Scene 5: Keeping your Muse alive

There are those that only write when their Muse demands their attention by hitting them over the head... with a hammer.  And then there are those that write and write and write, waiting for their Muse to arrive.  They think "if I write enough and show her I'm serious, she'll share her knowledge with me."  And she might.  But, I've come to understand my Muse in a completely different way.

I've come to realize that my Muse is always there, always at my side ready to speak... except when I refuse to feed her.  She needs sustenance!  She needs input.  She needs to be filled.  Like everyone else I know, she cannot give what she doesn't have.  Her hunger is voracious.  And she has a wicked fast metabolism.  Thus, the constant need for nourishment.  I must feed the beast or she will never purr for me.

Like the hippo rhino and the oxpecker some kind of bird,
I provide a constant buffet of nourishment
and she helps clean up the mess that is my thought process :)
It's beautiful, really.

I can wake early, or more likely, I can stay up all night, and write like mad.  I can spend hours staring at my computer screen, willing the words to flow.  I can sit with pen in hand and doodle countless flowers and stars and stick figures, listening for her wit and wonder to play across my pages.  But if I do not first feed her a hearty diet of living life and experiencing the world, a diet rich in humor and sorrow, in sights and sounds, in tangible knowing; if I do not fill her to bursting with a voluminous vocabulary of exposure, she will never speak.

So I read...  a lot.  I talk... a lot.  I observe... a lot.  I listen to music... a lot.  And occasionally, I watch movies... a lot.  And she is happy.

It's symbiotic.  When she thrives, I thrive.




*editorial note:  a friend just pointed out to me that is, in fact, a rhino and not a hippo at all!  Ha.  I was searching for a picture of a hippo and this was the one I liked best.  My brain has first-day-of-school fatigue, apparently.