2.22.2012

At one point many years ago I found myself in a totally desperate state, needing more than anything to be in touch with my creative self. I had to meet my muse face to face, to have a conversation about the meaning of the art, to celebrate our collaborations, to know I had been accepted by her as an artist. And so, in that state of mind, I searched the web for answers and discovered a recording of a guided meditation, a very new age product from Sedona, the kind you listen to it in a relaxed place with headphones, spacey music plays while a soft female voice directs your thoughts, and at the peak of it, so the blurb on the website promised, you would meet your muse. I downloaded it. I wanted a quicker path to art, a philosopher's stone that would constantly reveal to me the novel, I wanted to control my own source of creativity, and of course get rich and famous doing it.

So on a quiet afternoon in the studio, leaning back in my comfy office chair, big headphones, I prepared to be taken into the arms of my muse. I drifted, I cleared, and I released. I visualized a stairway leading up and I saw myself climbing (a higher self must be up, right?) and there was the door, at the top of the stairs, right where it was supposed to be. An elegant, rich door, mahogany, gold fittings, it swung open, flooding me with light.

I found I was sitting comfortably outdoors, in warm sunlight, on a park bench. I became aware that sitting next to me was something enormous and very insect-like, eight to ten feet tall, almost as wide as the bench, an iridescent shell, folded wings, and many jointed appendages; also sitting in a relaxed way. Both of us were just barely holding it together, practicing controlled relaxation, keeping down our fears and shocked emotional rationalizations about what exactly was going on and just who this other entity really was. On one hand, we rode a high induced by weirdness and surprise; but panic was very close to the surface. It lasted a moment. There was only time for impressions of one another, intuitive feelings, and some sense of each others presence; then the music, the unnoticed soundtrack to this scene, began to fade, and soon the meditation recording was over.

That encounter confirmed my suspicions, I don't have the sexy kind of muse.

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