Who is this muse and why is she dancing like a five year old with a secret to tell?
When she settles, why do words appear on the page, words that eventually become story.
Here’s what I think:
I believe the muse lives deep within me — where my dreams appear, where intuition holds the capacity for insight. Muse will not let me rest, particularly when I’m about to give up.
I’m an older woman writer who coaxed my muse out into the light a few years ago.
She’d been waiting patiently.
She has illuminated the essence of the creative spirit within me, allowing me to sit patiently (sometimes) in the mysterious anticipation of not-knowing. She’s helped me trust in my decades of experiences, encouraged me to wonder at the stories I know lie within me, applauded my occasional exuberance, and affirmed the grace of my sadness.
The muse (my muse – dare I name her as mine?) has cleared the way so I might write stories fed by generations of women before me.
When I’m thinking about the writer I’ve become, I seek out the wisdom of friends. I don’t always know these friends as physical beings, but I have their words and thoughts.
One such unknown friend is Stephen Buhner, author of ‘Ensouling Language’. In his chapter about The Imaginal Realm, he writes:
“There’s a part of us that knows that other world. A part of us that lives partially within it. And there are opening movements in all story forms that serve notice to the dreamer inside us that we are leaving this world now and traveling to another.”
I traveled to my character Casey’s world when she spoke these words in the epilogue of Those We Left Behind:
We are born vulnerable and exquisitely delicate. We may live our days seeking a place of wholeness. Feeling “less than,” we may aspire to be loved in all the wrong places, by all the wrong people, for all the wrong reasons. Until that day when we turn back to ourselves, feel the strength of our own spirit, uncover our own stories and move into our lives.”
As I reread that piece, I know those words arose from some place within me, fed by a moment in time, when my creative spirit – my muse — and I were telling a story together.
I showed up and so did she.