Whistling for inspiration
You know how to whistle, don't you?
Dear Writer,
I’m teaching this Year of Writing Magically workshop, and it’s amazing, but the trouble is… I’m also taking it. As a leader, I feel profound confidence in everything I’m telling the workshop participants to do. As a participant, I don’t trust the workshop leader’s confidence that this will work, even though it’s worked for me a number of times before and I know it all works. My lack of faith in myself even when I know that I know what I’m talking about is a confounding experience.
This week, we talked about not waiting for inspiration to come to you, but rather calling it to you. If it knows where you are, where you’ll be, and that you’ll be receptive to its presence, it will come when you whistle.
But, depending on circumstances, that might take a while. Maybe trust has been broken. Maybe your inspiration is an anthropomorphized version of your own creativity, and maybe after years of bringing you ideas that you were too busy to appreciate, they have rejection sensitivity. If they’ve brought ideas to you in the past and have been ignored or shoved aside because you didn’t have the time or space for their ideas, they might decide to bring those ideas to someone else, and skip past your door entirely.
This particular angle of the anthropomorphization of inspiration comes from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, but this practice of making inspiration an entity is nothing new. In the 18th century BCE Mesopotamian epic Atra-Hasis, the author says the work was dictated by a goddess; the Hindu goddess Saraswati’s name comes from the combination of “pooling water” and “speech”—water is a classic symbol of inspiration; and of course, we have the Greek muses. Stephen King calls his set of muses The Boys in the Basement; Jennifer Crusie amended hers as the Girls in the Basement. I once… I think it was in a Dear Writer letter to you… defined mine as a border collie named Max.
I’m not sure that’s right, though. At least, not now.
The truth is, while I’m very sure that this will all work for my students, and for you, I am still riddled with anxiety that it won’t work for me.
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Why would it not work for me when it’s been working for me and my students for years? No real reason. Just mundane anxiety, nothing special. And the only way to make it go away is to listen to my workshop leader, trust her that she knows what she’s talking about, and do what she says.
I need to just whistle for my muse and trust the process.
The process of calling your personal muse back to you, of mending fences and making amends, of asking them to trust you once again to clap your hands in excitement at the delights they bring you is, honestly, pretty easy. Muses are basically formed of two things; inspiration, and forgiveness. They understand what life does to us, how it can sometimes close our doors to creative pursuits for a while. The muse will visit us from time to time even when that door is closed, and leave little treasures for us to find when we decide to open the door and peak out.
My muse, like all of my creativity, is a shapeshifter. When I think they’re one thing—like a border collie named Max—I will find that the next time, they’re something else. So now, I’m feeling a young woman who is happy, fun, light. I’m not gonna lie… she has a slightly pixie-ish feel to her. She is not, however, a manic pixie; I feel like that needs to be said. She’s got young energy, but she’s been around forever. She is bright-sidey, but she’ll bring me dark things to work with. Everything about her is light; and by that, I’m not talking about anything visual, I’m talking about… like… sunlight. Energy. She knows everything, and even with the knowledge of everything, which can be heavy, she is light. Maybe it’s like that weird loop of nihilism; the trip into darkness, once you go far enough into the dark, brings you around once again to its opposite.
I don’t know her name yet. I might never know, unless she decides to share it with me. But maybe, if I just let her know that I will be at my desk every morning waiting for her, and if I open my door to her, and burn a candle with her favorite scent—lilac—then she’ll visit more often, and I can get to know her.
All right. That’s a start.
Okay, if you would like to try this exercise, I recommend the blindfold journaling method I talked about some weeks back but instead of going into it with the question of “how do I feel?” go into it asking your muse to tell you a little about themselves.
Everything,
L