Muse: Lost & Found

Writing yesterday was hard and painful work.  The words just wouldn't flow.   I struggled with paragraphs that led no where.  They were old willy jeeps, painfully, slowly climbing dirt logging roads leading to a wall of timber, a solid dead end.   So this morning, as I left for my Just 10 walk,  I shook my proverbial fist at the heavens, demanding inspiration.

Within moments, I received my first jolt.  I was Elsa Lancaster in Bride of Frankenstein.  Clothed in a shroud-like gown, my face blank, impossibly tall bee-hive hair spotting a lightening-bolt-like streak of gray.  I smiled inside and in that moment found my muse hiding in my amusement.  It hadn't been lost.  It was just on holiday.  Apparently, my muse hides in a sense of humor, in my amusement at the antics of my fellow mortals and myself.  I wanted to indulge this muse.  I wanted to streak down the trail like a cannonball of fun, finding  humor in everything I stumble across on the trail.  Something was standing in my way.



Before I could indulge my muse, I received a second, stronger image. A stronger muse began to take shape.   There is an image that often comes to mind.  I've seen it so often over the years that I don't always give it the attention that it deserves.  For many years, I have often seen a younger, thinner me tightly clutching an armful of jagged broken glass and mirrors.  The more tightly I hold these broken pieces, the more I am harmed.  I've been able to decode this image.  It is my psyche holding on to those things that need to be released, the things that harm me, bitterness, anger, self-doubt.  Sometimes, I imagine myself, letting go all at once.  The jagged pieces fall to earth and shatter into a million points of light.  Today, I could not drop them all at once.   I dropped the pieces one at a time.  I was quickly followed by two teen-age girls who work part-time as pooper scoopers at the fair and local parades.  They were busy sweeping the broken pieces into a dust bin.  Slowly, the broken pieces were falling away.  Inside, I began to heal just like I've healed countless times before.  I know I will be broken again.  Practice makes the mending easier.

I questioned myself about the composition of these broken pieces.  I saw the death of innocence at too young an age.  I saw myself celebrating the gifts left upon its grave.  I saw my soul, beaten and left for dead only to have it rise again, stronger in all its broken places.  I saw the ugly face of poverty and want, only to have it step into the light and find beauty there instead.  I saw myself rejected, abandoned, lost.  I saw myself chosen, light coming to my rescue.  I do not walk alone. 

I,  who had left demanding inspiration, had been rewarded.   As I crossed the intersection, I realized that my desperate search for meaning and purpose in the trials of life, has often lead to unnecessary misery.  Meaning and purpose will find me.  I just have to wait and be open to it.  Trying to be something, to force the process gets in the way.  It is only by being, by stepping out of my own way, by taming the ego, my dropping all comparison to others, that I find my personal truth.  Being is hard work because it requires a stillness, an openness and a vulnerability that is frightening in its novelty.  My muses, back from holiday were leading me again. I headed home forgetting to stop for a Sunday paper.  I was walking with my muses.  It was good to feel them again.