knowing your muse :: the thing that can't not be written

Editor's Note: during the month of June, members of my Story Sessions community will be posting about what it means to pursue dreams, engage in self-care and practice active boundaries. They had free reign on what they wrote, and the topics come from my 30 Days of Prompts. I'm so excited about the wisdom these ladies will share with you, and I know you'll be inspired.

xoxo,

Elora Nicole

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It’s insanely difficult. This thing we do.

(If we do it, and we do it well.) 

You know. Writers, builders, artists, visionaries, gardeners. You who strive to build a long term beauty. You who conceive and birth and tend. You, the one who plants a seed in the ground and tends it until it grows, you know: 

This stuff is hard. 

There’s a great deal of misery to be survived in order to keep a growing beauty alive. It’s a daily fight, to keep it from being crushed, not by evil, but by something much worse, which is the ordinary: the slightly chaotic: the pervasive creeping meaninglessness: the sands of the day-to-day.

So we do this, all the time: we just quit. The vision comes, and we just let it go away, or make it go away, because we know that building it one stone at a time actually will totally suck, like getting our eyebrows tweezed for a whole year nonstop, and we’d rather avoid the suffering. 

So we quit, and then what do we do? (You know.) We suffer. “I should have been somebody. I had so much potential. I’m a failure. What. A. Waste.”

Then you’ve got to have a pound of salty snacks just to combat the misery. 

You, the one who plants and tends, you know this: The suffering of not doing is just as bad, and maybe worse, than the suffering of doing. 

But where’s the will? Where’s the will to show up, and move a pile of sand one grain at a time? Where’s the strength? Where’s the discipline? Where’s the sense? 

And maybe you know this too, but you might have forgotten.  

It’s in the willingness to write what needs to be written. It’s in the listening.

There is a thing – and I believe this, with all my heart – there is a thing that cannot not be written. It’s a different thing each day. It’s a different thing each life. It’s a different thing each mortal soul. And not all of you write in words, like I do. Some write in stone and wood, or plants. Or food. Some write in prayer. Some in silence. Some in paint. In bodies dancing or struggling on a stage. Truly, if we really told the truth, we all have more than one pen. And to know where to point it, how to wield it, what blood to dip it in: we have to listen. 

The listening takes practice. It takes faith. It takes obedience. Next time, your muse speaks to you, next time it delivers a line of nonsense in the night, a picture of a building, a craving for a certain kind of beauty, try this: OBEY. 

Say, yes. Say, yes it will hurt a little bit, the Doing, but not as much as the Not Doing. So okay, throw it at me, sure, I’ll go across an ocean, I’ll look stupid, I’ll take the risk. YES.

I believe this, too: if you become a channel for the muse, a portal for the eternal to enter time, then the muse will know you, and she will not be unfaithful to you. If you show up, she will, too. 

Actually, what I believe is even worse than that. I believe that your muse is talking to you right now, this very minute, and I don’t care if you haven’t written anything in months, or if you are suffering through a period of confusion and lack of clarity. Chances are, you can hear your muse pretty well. You just don’t like what she’s saying. You don’t want to write that. You’re a writer, not a cook. You’re a cook, not a writer. You’re a solid family man, not an inventor of gadgets. I was looking for something a little more appropriate for my audience. I was looking for something a little more personal. A little less personal. Less dangerous. I was looking for something in green, not lilac.

But, sorry. This. What you get is what you get.  

Eternity speaks through you, and not the other way around.

Sorry, that’s the deal. (You know.) Obey.

Be a vessel. That’s what you are, anyway. The truth wants in, to you, through you. The cost is temporary loss of self. (And that’s the prize, too, you know.) The cost is to be the servant, in a world where everything tells us it’s cool to be the boss. 

But that isn’t entirely true. Try it. It’s worth it. (You know.) It just might set you free. 

//

Esther Emery was a theatre director and playwright before she gave everything up to raise her family in a yurt on three acres of Idaho mountainside. Now she does all sorts of ridiculous things in pursuit of a totally creative life, and blogs about it at www.estheremery.com.