When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing.  They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table, and then
ceased.  Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent.  I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched.  "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said.  "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation."  And I took her hand.
- William Stafford

Journal Notes: 

There is a holy aspect to the descent into your creative realm. When we engage in the creative process, we explore territory just on the edge of understanding.

We often encounter internal resistance as we embark on the journey. Fear abounds – fear of failure, fear our work is not good enough. Fear we don’t have anything of value to say or share. We enter a new unfamiliar world. But once we cross the threshold, magical forces come to our aid. A strange elation takes over. While before we were hesitant to start, now we’re hesitant to stop. The Muse guides us, takes us by the hand, accompanies us on our magical journey during which what did not exist before takes shape, assumes a life of its own. We build internal momentum, a magical momentum.

The universe is a creative entity. We are both the result of that creative process and participants in it. When we do creative work we express, in our own unique way, our reverence for life, for the holy aspects of the creative forces out there, whatever they may be. And we often then sense that those forces approve, and provide support, provide energy, to our journey.

But first effort. First dedication. Before entering sacred realms, we need to offer a sacrifice, and that sacrifice is part effort, part courage, part faith. We need to believe in our uniqueness, the value, perhaps even crucial necessity, of what we have to contribute.

Once we cross that threshold, magical things happen. We embark on the journey to experience the magic, to link up with it, to submerge in it.

What can you create that no one else can?

We need that from you.

. . .

I told my son that the one thing I have learned about life is, “I never was the man I used to be.” In my book Selected Poems, I chose as an epigraph something one of the characters said in a poem I wrote called “The Fish”. I fell in love with her. And she is not even described, but her name is Modean Gill. And she says, “The process of life, poetically speaking, is a passing between dream and reality, and the mark of any man I could ever trust or care for is that he would never presume to say which is which.”
-   David Lee, Heron Dance interview. David has published several books of poetry. The one I most often sample is So Quietly The Earth.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
- Christopher Morley

Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and all times to come, essentially the same—to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.
            - Walt Whitman