The Muse Within
Writing has always been very personal for me. Writing is the way I hear myself. Which is probably why I have struggled in the last few... that is, for many... well, okay, okay; so it hasn't been years; it's been more like a decade, since I have really written in the sense of trying to be a writer. Sigh. When life just gets so full-- of sorrows, illness, betrayals by self and others, love, children, joy, events --so full of just daily grinding life
itself as it painfully moves through its gears,well, it just felt better not to think and certainly better not to feel. I just didn't really want to know what I was thinking because that got too dang dangerously close to how I was feeling.
Since I was feeling way too much to sit down and expose any of it, I just didn't write. It wasn't exactly a conscious choice, but as a therapist in real life, albeit a retired one, I know that ultimately I must have made a choice. Illness and fatigue robbed me of spirit and voice. Self protection and preservation became paramount. My voice became stilled. After all, there is only one letter standing between "mute" and "muse." Remember the Emily Dickinson poem about the Soul Selects Her Own Society and then admits no more and finally just closes the door? Well, I clamped that sucker shut and sealed it with cement.
It isn't that I had never written. I had. My first semester of college was paid for by the scholarship I won for writing an essay on "What Americanism Means to Me," fed by the feelings that came with having a boyfriend in Vietnam at the time and paid for by the Lions Club, to whom I will always be grateful. It felt good to be published in the National Record and recognized by my congressman. In another contest I was able to profess in thirty words or less on why my mother should be chosen for the dozen roses and groceries given away by the local radio station. I won a haiku poetry contest locally. As a university graduate student I wrote "Workers' Compensation: Incredible Hulk or the Jolly Green Giant." (The fact that I had never worked in that system so that I could get a real feeling for it was no handicap; though later I paid my karmic dues for having written so presumptuously by actually working in that system, but that is another story for later.) At the time I was ecstatic over having won the graduate award and national journal publication that came with having won. I even have a romance novel to my credit. No, it never reached publication; that is still another story in itself. The "agent" I sent it to and who replied with such glowing compliments and hopes of seeing it in print, hit a "bump" in life himself and managed to get arrested for shooting another man in the parking lot in Branson, Missouri.
Life happens. It just does, sometimes. I was hitting a few bumps myself, going through divorce, interstate move, total career change, graduate school, my father's terminal illness-following up on my grade B romance novel didn't seem so urgent. I still have the story, and it's pretty dated at this point; but I did write it. That is the important point. And then I just quit writing, with the exception of survival, worker bee stuff.
So when my friend Barbara asked me if I wanted to be in a writing group, I thought to myself, "Do I really want to be mentally and emotionally outed like that, to myself and others? Am I really ready to re-own the Gemini within who just can't think enough, as in, there is so much to think and express that there is never going to be enough time to cover all the subjects-do I really want to go there (yipes!) and dig into my inner Scorpio rising, into that hidden and reclusive depth of feeling which seems to be the wellspring of my creativity? Expose myself to public view? Maybe.
Maybe I did miss that self expression for the joy of self expressing and having something to show for those feelings I wasn't writing about. So I joined the writing group; and I have written a few pieces. And every time I have written, it felt good to have expressed something, to have achieved. I may never be the most prolific writer of the group, or even the best, but that doesn't really matter. I don't have to be a professional writer or ever be published to be a writer. I don't have to mistake the call of the siren "achievement" with the inspiration of the muse.
My muse has moved inward into the stillness between silence and speech, which after all, is her native habitat. She has never really abandoned me. She lives within and she is patient. I am writing again. And it feels really good.
Here is an excerpt from a personal essay:
"Loved Spelled Backwards"
Even though we are little Baptist Sunbeams, we are not yet baptized. We talk among ourselves about how long someone can hold his breath if the preacher holds him under too long. Our backyard contains a puddle of water, and in it we baptize crawdads, left over from helping Daddy seine for fish bait. He gives us at least three. The baptismal font is a dripping faucet which stands in the center of our yard, where it leaks onto the rusty Oklahoma clay and forms a small red puddle of muddy water. The puddle makes an excellent location for a baptismal font, although the water contained in it is not as clear as the pool of water at the church. But Mama has told us that the water isn't the important thing; Jesus does the work. She says that baptism has something to do with cleansing sins; I guess that Jesus must really love clean people. The crawdads are already a dirty clay color, so it doesn't really seem to matter whether the water is clean. I don't think it does.
On this particular baptismal day, we squat reverently around the puddle, watching solemnly as Carol Ann, the eldest at age eight, grasps a crawdad firmly and dips him in the puddle as she intones: I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and The Holy Ghost. Asking him if he believes would be wasted on the crawdad, but we do sing choruses of I've Got a Home In Glory Land and snatches of When the Saints Come Marching In.
The crawdad's strength of endurance does not match our religious zeal, though. We tirelessly baptize the wretched soul, and in our enthusiasm we drown him. His demise ends our debates on whether crawdads can breathe under water. Carol Ann had been sure that they could, and she is almost four years older than Little Joe and I. We confess our sin to Mama. She scolds us when she hears what we have done, and as we try to grasp the concept of death, we mourn for the lost crawdad. In atonement for our sins, we lay him out in a Diamond Match box and give him a Christian burial, bowing our heads in prayer.
