Breathing Life into Your Muse

Reflection #54: You are in a relationship with your Muse. Your job is to inspire each other.

We normally think of a Muse as a force, or being, or a part of our subconscious that delivers inspiration from the Mystery to us.  But it’s not a one-way flow from Muse to Artist.  You are in a relationship with your Muse and your job is to inspire each other.   

If you find that your creative wellspring has run dry, that you can no longer hear the Muse’s whisper, and that you can no longer bring forth ideas from the Mystery, you may have been neglecting to properly nourish your Muse.  

Your Muse needs to eat.  But, existing only in the formless realm, she doesn’t eat food, she eats ideas, digests them, combines them, and then gives them back to you in the form of solutions and unique combinations.  You are in a symbiotic relationship with your Muse and it works similarly to our relationship with plants: We breath in oxygen, and exhale carbon dioxide and plants breath in what we exhale, transform it, and give oxygen back to us.  That sort of symbiosis is what you and your Muse do with ideas.  But you have to do your part.

In the state where your muse has become malnourished, you need to breath ideas into your Muse.  You need to in-spire her by filling your mind, body and soul with uplifting ideas, experiences, and re-creation.  You need to let your creative field lie fallow while you fertilize it.  

While you are fertilizing your field, you may feel like you aren’t “doing anything.”  Don’t give in to the negativity of that lie.  That is social conditioning, the resistance, talking, not your true self.  It is true that you may not receive inspiration from your Muse today or tomorrow, but the creative seeds you are planting are growing deep roots and, someday soon, the Muse will return and those seeds will sprout.

What you give is what you get

Stimulating your Muse is a responsibility.  You must feed the seeds of inspiration to your Muse, and ensure that you do not drown her in banality and negativity.  So, before we discuss some activities that inspire your Muse, a warning:  Inspiring your Muse works very much like the old technology maxim, “Garbage in, garbage out.”  

Don’t feed your Muse garbage.  

Your eyes are windows into the holy recesses of your soul, as are your ears.  Attention is the most precious gift you have in this life, so use your attention wisely to inspire your Muse, and not to chase cheap dopamine hits. 

My strong recommendation is that you don’t feed your Muse garbage.  Garbage consists of social media, reality tv, the fear porn of most news stories, and most current events.  Politics are particularly muse-draining and political stories and discussions are toxic to her.  I suspect that many artists’ creative output or quality declines in election years.

I strongly suggest, when you are online, that you don’t engage in arguments (especially political ones). Don’t follow dopamine peddling pimp-sirens intentionally or accidentally seeking to keep you from discovering the true freedom deep inside yourself.  Don’t give such accounts your sacred attention. Don’t follow the masses whose attention is directed like sheep under the maxim: if it enrages it engages.

If you feed your Muse such problems of banality, your muse will be forced to work on those problems instead of your art.  Your Muse certainly might provide the perfect clever reply to that horrible tweet “the other side guy” posted, leaving you temporarily and artificially satisfied. But, you’ll find, when you sit down to write (or paint, or sculpt, etc) something real (something that matters), that the well has run dry.  Getting worked up about politics and online arguments gunks up the Muse’s connection to the Mystery.  Or, more correctly, engaging in such toxic time wasters summons the wrong muses — demons — and demons, being a corruption of Muses, are prone to pervert the creative process by using your energy to find creative ways to destroy and inflict suffering rather than to seek truth and transcendent creative beauty.

Art is creation after re-creation.  Recreation precedes creation.  When your Muse has disappeared, you must re-create her (and your self).  And once you have engaged in such recreation she will reappear to tap into the Mystery from which true inspiration flows.  This process of re-creation involves kindling a love of play born from inspired deep curiosity. 

There’s a reason that one of the two main pillars of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way was the weekly “artist date.”  That date guaranteed a creative person at least one sacred time a week to indulge their curiosity and play: A time to re-create their Muse.

The process of recreation rekindles the power of The Sovereign Artist Within.

Next time, I’ll share some specific wholesome and playful re-creation activities that will breath life into your Muse. Of course, those activities are what work for me. You likely already know what works for you.

Creatively,

Clintavo
Sum Ergo Creo

"The Muse persists. It goes on living, though neglected, waiting for you to give it air or die without giving it utterance." — Ray Bradbury

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And now, for something a little different, I’ll share something my Muse brought me. Though I have some ideas, I’m not sure exactly what it means. It’s from the Mystery, after all. Perhaps its meaning is slightly different for everyone.

Nature pulsates against my brow,

And breaks its waves across my bow.

The babe’s blue eyes engulfed in thrall, 

to tides that aren’t there at all.

The unstruck sound reverberates,

the source eternal percolates.  

I am nothing; and I am all

I only exist when we raze our wall.

When nobodies find the nothing within,

then Gaia’s destiny can finally begin.