Write? How is that possible?! I’m stuck. Under water. Inspiration eludes me. I prefer a cup overflowing and now must make something out of nothing. I lament my creative poverty when a higher voice comes to the rescue: You would be a fool to believe yourself. Find the archetype in your situation and get to work.
My creative juices may be absent, but I do manage to find the archetype of ‘beginning’—a condition demanding considerable, sustained effort. I also know beginnings lead to middles where the Muse awaits. I turn to the keyboard and call upon writing’s mercurial magic to connect, trick and transport me toward her vitality and passion.
One by one I wrest words from an inner swamp of uncertainty, hanging each to dry like laundry on a clothes line. Slowly, the untidy row shapes itself into a second saving message: Stand by your experience.
Ahhh. Memory and Muse both remind me that as a younger person, I did not grasp the necessity of being what I wanted to become in a measured and consistent way. I fantasized talent and accomplishment arrived in their entirety, like a kit. Not so, of course. Life is not a kit, it is alive, and responds according to the devotion and discipline accorded it. Many times I turn my back on practice, undermining the treasure it brings: ballast, joyful imagination, intimate feeling, peace of mind, guiding intuition, artful sacrifice—an infinity of experience that adds up to the ‘one wild and precious life’ of which poet Mary Oliver writes.
If what I want to be is not what I do, if what I do is not who I am, I remain a stranger to wisdom. Either I tend my practice or sound as a clanging gong. This is my experience and I stand by it.