Moonlight, my poetry collection, I wrote: I think of the muse as elemental, unpredictable like the weather. I wait for the muse like I wait for a downpour during a dry spell because all of life needs rain to live.
The muse brings vital inspiration that renews me, but it isn’t normally a part of my daily conversation like the weather. As sustaining as it is, I don’t budget it in like my food bill. I don’t buy it flowers often enough.
The muse is shy and as “fickle as a well fed cat,” I once described. Sometimes it takes days of solitude to clear the way for it. Once I wrote a want-ad for the muse. Another time I wrote an essay about what inspires the muse in me: open spaces, walking without a destination, a starry sky, the ocean air, purposeful activity and time to listen.
When I feel uninspired I like write about the muse as a way to court it.
Consider this an invitation.
July 15th, 2011 9:18 pm
I like your last 2 sentences!! I am calling on the muse too…….I want her to visit Colleen as I write this. xo
July 15th, 2011 9:33 pm
It seems that mine too has seen fit to take a vacation!!
July 17th, 2011 12:27 pm
What a perfect couple of paragrapjs about ‘the muse’…..! And I love your last line—‘Consider this an invitation….’
Indeed, Indeed!
Mine is often off somewhere and patience is required by me……(lol)….I need to remember: It always does come back….! Just, sometimes, not soon enough for me. You, too?
July 17th, 2011 12:33 pm
I need the muse like my garden needs rain and its been a pretty dry summer on both counts so far.
July 17th, 2011 5:54 pm
Please court mine as well. I have been spending so much time with the camera muse that my writing muse has left town and gone on a long retreat.
July 20th, 2011 6:31 pm
But muses love getting flowers! And thistles as well. It just flourishes under any type of sustained attention. The more you read of other people’s bouquet’s from the muse, the more your own might get jealous and come to woo.
July 20th, 2011 7:32 pm
Pearl, you are so right. Often that does the trick!