Musing

In a delightful essay about creativity, author Ray Bradbury makes this comment: “When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange–we are so busy looking out to find ways and means, we forget to look in.” I’ve lost count of the mornings when I climb out of bed, eventually end up in front of the coffee maker, then slowly sip the hot wake-up mixture. And while sipping, I ask myself the same question: What shall I write today? A subject. A topic. Something I can write about with at least a vague acquaintance.

At this intersection of waking and wondering, I often turn to my bookshelf, the repository of other minds and pens. Sometimes a book opens itself, setting free an idea which agrees to be expanded or embellished. I write. But the well of almost-creativity runs dry in time, and with the third cup of coffee I am staring at all those colorful book covers that refuse to contribute a creative thought. The muse has moved away and I am left alone with an empty coffee cup and an equally empty mind. Muse. Now there’s an interesting word. Not used often but ancient in meaning and in thought-making. The Spirit of Creativity. That inner mystery that when fed and tended whispers ideas and intrigue, the food of creativity. I shall visit the muse, I tell myself, as I turn away from my bookshelf filled with sullen acquaintances and knock on the Muse’s door within my experience, memory, being. Thus, Bradbury’s quotation “…so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.”

The source of human creativity. The table of memory and meaning from which I feast. The well that cannot run dry. Is this anything other than The Spirit that made the muse, shaped the memory, tickled the imagination, urged the thought? There is a sacred Spirit that waits patiently while I rummage the books and brains of external sources, waits until I finally turn and embrace the eternal gift of Grace. “…we forget to look in,” he wrote. Ah, it is inside, sometimes deep, where the Muse of Creativity takes off her mask, revealing the flickering Light of Meaning, a torch held by The Eternal Presence.

It is here, not out there, where I am gifted with a word, and another, and another until the page glistens from the glow deep inside. Rare the moment? Maybe. But only because the doorway to the deep is often behind and beyond the experience, the usual, the ordinary. The sacred Muse of Light and Meaning, the perpetual Presence, responds to inquires and entreaties…responds…to a knock on the door. “Knock and it shall be opened unto you.” And that’s not Bradbury.