Category Archives: Life

My Muse

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My muse amuses me. I often hear people talking about their muse and I don’t have one. I have hundreds of thousands of one. I get my inspiration from the wind and leaves or a comment overheard on the street. I once wrote a lovely post about an ‘alligator’. A small childhood used that word to his mother to describe the elevator we were all on. I’ve written poems based on a cracked tail light and a misheard comment about soup. I am inspired by the people I read and by the actors I am entranced by. I am placated by a wooden spoon that my Mother used when I was a child, I still have it. It is so full of memories and it is now almost black. I would never part with it. I love the memories that creep up in the back of my mind when I least expect it and the wonderful vacations I can take meandering through my childhood. These are my muses.

I have written about a little red wagon and a broken pencil.  I have written about hopes and dreams and puppy dog tails. Raindrops hitting the glass or rainbows sneaking behind buildings.  Laughter and tears, a quiet moment with a book or a rousing rendition of cello music. All these things stimulate and provoke and tantalize. These are my muses. This is what compels me to write to share and to learn.

I am often flooded by ideas that won’t stop coming. I am downing but I am also excited and terrified. How do I grasp, how do I hold on. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes they walked by me never to be seen again or perhaps to show up in something else. Sometimes the ideas sit and percolate. They need to be stronger, more full-bodied. I can wait. I write a few words down and sometimes I go back days, weeks, years later and pick up where I left off or I am stimulated by another thought and I will go down another rabbit hole. This is my world. I love, love, hate, love it!  I am inspired and I despair in equal measure. But I’m having fun. It is my muse de jour that I have grabbed by the tail and I’m trying to hang on. It might be a bumpy ride, but damn I’m having fun!

 

An Emotional Hoarder

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I recently posted a poem that I had written about how we need to let go of the baggage we carry around. It’s true. And I am guilty, so guilty. On one of the comments, I responded that I was an emotional hoarder. I really am. I remember a slight I was given when I was five years old, maybe. I was going to the first meeting of a Brownie troop and one of the leaders looked at my fingernails and said, and I quote, “You bite your nails! That is a filthy, dirty, disgusting habit.!” I was five. Of course, there was no recording of the comment so it is entirely possible that I have blown it out of proportion in my memory. But what I have not blown out of proportion is how I felt. That is a memory that will not fade. Because I internalized it. I never went back to that troop.  And you know, it still hurts. I no longer bite my nails. But why do I think of that, why do I remember that?  Why am I carrying that baggage?

I am also a physical hoarder, albeit a tidy one. I’ve lived in the same place for almost 30 years so I have a lot of boxes full of a lot of stuff. I have figurines that I was collecting when I was a child, think single digits. I think of it as mindful clutter.  I have pieces of paper that I wrote in university and that was many decades ago. Recently I’ve been going through those boxes looking at the things I have kept and wondering why? Why would I save a piece of paper with three words that have no meaning to me now. But they must’ve been important once upon a time.

I think I do that with bad memories as well. Why do we hang onto those? I want to remember the good stuff! I think I do but I not sure I give it as much weight as I do the negative. And that is my failing. I think there’ll always be a part of me that wonders if I am good enough or smart enough or pretty enough or… just enough. And I also think we all go through the same thing. But I’m starting to realize that I am enough. Of course, some days I am more than enough. Thankfully there’s only one of me in the world, I don’t think the universe could handle two!