BREATHING INTO THE MUSE
The way of the muse is a tricky one, perhaps because this concept can mean so many different things to different people. Ask one artist, and he may claim that his muse has always been his wife. Ask another, and she may claim that her muse is an invisible, mysterious presence—something she feels as a visitation of grace. Ask another, and he may claim that that same invisible presence is demanding, difficult to please, and fickle. Some will say nature is their muse. Others a lover. And another may claim a particular city or vista. I suppose that the muse can be found hovering over and within each of the themes (or ways) in this book.
Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. I feel we know each other well enough by now. And if you’ve skipped to this section as your first, well, here we are. Because the concept of the muse can be so elusive, I was unsure how to begin this introduction. I stared at the blinking cursor on my Mac screen for what felt like an eternity. I started a first sentence and then stopped. And then did that again. Back to the blinking cursor. I mastered the type-and-delete dance, which any of you writers in a rut must know about. So, in creative desperation, my head took the reins and went to my trusted online dictionary to look up how our beloved Webster defined “the muse.” I copied and pasted the definition at the top of my blank screen. “Surely, this will give me something to work with,” I thought with determination. I read it over and over and had nowhere to go. Nada. No creativity sprung forth in any way, in any fashion. In fact, it all vanished. Instead, I got a slap across the back of my head, accompanied by the question, “What are you doing?!?” Hmmm. After a long pause, I smiled. Perhaps, it was the muse with her heavy hand, reminding me (not so subtly) that she is not about to be tied down or boxed up in a definition. Especially as her first introduction. I should have known.
Deep creativity asks us to look beyond the surface—to not ask only for literal definitions. Direct questions such as “What exactly do you mean by the muse?” are replaced by curiosity and exploration. We understand that a concept such as the muse is layered, nuanced, and even shifting. We become deeply inquisitive about what this concept has meant or can mean to our creative life.
One way to breathe into the muse, as we begin this section, is to imagine her as inspiration personified. This provides her with a wide field to move within. I am using the pronoun her when referring to the muse because in traditional mythology, the muses are goddesses. But if your muse has a particularly husky voice, feel free to replace her and she with him and he. Or perhaps, your muse is genderless or a mixture of the two. This is also perfect. We cannot say how the muse will appear and in what form. When we personify, we allow the figure to remain as both a part of us and apart from us. We are, then, able to begin a relationship rather than an interpretation. The heart takes the reins from the head and the need for definition falls away. We simply long to know all about her—how she comes, how she leaves, what her particular way of speaking is, what she wants of us, how she moves. We accept that we are never going to find a single concept that captures all of whom she is to everyone. In allowing the muse to remain as an Other, existing outside of our internal psyche, we disown her in a way that sets her free and gives us the freedom to begin an honest exploration and dialogue with her.
You may notice that all of the other “breathing in” sections begin with a quote by another artist or creative. It is my way of weaving another voice of wisdom into this unraveling mystery of deep creativity. But this section does not. Again, after hours (and hours! and hours!) of reading quotes on the muse, I could not settle on any one statement. Don’t get me wrong; there are many brilliant ideas written about this concept. But the problem lies in how disparate each of them is. I felt like I needed to include all of them, if I was to choose one. For example, one artist said that the muse will visit during the process of creation, not before. Therefore, we should never wait for her arrival. But scroll down on the same page, and another artist stated that we should never begin our work before invoking the muse and feeling her presence.
If breathing into the muse implies beginning a relationship with her, we must remember the age-old wisdom that states that no two relationships are the same. And in fact, according to tradition, there isn’t only one muse; in Greek mythology, there are nine. As we come to know the muse, the “what” questions—What is the muse? What do you mean by that?—are replaced by the “who” and “how” questions—Who is the muse? How does she speak or look or appear?
These who and how questions give the muse the freedom she needs to move around, shift, and inspire. And that, in turn, gives us the freedom to imagine and relate to a mysterious and magnificent presence and allow her to become an essential and intimate part of our creative life. As artists of deep creativity, we approach the muse with a playful curiosity. We put the books and concepts and definitions down and instead look and listen for where she shows up for us, knowing that this may be very different from where she shows up for the writer next to us at the café. We respect that, like all of us, she is complex and nuanced, with altering moods and appearances, and is not to be tied down. You will see this as you read each of our reflections that follow. This section on the muse is probably the most divergent of our writings, and I can imagine that the muse loves this, even revels in it. I see her smiling, whispering on the wind that inspiration is not simple or straightforward or literal or the same for any two artists. Okay, we get it.
And as I complete this rather rambling introduction, we are probably not much further along than wherever we were when we began. But I imagine all of my wriggling and wrestling has pleased her immensely. She remains free. And I—a squirming artist at her disposal. So…as we breathe into the muse, I can only leave you with this—don’t (whatever you do!) try to figure her out. Simply try to get to know her. I wish you luck, dear friend!
Amidst a Sultry City:
The Muse Is Not Only in the Meadow
Deborah
Despite all the pastoral romance of musing by a brook, the arts and sciences constellate in the minds of crowded cities—dense, complex, elegant. Cities are novels, poems, dances, theories. They are packed with ideas that tell of the transactions of the Muses. Their mother, Memory, needs cities for the sake of her daughters, that they may flourish, wildly, that they may be honored with libraries and concert halls and theatres, remembered in museums, and permitted private intercourse with poets and painters in the intimacy of conversations.
—JAMES HILLMAN, City and Soul
I’ll admit it. I adore nature.
I write often of the reprieve that seeps into my bare feet after a stroll on the sand. Occasionally, I pick up rocks and shells from the ground, feel them in my hand, and then place them down again—trinkets to remind me of my place among the natural world. I also escape to fairy-tale forests in my imagination when thoughts crowd my brain like pushy salesmen, trying to get me to buy into the ideas they are selling.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with this, and I will always be a lover of the natural world, longing for mystical mountains and endless horizons, writing of sunsets and silence, of clouds and calm. But, lately, I have been having a love affair with cities (yes, I said it). And it is a magical one.
The idea of the Muses has always fascinated me. Since their conception, no one seems to agree upon a single notion—their number, their names, which gods brought them into being, how they are portrayed. And I suggest, this is part of the Muses’ magic. They are fleeting and unreasonable. They inspire the arts, not the intellect, and so they will sneakily elude any intellectual understanding. If you are to befriend the Muses, do not expect a clear and rational road. They are many, and they appear often where we least expect it. For instance, how peculiar it is that I, a mystical lover of nature, found a muse in the city.
Perhaps I am one of the poets in the introductory quote, permitted private intercourse with the great cities I am now in a full-fledged affair with. And this is no passing romance. It is an urban and sultry exchange, one that leaves me at the end of my day, sprawled out on the couch with one shoe on, exhausted with pleasure, wondering how it is humanly possible to feel such joie de vivre.
Curious, you may ask when this love affair began. And I wish there was a single, romantic moment that I could recount to you, leaving out not a juicy detail. But I cannot. There is no single moment, no long glance that stopped me in my tracks. It has been a subtle infusion, possessing me slowly and silently over time. And so, it is not the when that is so important, but the how. How did this love affair begin? How can I possibly cheat on my beloved nature with the crowded city? How do I continue to be seduced by the muse in the city and seduce the city in return?
There are a few things about the city that have me intoxicated, and I will try to let you in on my steamy affair with her and explain how she became my muse. Perhaps this small offering will provide some hints and clues to help you realize that our muses are not only in the meadow; cities can become immensely inspiring for us artists as well.
FIRST, HER BODY
Many great and sultry love affairs begin with the physical—with one person becoming possessed by the sensual body of the other. James Hillman writes, “We love [cities] because they hold us in their bodies, excite us, exhaust us, don’t let us leave.” Indeed. How true that can be. The great body of the city is a complex place, and there is much to see and explore, should we choose to.
Deep creativity is embodied.
I’d like to tell you a story. You may think I’m mad, and perhaps I am. The Muses are known to bring a bit of lunacy.
It was a stormy Tuesday afternoon in Amsterdam. I was strolling, slowly, alongside the canal that we live on, as I do multiple times throughout my day. My steps were unusually quiet. My gaze scanned from right to left, then left to right, pausing on small, distinctive characteristics that I had never noticed before—cracks in the sidewalk, small weeds that peeked through the openings in the pavement, chipped paint on the doorways, a slight tilt in the building before me, an unusual boat shaped like a wooden shoe, a woman in a red coat.
Suddenly, a distinct feeling surfaced within me. The scene, all too familiar, felt unusually different. I felt as if I was walking inside a beautiful and complex body. A body that (or perhaps who), as Hillman said, held me, excited me, and exhausted me.
The canals and roads, as blood vessels, carried the many components from one part of the body to the other. The museums, universities, and houses transformed into the organs, each with their unique function and purpose. The people all around me became the cells—all moving along, communicating in some way as the great building blocks of the city. Everything was connected, and within me, an eerie sense of wonder arose.
The city—when we notice her as a living, breathing body who excites and exhausts us—becomes immensely alive and inspiring to us as artists. We feel, suddenly, as if we have been granted permission to walk inside of someone. And to do so with haste and a particular agenda feels inconceivable, even insulting. Instead, we begin to move and relate to the city with a silent reverence, wanting to explore every crevice—taking notice of each scar or freckle on her body. We are let into a great secret, finally allowed to see the intricacies that for so long we had somehow missed. And everything changes.
Deep creativity is ensouled.
Of course, frustrations continue to arise all the time in our city lives, but we no longer see the city as a soulless clump of concrete buildings plagued with too much traffic and annoying inconveniences. We see the city as a body, alive and vital, of which we are a small but meaningful part; a single cell among many, bringing a spark of life to the system we are living within.
The city suddenly becomes one large body of creativity—holding creative conversations, embodying the product of creative collaboration, offering, in any moment, an ever-inspiring morsel of creative accomplishment. Like it or not, the city becomes our muse.
SECOND, HER SEDUCTION
The relationship with the muse is never one-sided or simple. You have to be open to her seduction, receptive to her appearance, and pleasing to entice her to return. It is, I would dare to say, a two-way seduction.
Deep creativity is receptive.
As artists, then, each time we meet a new city, we must think of it as a first date, a first impression—the perfect time to seduce our muse. If we inspire her, she will inspire us. Perhaps we should dress up (just a tad), for we realize how we feel when we meet the city will greatly determine how the city meets us.
This may seem silly or shallow at first, I know. But it’s not. In cities, fashion is a form of art. The pavement of great cities deserves better than worn-out Nikes. Typically, we don’t get very far in any seduction donning white rubber and matted shoelaces. Now, we don’t whisk out our jeweled stilettos here either. But our favorite boots, sunglasses, an edgy hat, a gorgeous coat—whatever it is that has a bit of temptation in it, wear that. Cities love to be tempted. And soon, the city will begin to pull us slowly down her alleyways into the glistening corners, where tennis shoes aren’t allowed.
Let me tell you another story. This time our scene is Verona, Italy. An apt stage for seduction, as you know; the very place of Shakespeare’s famed Romeo and Juliet.
I set out on a sunny afternoon, dressed in my favorite brown leather jacket, to enjoy some famed Italian shopping on my way to the acclaimed balcony of Juliet. It was quite a long walk, and I was severely tempted to take a taxi—the quickest way from point A to point B. That’s often our immediate conditioned thought. But there was no reason to rush, so why not explore the city along the way?
I began to walk and with each step, I became more intoxicated. I watched the way the colorful flowers on the small balconies reached toward the sun and how the vines caressed the side of the buildings they grew upon.
I smiled at an old man with a black hat and kind eyes. I noticed the smile lingered on my face for quite a few steps after our crossing, and I quietly placed his kindness into a pouch that hung just inside the door to my heart. I tried to pass this smile on to a rushing woman in a gray coat moments later, but her sullen response clearly conveyed that she wasn’t at all amused.
I listened to the whispers of café conversations on the wind, as I stumbled through ordering a cappuccino and some acqua frizzante in jumbled Italian to a very good-looking, dark-haired (but grumpy) waiter wearing a terribly tacky bow tie. I wondered if I had offended him (and his entire country) speaking Italian with my horrible American accent or if the demands of serving tourists all day (and/or wearing a terrible tacky bow tie) were just too much for him to handle. Somehow, his lack of warmth did not distract me from noticing his gorgeous complexion and beautiful shoes. I walked away wishing I had just said “sparkling water” instead of joining the mass of tourists who make an excited (but often terrible) attempt to say the two or three words in Italian that they somehow picked up along the way.
I laughed at myself and then listened in to the gossip of two teenage girls beside me, as they stared into the mesmerizing screens of their iPhones, not paying much attention to anything else—including where they were walking.
I strolled among the swirling scents of freshly baked waffle cones and sewage. A young couple meandered slowly in front of me holding hands. I wondered of their meeting and how many years or days or hours or minutes had passed since they exchanged hearts.
Eventually, after many hours and a mint chocolate chip gelato, I found my way to Juliet’s balcony. A large brass statue of the famed lover, with a hugely faded right breast, stood in the courtyard. (Legend says that if you rub the right breast of Juliet, you will have good fortune and luck in love. The metal has worn bare from so many hands rubbing it. An intriguing sight.)
As I stood there, staring at the brass statue, I began to think, with an air of deflation, “She is brass.” And her balcony, when I glanced up, was empty. What a huge contrast to the flowered balconies I had just passed. Or the warm flesh and glowing bodies I had encountered in the city—bodies full of life and attitude.
And just as that thought floated through my head, I could have sworn that bronze, right-breast-faded Juliet winked at me. I hadn’t missed the real love affair in exchange for the tick of a tourist box. Juliet was present among the life and people of Verona, as much as she was here in the courtyard. I knew her secret now. She has left her balcony.
And so, as creatives, we must learn to stay close to her—the city. Make sure to get out of our metal boxes on four wheels and wander, meander, stroll, and get lost in her streets. Inspiration is not possible with a piece of glass between us and our muse. Erotic connection comes with textures, nuances, sounds, touch, smell, steam, and sweat. We must drop our agendas and let her guide us. She likes to be in control, and most of us artists quite enjoy surprises.
Every city has its checklist, its must-sees. By all means, we should see them. But not only them, and we can no longer rush from one to the other. Instead, we must let the small, unexpected nuances of the stuff in between seep into our body and inspire our creativity.
If we can avoid it, let’s not try to do all the major attractions in one day. Eventually, the allure is lost, much like with any lover. It feels a bit like going straight for the orgasm, over and over again, without the seduction. The idea sounds nice. (The idea always sounds nice.) But, at some point, we will miss the seduction and want some variety. If not, our stamina will wither, and the height of the pleasure begins to dwindle. It’s exhausting. If you have ever tried to hit many major tourist attractions in one day with way too little time and probably not enough food, you know the misery of which I speak.
We all know, anyway, that the arousal is not in the orgasm. It is in the small things, the in-between stuff that makes a love affair so sweet—the soft whispers, the unexpected discoveries, the quiet conversations, the exciting surprises. We must always make space for this. This is where our creativity comes alive. More so than with the big stuff.
In our search for creativity, we are writing a great, seductive love story, not an adult thriller. In going only for the big O, we lose touch with the ways we can cradle pleasurable moments in the fibers of our body. We forget the enchantment that comes with slow undressing, and significant, lingering kisses.
THIRD, HER STORY AND HER SECRETS
Each city is like a living installation with a great soul, a great history, and a great inspired story that founded its making. I have learned that curiosity inspires creativity.
Cities have been loved, tortured, bombed, burned, manipulated, exalted, praised, erased, painted, written about, and so on for centuries. Their souls holds the memory. When we enter a city, we are entering all of this soul. And if we are not careful, we can miss it all.
As with any love affair, the exchange and inspiration deepen when we pay attention, when we allow ourselves to feel and get to know the story, the interesting facts that are unique to a particular person. We don’t obsess about every detail, but want the highlights—major events, past loves, challenges, special gifts, what and who has shaped her to be who she is. This is the same with a city.
Deep creativity is attentive.
Now, as artists, we do not have to become historians as that doesn’t always inspire us. But, perhaps, what does inspire us is to know just enough about the place to impress her. Before visiting a new city, we should try to collect the major pieces of her story—whose art she holds, what events have scarred her, who has written of her, what major events have shaped her.
As we get to know her and show genuine interest, the city will tell us her secrets. And like all great lovers, she has many. As a muse, she won’t let us down. But we should be warned. Her secrets are not all about allure and enchantment. As the city becomes our muse, we will surely be confronted with brutality, with pollution, with soulless architecture, with factories, with the big devastating urban sprawl, with war, with the way that the modern city has stripped art from its buildings, favoring usefulness and efficiency over beauty and soul. But we cannot turn our eyes from her misery. If we look upon it with empathy and listen, her suffering can become immensely inspiring material for us as creatives. We are here to notice and tell her true tale, to love her fully in that way.
I shall tell you another story. Recently, I traveled to Antigua, Guatemala. It was love at first sight, as this small town, with a population of only around 35,000 people, is surrounded by three volcanoes and still has the original cobblestone streets connecting its colorful buildings to religious ruins.
There was something charming and unusual about the place, but as I wandered through the city, I became fascinated with door knockers. Yes, door knockers. In Antigua, there are huge iron door knockers on all of the homes throughout the ancient walled city. Many of them are incredibly high—way out of reach of any normal human being. I found myself wondering, “Why on earth are the door knockers so high?” Were the ancient people of Guatemala giants? Was there some strange custom of standing upon a friend’s shoulders in order to knock at another friend’s home? Were you expected to be able to jump that high? I laughed at the vivid meanderings of my imagination and learned later that they were placed at that height to accommodate a visitor on horseback.
By paying attention, I had noticed the door knockers, and the door knockers had opened a curiosity in me. They allowed me to access the feeling of something subtler in the history of the place that didn’t feel quite right. Large, ornate, and iron, there was something to them that felt heavy and invasive. It felt as if I needed to be someone important in order to knock at someone else’s door. In fact, if I didn’t own a horse, I couldn’t even knock.
When I looked and researched a bit deeper, I found that Antigua did not escape the brutal colonization of the Spanish empire. In fact, at one time it was the capital of the empire in Guatemala. No wonder the remaining ruins were of Christian cathedrals built over the sacred Mayan temples.
A hue of reverent sadness (or maybe empathy?) enveloped me and felt familiar. It was the same feeling that arises when a friend or lover discloses a painful story to you about an abuse or heartache they endured in their past. They give you access to a sacred and scarred part of their story, and you find them remarkably beautiful in their openness and vulnerability. I had a similar feeling when I got to know the true story of the door knockers and the brutality that Antigua must have endured.
All of a sudden, my love for the city, and all of the people she held, deepened. And any notion of romantic idealism (which I am sometimes prone to) disintegrated. In cities, we are forced to confront the heights and also the low points of civilization. Cities have scars. Her secrets are full of abuse, war, division, and brutal oversights, and our creative inspiration can be found by connecting as much to her tragedy as to her triumph.
Our creativity comes alive through a type of connection that embraces the full spectrum of experience. Artists are the ones who expose the stories and secrets of the great cities. We are the ones privileged to hear her tales and thus have a responsibility to tell them, regardless of our human inclination to favor pleasing tales with a happily-ever-after ending. In modern civilization, not many of our cities are living happy tales. But they still hold a deep and grand memory bank that doesn’t take much for us to access. The key is knowing that the city loves the artist, and the artist must love the city to be granted intimacy.
A few weeks ago, while wandering through the huge and unbelievably mesmerizing ancient ruins of Rome, the muse whispered to me of how this city used to be, and I found myself flooded with a sudden feeling of deep sadness, while standing amidst overwhelming beauty. I walked into the Pantheon to see the walls of a pagan temple covered with Christian paintings. I asked my muse, “Where have the gods gone?” She told me that I should not believe that the gods are reserved for temples, churches, meadows, and mountains. They wait in cafés, loll around the corners of buildings, dance in museums, hide in cobblestones, slide down the sides of skyscrapers, inspire impassioned conversation, frolic in small talk, and whisper the great secrets of civilization.
And we are called to whisper back. She is daring us. And if we do, it could be the start of a great, “a-musing” love affair.
EXERCISES
Deborah invites you to these reflections.
Is there a city or town you have grown close to over time? What was or is your affection for it? Was it, for instance, a favorite place, or is it the people you know who live there? Track the path of affection that may have sprung up immediately or grown over many years.
When you visited or toured a new city or town, what small details about your explorations helped you to feel the place’s deep charm and attractive magic? If you have kept a photo album of your visit there, revisit it now. What did you take photos of? What inspired you when you were there?
I opened my piece by discussing how for me, it is easy to be “mused” by nature, and how peculiar it’s been to be mused by the city. Your experience may be different—perhaps you’ve always been mused by the city but going out in nature doesn’t do much to stir your creative juices. Using the seduction analogy, perhaps you have a “type” that you typically court for creative inspiration. What is your type? And what might be gained from opening yourself to being mused by other types?
Can you create something from these reflections?
Deborah invites you to this practice.
BEING OPEN TO SEDUCTION
In my essay (maybe more appropriately deemed a love letter), I focus on two aspects of deep creativity: ensoulment and reciprocity (salted with a good dose of aesthetics and peppered with attentiveness). Deep creativity posits that soul exists out there as much as it exists in us; that we are ensouled human beings engaging with and in an ensouled world. As such, deep creativity is marked by reciprocity, which allows me to make the statement that “the relationship with the muse is never one-sided or simple. You have to be open to her seduction, receptive to her appearance, and pleasing to entice her to return. It is, I would dare to say, a two-way seduction.”
Are you ready to be seduced by city as muse?
If proximity allows you to do so, plan a first date with a city. It could be a city that’s new to you or a part of a city that you haven’t frequented before, or it could be a city you think you’re already very familiar with but are willing to approach with beginner’s mind. Here are my suggestions.
1. Give yourself at least half a day, if not longer, to “date” your city. Try to be flexible about when the date ends (because one of the hallmarks of a great first date is how long it stretches on, when neither of you want it to end).
2. Dress up a little for your date, even if it makes you feel silly (trust me, this is important). Purposefully wear something a little seductive. As I suggested, wear your “favorite boots, sunglasses, an edgy hat, a gorgeous coat—whatever it is that has a bit of temptation in it.”
3. Take whatever transportation you need to arrive in your city, but once there, commit to walking, but let her take the lead. This is radical reciprocity, I know, but I stand by my words: “We must drop our agendas and let her guide us. She likes to be in control, and most of us artists quite enjoy surprises.” So wander, meander, stroll—don’t push yourself, but let her pull you in. Be open to her seduction.
Notice. Everything. Feel the city’s soul, yes, but notice the city’s body as well, her “beautiful and complex body” that is immensely creative. Notice her beauty, her crowning achievements, her spectacular sites, but also notice her wounds, her scars, her misery. Assure her that you want to hear and see it all, both her tragedies and her triumphs.
When the date is over and you return home, write the city a thank-you letter (if the seduction was thorough, you may deem it a love letter). Tell her how you felt; tell her what you noticed about her; tell her what you appreciated about her; tell her how she “a-mused” you. This love letter could be a literal letter, or it could be a painting or collage or song. You may post a hundred photos of her on Instagram or sing her praises in a Facebook post. You may bring a memento of her home and install it in your creative space where it will continue to inspire you.
The Ones Who Light Our Way: Honoring Our Muses
Jennifer
I want to tell you a story, which is two stories, really, but the same story, and it’s an old story, far older than me, as old as the presence of wise women who’ve mused young girls who needed them, who could not and would not have survived, let alone thrived, without them. It is the story of aspirational women whose presence is archetypal; it is the story of inspirational women whose influence is immeasurable.
I wish you and I were sitting around a campfire as I tell you this story—it’s that old and elemental. I would talk half the night away, and when I reached my conclusion, and the fire had too, you would exhale deeply, pause, and on your next inhalation say quietly, “I had a muse like this as well.” “Do tell,” I would say with delight, as I tossed fresh logs on the fire.
The fire is eternal. So is this story. Only the details differ between yours and mine, between ours and theirs. Each flame tells its own story, but all the flames together tell only one story, really. The story of fire. And the story of fire is the story of the muses and mentors, of the ones who light our way.
Let us begin.
My childhood was many things, but mostly, I remember, it was dark. I was dark, a corner child lost, withdrawn, sulky, sure I was nobody and sure everybody who was somebody—which was everybody but me—knew it.
Except for the third week in July. From Sunday night until Saturday morning, I became somebody in the eyes of a very special woman named “Fish.”
Fish was extraordinary and in no way resembled her ordinary name. She was a woman of presence, the first I can remember. She was a large woman with robust shoulders and thick barrel legs always adorned with khaki shorts and hiking boots when she was out of water. Her hair was hazel and thick and lived on her head according to the style of the 1970s, long and parted down the middle. Occasionally she would braid it, twist it like a cinnamon bun, and pin it to the top of her head. I always felt sorry for it then, much the way I felt about animals in the zoo and Rapunzel in her tower.
Fish was the water safety instructor at Camp MeWaHi, summer haven for hundreds of Bluebirds and Camp Fire Girls. I started attending the moment I was old enough and stopped attending the moment I was too old, and the middle of those years were the years of Fish. She was a strong woman who could swim for hours upon hours in a pool filled with screaming girls and never get tired or impatient. Because of her efforts, I became a Tadpole one summer—no mean achievement for a child in fear of all water deeper than a bathtub.
When the pool cracked in the winter of 1974, Fish became the head nature counselor. She taught us how to tie granny knots and read a compass. She taught us how to build a lean-to, and what plants and parts of trees we could eat if we ever got lost. She taught us wonder simply by the way she gently peeled back the bark on a birch tree. She taught us awe as she pointed out the finely divided leaves on a Queen Anne’s lace. Whatever skills I have as a nature photographer now, I owe to her, because she is the one who taught me to see. To really, really see.
She is also the one who first saw me, who held up a mirror and showed me I was somebody worth seeking out. Every summer we shared together, on the first Sunday night of the session, Fish and I would sneak out of our cabins and meet at the camp’s outdoor chapel, where we would sit on uncomfortable log ends under the stars and talk for hours.
What we talked about then, I don’t know now. I only know that there in the dark, I could talk about anything, from the pain-filled reality of my home life to my dreams of becoming a writer, and never would she fail to listen. What she saw in me then, I don’t know now either. I was a gawky child with the self-esteem of a snail and the shell to match, yet never would she look away. But what she gave me then, I do know now. She gave me my self, and she called me precious. She put my self into a trust, a savings account of sorts, and she held me there safely for years until I matured enough to see my own worth. She literally taught me to float, and she metaphorically kept me afloat, and she taught me how to breathe underwater, both literally and metaphorically. In short, she taught me I could survive the present, and she offered me a vision of a future worth living. As my muse, she was aspiration and inspiration.
Deep creativity is healing.
Let’s throw another log on the fire. I want to tell you about an earlier fire: Fish’s and my last fire together.
On the final night of every session at Camp MeWaHi, we had our closing ceremony. The older girls would dress in their Indian gowns and headbands and flowing beads and lead the rest of the camp up the hill to the chapel. There, the older girls would circle around the campfire, with the younger girls making a larger circle around them. On cue, the older girls would bend down in unison and light the huge campfire, sending the flames up to heaven and spraying the light onto each of our faces. Then we would sing our songs, gather our awards, and bask in the last moments of our togetherness.
With that complete and the fire waning, we could reluctantly close our ceremony in the most magical of ways. We each received a thin white “friendship” candle. Two of the oldest girls would bend down, beads jingling and jangling, and light their candles from the remaining fire. Those two would light the candles of the two girls next to them, and so we would pass the fire around the circle, each of us taking the flame from one friend and passing it to another, until all of our candles were lit. Then we would slowly sing the old hymn about making the world a less dark place by using one little spark to light one single candle.
No matter where Fish and I were each year during the ceremony, we made it a point to be next to each other, to pass the flame between us. It was our ritual, and it was beyond important to me. I took my candle home each year, and when things were particularly dark and I was nobody again, I only had to light one of them and stare into the flame until Fish appeared, and I was suddenly somebody again.
However, there was one summer when she wasn’t there for the ritual lighting of the candles. Unbeknownst to me, she had been called down the hill to the director’s office during the ceremony to take a phone call from her husband. When the beaded girl handed me my candle, I looked around desperately for Fish, feeling disappointment and disbelief that she wasn’t there, that she had forgotten about me and our special ceremony. I received the flame from a girl I barely knew, but it was a weak flame, signifying nothing.
As I trudged down the hill, tired and teary and terribly forlorn, I heard Fish call out: “Jennifer!” She was standing in the director’s doorway, phone in hand, beckoning me to come in. She finished her call and softly placed the phone down in the receiver. Turning to find me tentative in the doorway, she asked with a smile, “You didn’t forget about me, did you?”
“No, never,” I choked out, barely holding back the tears.
“Good. Come inside then,” she appealed. I followed. She was holding a white candle, unburned. She turned out the light. She struck the match. She lit her candle. She stared at it for a moment before she turned to look at me. “Can I light your candle?” she asked.
I couldn’t speak. I simply held my candle next to hers. Her flame torched my blackened wick and brought the candle back to life. We stood there, watching the one flame between us growing bigger and brighter and stronger. We were both mesmerized. Time stood still and crystalized.
And in that moment, from up on the top of the hill, the sound of a solitary bugle playing taps broke into the silence. “Day is done. Gone the sun. From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky.” I closed my eyes, suddenly and awfully aware of the passing of time. I tried to will the clear notes of the bugle to slow down, to never finish its song. Yet soon, the echoes ended and the moment was gone. We blew out our candles and went home.
I never saw Fish again in the flesh, but I’ve never stopped seeing her—when I replay the trailer of my childhood, she’s always there, one of my leading ladies. I’ve also never stopped wanting to be her, which is what I mean by saying that our muses are as aspirational as they are inspirational. As my student Mickey Babcock said about our muses who are also our mentors, they “foster growth and fuel creativity.” Fish did both—she helped grow me under her nurturing wings, nourished by her eyes that saw me, and she helped launch me as a writer and photographer by helping me in turn to see. She taught me about unconditional love and the generosity of listening, and she showed me how to hold the precious self of a wounded young person until they could hold themselves. That was my daily devotion for sixteen years, because Fish also inspired my vocation as a high school teacher, which she was too during her non-summers.
Deep creativity is archetypal.
This story closes there, though of course it does not close, because I am still the I fostered and fueled by Fish. We stand up, stretch our legs, you and I, and look up at the stars. “The other story,” you say. “Tell me the other story that is this same story that is your story and my story and our story and their story.” We begin again.
A decade or so later, it was another summer, or the time just before summer when college students like me are looking for jobs. In the student union, I saw a brochure that promised “a challenging, rewarding and fun-filled” summer working with children in the “beautiful backyard setting of Yosemite Valley.” I was as good as gone. Not only would the job allow me to relive the poignancy of the past, but it would afford me the opportunity to give back the past as a present, in the present. The icing on the cake: I would be teaching photography, with access to my own darkroom.
In that darkroom, I met Kim. She was a slight, shy child of eleven, ghostly pale and frail, tucked inside like the snail I used to be, a corner child too, so of course I recognized her immediately. Our only difference was economic—my working-class parents could only afford to send me to camp for a week, while Kim was deported to camp for eight weeks by her upper-upper-class parents who preferred on their summer vacations to travel light.
Kim was neither athlete nor fan of the outdoors, and whether this is the reason she wandered into my darkroom or whether it was because she felt me a kindred spirit, I do not know, though I want to believe the latter. I sensed she was a child who spent a great deal of time alone in her room, so perhaps the darkroom was the closest match to that safe space. What I do know is that once inside, she rarely left.
During the first week, she would sit quietly in the corner, just watching, her wide green eyes taking everything in. I made no sudden moves toward her, sensing her feral catlike soul was in need of space to come forward on her own. She was timid, reticent, and already far too old. She was one gale gust away from blowing over. She was one quiver away from a quake. She would settle for quiet companionship, but I knew she was hoping for kindness and was in need of tenderness.
By the second week, however, if I used my soft voice, I could coax her out of the corner. “Kim, come see this” or “Kim, could you hand me that?” always worked. She liked to help, and she especially needed to be needed. So I became needy to gain her trust. I think she found me so inept that she feared I could not do my job without her, so when I came to work, she came to work with me, my necessary assistant.
By the third week, she was coming into the darkroom not just during class hours but in all of her free time. Working alone, I would hear a soft knock on the door, followed by a timid voice whispering, “It’s Kim. Can I come in?” In the beginning, I was wary of encouraging her visits, thinking she was missing out on other aspects of camp fun, but every time I began a sentence with “Wouldn’t you rather?” the answer was a firm and fierce “No.” She would leave the darkroom long enough to go out and shoot a roll of photos, but that was all.
During that time alone with me, she began to talk. At first, it was just about the photos, then about the other campers, then about school and books and television shows she liked, then her dreams, and then her vast inventory of philosophical and mystical wonderings (“If God is so powerful, how come he doesn’t invent a wife for himself?” “If the world is actually spinning in space, how do we know South America isn’t on top of North America?”). Sometimes I asked questions, paying special attention to her wince words, words like friends and family and home, which would illicit a painful tic and an inarticulate or inchoate response. It was enough that I asked—it was too much for her to answer. Mostly I allowed her to direct the conversation. Mostly I listened. If it was still a darkroom, it was no longer a quiet room, with her incessant chatter shattering the stillness that might have descended when the other campers left, and yes, there were times I wished she would pursue another hobby like horseback riding or archery, but I knew this was not fun and games because I knew what was at stake for her, and I remembered Fish and I listened some more.
There was one time when she turned to an outdoor activity, only one, and for that she was with me as well. Toward the end of the summer, there was a sunrise canoeing contest, to the far end of the lake and back. She asked me to be her partner. She sat in the front of the canoe, I in the back. She would row a few strokes, then turn around and talk to me, her oars dragging in the water, slowing us down. Several paragraphs later, or when she had exhausted that topic (“I don’t understand how come women get married in white when red is the color of love. Why don’t they wear red dresses?”), she would turn around and row a few strokes more. We won third place and a white ribbon only because one time when she turned around, she told me she had never won anything before. I rowed harder.
Back in the darkroom, we spent the last week together printing pictures and piecing together the camp yearbook, and as the Saturday end of the summer drew closer, she became quieter and I understood why. Just as she was my necessary assistant, I was hers, and her time in assisted living was nearly over. I still was not entirely sure what kind of home she was returning to, only sure that her relocation would also be a dislocation.
During our Friday-night final counselor meeting, I nominated Kim for Camper of the Summer. The other counselors unanimously agreed—though I can’t imagine any of them saw her much. Still they recognized her transformation—how she had developed more than photos in that darkroom, how she herself had gone from black and white to full color. She had purpose now, and meaning, and she was good at something, and she mattered to someone, and her whole body seemed to know it and stretch toward the sunlight. I barely recognized her myself, even though she was almost always with me.
That night, I prepared a speech to read the next day when we would give her a plaque at the awards banquet and closing ceremony. I wanted that speech to be special for two reasons. First, of course, because Kim was so special to me, and I wanted her to incontrovertibly feel and know and have reinforced her own worth. But second, I was aware that her parents would be there, and I wanted them to hear their daughter’s praises being sung—Camper of the Summer, unanimously recognized as recognizable and admirable and emulatory. I labored over that speech, and I know you know it was a labor of love.
As was the tradition, I read the tribute to Kim the next afternoon in front of the staff and counselors, the campers and their parents, enumerating her many wonderful qualities and her contributions to camp life while withholding her name until the end. Of course, everyone there except for the parents knew from the start whom I was describing. But no one was more surprised than Kim’s parents.
After the close of the ceremony they approached me, and while her father stood silently in the background, her mother proceeded in Kim’s presence to tell me in a sharp and shrill voice that she had no idea I was speaking of her daughter, that none of the attributes I ascribed to her actually described her, that in fact she was a lazy, withdrawn, and apathetic child. It would have been bad enough had she stopped there, but she didn’t. In my shock and dismay, I don’t remember what else she said. If it happened to me now, I would have taken her aside to stop her, or stared her down until she went mute, or wagged my finger with shame or placed my hand over her mouth to shut her up. Then, I didn’t know what to do. I was twenty-two and used to passive, not aggressive, parenting. I know I protested, but it was too little and it was too late. The girl who had bloomed over those past eight weeks, who had beamed so brightly when she accepted her award, that girl wilted right in front of my eyes, all light drained out of her. More than anything, I wanted to pick her up and abscond with her, but I couldn’t. I had to say goodbye to her in front of them, and the pain was exquisite.
After I returned home, I sent Kim’s parents a copy of my speech. I thought if they heard it a second time, this time knowing it was about her, it might help them begin to re-vision who she was and more, who they were—the ones who failed to see her this way, who failed to provide a home where she could be this way. Honestly, I wasn’t hopeful.
More importantly, I sent Kim a copy of the speech, along with a series of color photographs—there’s me reading the speech, there’s me handing her the award, there’s the two of us hugging, there’s her with her award. They can’t take that away from her. That award, that speech, those photos, that white ribbon, that yearbook we created together, those are her friendship candles. They say you were here, and I saw you, and others saw you, we all saw you as precious, saw you as strong, saw you as gifted, saw you as worth being seen.
To Fish, whose real name was Judith and whose real occupation was a teacher, I want to say, “Look. I’m a writer now, and a teacher like you. I am living the dream I spoke of under the stars, the dream you held in trust and in faith until I could hold it myself, until I could hold my self, the self you saw and helped birth into being. And look. I’m a photographer too. You inspired me to see and to capture the beauty in nature during those camp days, and I once did the same for another young girl in another camp during another summer.”
To Kim, I have only questions to pose: “What became of you, beautiful girl, a woman now? Are you a photographer now too? How do you remember our darkroom days? And more importantly, who have you inspired?” I would then invite her: “Introduce me to the girl you saw, and in seeing, birthed into being. Introduce her to me, and I’ll introduce Judith to you both, and sitting around the fire, we’ll ask Judith for the story of the woman who once saw her, and that woman will join us in the circle and she’ll introduce us to the woman who once saw her. And we’ll stay up all night and go back in time to when the Muses were goddesses, and we’ll know they still are and will ever be.”
I stop talking now. You exhale deeply, pause, and on your next inhalation, you say quietly, “I had a muse like this as well.” “Do tell,” I say with delight, and I toss fresh logs on the fire. You tell me your story—the woman, the man, the one who saw you. The teacher, the coach, the counselor, the one who helped you to survive, and then, eventually, to thrive. The one who rowed you toward a white ribbon. The one who fostered your growth, who fueled your creativity. The friend, the mentor, the grandparent, the one who lit your white candle, the one who provided the one single spark that allowed you to flare into flame. The one in the history book, the one in the art magazine, the one on the movie screen who was aspirational, who was inspirational, the one who maybe didn’t literally see you but helped you to see yourself, who taught you how to imagine differently, who showed you the possibilities of your own life.
You talk through the night, and I am rapt. With morning’s light, we leave the safety and sanctity of the fire circle, and we go out to gather gifts. For Judith, a cedar-incense pine cone, strong like her. For Kim, a handful of Starfire red clover, color-full like her. For my other muses—and there are many—small rounded stones from the rivulet, touchstones really. You gather for your muses as well. We place these gifts on the ground in acknowledgment of the ones who have grounded us. They become an altar of appreciation. We stand back in awe.
And now we must go home, you and I. I to my writing desk, you to your paint studio or your music room or your living room chair with the knitting needles on the table beside. Because what we must do now is create. To whom much is given, much will be required. The Bible tells us so, but this we already know. The best way to honor our muses is to create something a-musing. We pay them forward. We write them into our characters. We sing them into our songs. We plant a tree in our garden and remember them there. We cook their favorite dishes and evoke them on our plates. We arrange flowers to take to their graves. We add a tiny dedication line at the top of our poems: To you, my muse.
Deep creativity is responsive.
To Judith. To Kim. To my mother. To my grandmother. To my students and those who teach me. To poets like Rumi and Rilke and e. e. Cummings and Mary Oliver. To Martin Luther King Jr. and those who dream his dream forward. To Dennis and Deborah. To you, dear reader, whose story I want to hear, whose muses I want to honor.
Come, join me by the fire. The night is young, as we once were, in need of warmth and light.
EXERCISES
Jennifer invites you to these reflections.
Light a candle and in front of that single flame, write out the story of your muses, those who have been both aspiration and inspiration to you.
In my piece, I discuss how muses hold up a mirror, helping us to see something in ourselves as worthy and strengthening our ability to creatively express ourselves in the world. These muses say, “You were here, and I saw you, and others saw you, and we all saw you as precious, saw you as strong, saw you as gifted, saw you as worth being seen.” Who in your life has held such a mirror for you? What have they seen in you that’s made a difference in your life? Have they been properly thanked or acknowledged?
Have you served as such a mirror for someone in your life? Is there someone in your life now who could use some mirroring, someone you could reach out to and remind them of their gifts, to let them know you see them and honor them?
Can you create something from these reflections?
Jennifer invites you to this practice.
CREATING AN ALTAR OF APPRECIATION
“We place these gifts on the ground in acknowledgment of the ones who have grounded us. They become an altar of appreciation. We stand back in awe.”
It is awesome, indeed, to be graced in our lives by muses. This practice asks you to consider creating an altar of appreciation to your muses, which may serve as an altar of inspiration as well.
Some of you may already have such altars in your home or creative spaces. Some of you may have framed photos, symbolic objects, or memorabilia from your muses (on my altar would sit a single white friendship candle). So this practice may be an extension of what you’ve already done.
The first step in building such an altar is to gather your muses together, to name them (making a list will do just fine). Consider people you know personally who made an impact on you (like Judith and Kim for me) but also consider people you’ve never met, but who have inspired you nonetheless (like Rumi and Rilke and Martin Luther King Jr. have inspired me). Consider characters in film and literature. Consider religious or spiritual figures and gods and goddesses. Consider places (like Deborah considers cities). Consider natural elements, like mountains, oceans, deserts. Consider animals and other forms of nonhuman life.
After naming your muses, an important next step is to try to articulate in writing exactly what they have gifted you with. Maybe they’ve held up a mirror to you and showed you something about yourself. Maybe they’ve taught you qualities like courage or joy or generosity. Maybe they’ve shown you a different way of being in the world and taught you through their authenticity that you can trust your own.
Writing this down is one form of building an altar of appreciation. Another form would be to create a collage where you blend a combination of words and images to capture your muses in one overall gestalt. Hang this collage in your creative space, or if there’s not enough room to do so, then take a photograph of the collage and frame that. Yet another form is the literal altar (a tabletop or a corner of your desk or a bookshelf—any surface will do), where you place photographs, symbols, objects, and totems representing each of your muses.
You can see how quickly this altar of appreciation becomes an altar of inspiration. If you’re ever creatively stuck, blocked, fearful, dried up, or full of doubt, you can approach your altar and ask for support. Just remember to pay it forward: “To whom much is given, much will be required.”
Inspiriting the Muses and Musing the Spirits
Dennis
This morning is cloudy and dark in the Texas Hill Country. I have lit my candle and from it ignited a stick of incense in preparation for some early musings on the Muses. Mythically, the nine sisters are harbingers, even energy pockets of inspiration. Ever faithful, one or two show up if one is respectful, porous, inviting, and grateful for their inspiration. Over the years I have grown, in my own creative work, to appreciate their desire to move ideas, images, arguments, and insights along the path to some new fruition. I want to relate a few stories about my own encounters with them, with one especially—Polyhymnia, the muse of poetic inspiration. These short vignettes might coax you to further musings on your own experiences; others may, well, just be a-musing, and there is value in that as well. I begin with a story of how I began to arise early in the morning to read, dream, meditate, write, and rewrite in the solitude of my study, for in this setting the Muses are at their most inspiring. Yours may well be constructed of different circumstances; the trick is to find when and where you are most often inspired and then develop a discipline around it.
Since the spring of 1992, I have risen most mornings at 4:00 a.m. seven days a week to read, to meditate, and to write. It began as a habit many years ago when I was accepted into a National Endowment for the Humanities program at Harvard University to study the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Blake for nine weeks. The director of the Summer Institute insisted that all of us complete at least 75 percent of the readings before arriving. At the time, I was teaching three undergraduate and one graduate course; I knew that with my present schedule I could get little reading done. So I tried something that I now know was Muse-driven: I woke up at 4:00 a.m. to read and take notes and be inspired by the writings of these two geniuses of the imagination. Far from being wooly minded and in a stupor, I found that I was wide awake with great energy and a sense of peace in the silence before the world awoke. I also felt more porous and receptive at this hour to poetry, to reading, to listening before the day’s obligations and concerns would invade this precious space. I discovered that some clarity, accompanied by a deep sense of belonging to something mysterious and sacred, blanketed me in the early hours as musings took precedence over more abstract mental activity. I grew to love the tincture of darkness that illuminated my thoughts in reverie. The habit stuck, and I continue it to this day. Rarely have I been disappointed by the discoveries given to me for showing up. To show up is to invite the field that the Muses bring with them into play.
I write these words at 5:00 a.m. It is my time to muse in an atmosphere that will hold steady until about 7:30. Yours may be different, but it is crucial to one’s creative self to discover the time—day or night—that suits your own psychic need for openness, for mystery’s presence, for meditation, and for when creative inspiration emanating from the Muses are most alive in your imagination. It is to discover within your own life rhythm the moments when musing offers its most creative insights, its most deeply seated truths inherent in you. Whenever it is, entertain the idea that the Muses love ritual, especially rituals of invitation. Here is my current practice I engage in each morning.
Deep creativity is idiosyncratic.
My ritual is the same as it is simple, for I know I am inviting powers and presences in each morning by creating a space of hospitality. I twist on my desk lamp in a study outlined with books and journals, to push the darkness back a few feet and to create a space in which to brood. Here in the silent stillness, edged about like lace, is the darkness; into this cocoon I enter to read poetry or spiritual writings or to write down dreams before they escape out of the body and into the ether or fade back into their timeless realm to be dreamed, perhaps, by someone else, in another climate, another country, another age.
I begin my ritual by writing one page in my personal journal. The structure is most often the same: I write about what wishes to be remembered from yesterday. I remember and write whatever memories surface in the order they are recollected. Then, if a thought, an image, or an idea attaches itself like a barnacle to the underside of that remembrance, I add it. Whole poems, even themes for an essay or presentation, have arisen from such a practice.
I should note here that within the Greek myth, the nine Muses are the daughters of Zeus and the goddess Mnemosyne, Memory herself, who also has a sister, the goddess Lemosyne, or Forgetfulness. Remembering and forgetting are two necessary sides of the Muses’ powers. Now if we imagine for a moment that Zeus, as the Olympic leader of all the immortals, is a mythic image for consciousness itself, then when Consciousness mates with Memory in darkness each night for nine successive nights, giving birth to one Muse each morning from their union, then musing is a partly conscious, partly memorial, and partly forgetful act of imagination. My remembering in and through my journal writing, I like to think, enacts a ritual of the first creation of each of the Muses. At least, this is what I imagine.
Muses like Polyhymnia, the muse of oratory, sacred hymns, and poetry, and Clio, the muse of history and writing, are two of my favorites because of what each brings me as ideas, images, feelings, notions, and inklings that they encourage me to cultivate. For each of the Muses enacts a certain part of the imagination to see, feel, and engage with more depth whatever it is their characteristics inspire.
As I write this, I am inspired by the insight that whatever their individual traits are, the Muses have three common qualities:
1. The Muses enthuse. When I feel some real juice entering an idea and branching off in various directions, I feel enthusiasm. Recently I read that the god that promotes such a rush of feeling is Dionysus; I think he is in cahoots with this quality.
2. The Muses infuse. I sense that whatever and however one is inspired by the delicious deliverance of inspiration, which means to be inspirited, one is infused with an energy that goes well beyond mortal limits. No wonder epic poets often addressed and prayed to the Muses at the beginning of their poems. They sought the inspiration generated by these daughters of Memory and Consciousness so they could transcend their own limits as mere mortals and stretch their language to accommodate their vision of something that appeared to them as worthy of their talents and aspirations. We are no less epic when we respond to enthusiasm and feel our way in and down to an idea or image that arrests us.
3. The Muses reuse. One of the myriad ways we create through inspiration is by taking something familiar, something known, and twisting it until it appears foreign, strange, and new, a torqued version of what was before commonplace. This kind of distortion of the ordinary is a crucial way to create; nothing new is made from nothing. It has its roots in the familiar, but then it bursts forth into the strange, exotic, impossible, and improbable. Then we are truly in it. Clio, the muse of history, invites writers to “braid together memory, fact, and imagination…through the capacity for inner listening,” and Angeles Arrien observed that Polyhymnia “directs us to the places of silence, contemplation, and reflection.” Her power rests in her ability to inspire and evoke “wonder, awe, and curiosity in the mystery, the sacred, and to known and unknown worlds.”
A second story. Pay attention at all times to where you are and what is around you, often beckoning you. Example one: I was in a bookstore in San Antonio, Texas, years ago seeking a book on Ireland to prepare for my first sabbatical after decades of teaching. I found the travel section. As I pulled out A Guide Book to Ireland, another book clung to it and came off the shelf at the same instant, landing with a painful jolt on my left toe. I can still feel the pain to the foot as the book gathered its pages to attract my attention. It was titled A Guide to Monasteries and Retreat Centers in the Western Half of the United States. As I picked it up, something roiled deep in me. My stomach knotted, my breath grew shallow, and Ireland sank into the sea. However, given my life circumstances—a very briefly planned move from San Antonio, Texas, to Santa Barbara, California, to begin teaching at Pacifica Graduate Institute—I had to put that toe-bruising book on hold, although I did buy it. Four years later I became eligible for a sabbatical from my duties at Pacifica. I then pulled that book from my shelf, laid out a pilgrimage plan, and executed it the following fall. My travels took me to twelve monasteries, retreat centers, and one Zen Buddhist center in five states. The experience became a book: Grace in the Desert: Awakening the Gifts of Monastic Life, published by Jossey-Bass in 2004.
None of it was my doing, or at least the major part was not. I was visited by the muse of travel to take a journey, just not the one I had invested my heart in. Even more, during the fifteen-week pilgrimage I knew I was guided by the Muses each day that I wrote in my journals that eventually served largely as the text of the book. I was, I believe, a double muse winner on that journey from excursion to remembrance to expression.
A third story. I have developed the habit of carrying a little spiral binder and a pen with me wherever I go, even out for morning walks. I especially receive gifts from the Muses when I walk Ladera Lane in Montecito, California, when I am teaching classes at Pacifica seven months out of the year. My trajectory is a walk to the top of Ladera Lane, then across Bella Vista until I reach an opening in the landscape to gaze with appreciation on the Pacific Ocean rolling beneath me. I then head back down Ladera Lane to the Vedanta Temple. It is no later than 7:15 a.m. on these hikes so the temple is most often empty. There I sit in gratitude for my life in all of its richness. I then empty my mind of all thought. Inevitably, I am visited by an idea, an insight, a possible way of handling a problem, personal or professional, or a strategy for writing an essay I am thinking about. I pull my tiny notebook out and jot down whatever enters to be recorded. Solitude, silence, and sacredness all contribute to some notions that may or may not be used. No matter; the Muses are there inspiriting me and nourishing my imagination. What I am most struck by is their benevolent consistency if treated hospitably. All of them seem to be drawn to a disciplined presence on a consistent basis. I try to accommodate their wishes and the payoff is always impressive.
Deep creativity is participatory.
Finally, I wish to spiral back for a moment to my experience of rising early in the darkness of the morning that began this rumination, and to hook it into two Muses: Polyhymnia and Clio. If I am to write any poetry, it will happen in the early morning hours when the dreamscape that I have just risen from and the poetic inscape that I actively enter into through reverie, meditation, and contemplation have a porous quality about them, a thinness of texture, so that ideas, images, thoughts, and feelings can move freely between them, as through a shimmering membrane, where memory is in front of, rather than behind me. Poetry and dreams surface from the same embodied place, one which I now want to enter in this early hour, without violating the thin filaments of dream that cling to my waking life; rather, I wish to engage in conscious meditation—the atmosphere of musing, of poiesis, a word bequeathed to us by the ancient Greeks and invented to signal the creative act of making, or of shaping an image, thought, or feeling into some coherent form. To this early poetic time of Polyhymnia I am called each morning, seven days a week; I believe the continuity of creative time promotes a certain habitus, a certain disposed way of being and imagining—a rhythm rocking toward insight—that invites such reverie.
Into this state of active quiet reverie, I am attentive, nonjudgmental and receptive, like a soul just born, to the order and resonance of words and to the reality they point me to. The remarkable fact is that this reality is what I already know on some cellular or biological level but have failed to bring sufficiently across the threshold into consciousness. Speaking more generally, all of the nine Muses remind us, following their mother, Mnemosyne, of something we must retrieve, something once known but forgotten. In their presence, some memory is unveiled in the mother-daughter complex. Years ago, during a seven-hour master’s in counseling psychology class exploring the deepening and constricting spirals of the downward journey of the pilgrim in Dante’s Inferno, one of my students stated it this way: “When I read Dante and struggle with his pilgrimage as a poet, he reveals to me what on some level I already know. So, while I have never read him before, he is unfamiliar; but when I read him, he is already familiar.” A beautifully stated musing moment in her experience of Dante’s creation. Poetry is that place where what seems unfamiliar becomes, through reflective musing, a recognized companion we have met in an earlier form. Like a dream? Yes, but underline like, for dreams and poems, while sharing some of the same imaginal space, are not identical. Yet they both have the power to prompt deep reflection, itself a creative act.
If part of the work of myths is to put us in touch with, among other arenas, the transcendent, the numinous, the Sacred in matter and the sacredness of what matters to us, then visitations by any of the Muses is a mythic moment, charged with the energy of deities and sacred in its properties. In mythic musings something of the world’s myth and something of our own mythology is called into being to be reshaped through an embodied insight.
Creative inspiration carries, given its parents of the Muses, a unique power, the power to reclaim, to salvage our inner body and the energetic field that emanates from it. Without creating a syllogism, I would envision the following progression of effect: if psyche and matter are indeed the same, then as poetry touches matter, touches the imagination of matter, then matter may indeed contain a poetic quality to its being, what might be termed poetry’s mythic matter. Inspiration is a matter not just of mind but of the world’s body. Creative instincts begin in the body; the muses are inspired moments in which something new is encouraged to become embodied. Inspiration may then be a call to any of us to enter the hidden things of the world and to bring them forth shaped in a creative outlet that is a choice made by each of us.
Deep creativity is embodied.
When I read poetry through the membrane of dream and reverie, I am allowed access into some essential arena of my own personal mythology. That is the landscape for any of us in which the Muses enter, entice, and instruct us with their divine wisdom. The analogies, correspondences, and equivalences that emerge are part of my dream body; they exact metaphors from each of us that comprise, as Joseph Campbell often observed, “the native tongue of myth.” This tongue speaks the possible world of “as if.”
When C. G. Jung wrestled with the myth of Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus in his essay “The Type Problem in Poetry,” he made the following observation:
This bare statement of the case might leave us entirely cold were there no poets who could fathom and read the collective unconscious. They are always the first to divine the darkling moving mysterious currents and to express them as best they can, in symbols that speak to us. They make known, like true prophets, the stirrings of the collective unconscious, or, in the language of the Old Testament, “the will of God.”
Implicit in his observation is the power of musing as a way to transport the imagination down, to deepen the sense of what one knows and to express it in freshets of new language.
But let us not pass over the ordinary daily life we live, which we can fall asleep to as we attend to our obligations semiconsciously. It can instead by experienced musefully, musically, and authentically with full awareness. That is my fourth example: the daily round, lived in full awareness of one’s creative being in the world, can also inspire others who witness one’s example. In the company of inspired individuals something stirs in the witnesses. All of us should be keenly aware of who it is we admire, what traits we are drawn to emulate and perhaps modify and ratify. The ultimate prize is the one we allow ourselves to create and what we are destined to add to the world’s value. I try to be disciplined in remembering to carry pen and paper to collect the gems fostered by the Muses. They may intrude anywhere at any time and they always point us to something interesting to muse over.
EXERCISES
Dennis invites you to these reflections.
One of the ways the Muses may enter our lives is through our dreams, because it is often during sleep that we are the most porous to otherworldly visitations. Do you record your dreams? Try it for two weeks to see what images, plots, plans, and desires surface through them. Even just keeping a notebook by your bed will signal to the Muses that you welcome an inspiring dream. If you already write down your dreams, what do you see as the connection between this practice and your creativity? Is your creativity, for instance, a form of dreaming when you are awake?
I end the essay by discussing our ordinary lives as sources of amusement, but only if we resist falling asleep or becoming semiconscious. Instead, I suggest we experience our daily round “musefully, musically, and authentically with full awareness.” My practice of staying aware and awake to creative inspiration is to always carry my notebook and pen in my pocket. Do you have such mindfulness practices that allow you to capture musings when they arrive? If not, can you imagine creating one?
When do you feel most creative, open, porous, and ready to receive rather than administer? In other words, what’s your version of 4:00 a.m.? And are you showing up for your date with the Muses then?
Can you create something from these reflections?
Dennis invites you to this practice.
ENTHUSE, INFUSE, AND REUSE
In my essay, I offer these three qualities of the Muses. Let me suggest practices for each.
1. The Muses enthuse. Enthusiasm is a call to us to pay attention because something is gathering energy within. Enthusiasm causes our hearts to speed up a notch, getting our creative juices flowing. The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek enthousiasmos, which means to be possessed by a god or a deity such as a Muse. What are you enthused about currently? What thoughts or feelings or situations in your personal life or our collective social life are possessing you? What holds your rapt attention? And what might you create from this enthusiasm?
2. The Muses infuse. Remember my story about walking into a bookstore looking for a book on Ireland, when a guidebook on monasteries and retreat centers fell on my foot? The response in my body let me know that I had just been infused by the Muses, though it would take me a number of years before I could follow the calling. Bookstores are a great place to welcome such infusion, and so too are libraries. Consider buying or checking out a book on a subject you have perhaps thought about but never followed up on. Or better yet, allow yourself to wander through the stacks until something captures your attention, something draws you to it—invite your muse to show you exactly what she wants to infuse you with!
3. The Muses reuse. I suggest that “nothing new is made from nothing,” and that the “distortion of the ordinary is a crucial way to create.” We take something familiar and we twist and torque it to make it new, to add our inflection to it. We sample music; we write another version of the Cinderella story; we paint our own water lilies in homage to Monet. Take a work that’s inspiring to you and reuse it. Don’t fret about copyright infringement or any legal issues at all—just allow yourself to be guided by your muse to reuse source material, trusting that it probably had its source somewhere else as well.