The Muse

The Muse (see in Gallery / Store)| Image by Bruce Harris

Another stumble through the brush trying to find what I don’t know, but I came across this red-winged blackbird roosting in a blade of sunlight cutting the forest shade. Neither of us was in a hurry to leave and each, it seemed, equally curious. Yet, I suppose either of us could have left, me not noticing anything unusual, the bird because it's a bird and anything can chase it to the sky.

The other night we were dining with friends who we had not seen in too long of a time. It was one of those dinners, similar to a family newsletter that comes over the holidays, where the evening was largely filled with catching up. Better though, because the updates came with great food and laughs and the shared history we had raising our kids in the same neighborhood and schools. We traveled together. We know some of their close friends and relatives and they know some of ours. They are close friends that we regrettably haven't stayed close to. But we are close enough still that there is no hiding behind who we want the world to believe we are, as we have been privy to the successes and failures we have attempted to make and avoid.

And successes and failures there were, which in a strange way, draws people closer for the shared experience of life having turned in ways you least expected. One of those ways turned out to be me taking several years to write a book, now on a path to write another with no monetary reward given or in sight. I already know this leaves some people scratching their heads, and others (maybe the same people) making household calculations of how ends actually meet. They might come to the same conclusion; my lovely wife bakes the bread. Perhaps that is my own intractable guilt projecting its way onto the canvas of partially nodding heads and wondering eyes. It is also a reason that I generally deflect the topic; it’s hard enough for me to accurately write about what goes on in my head much less describe it over dinner. And even when I might say a thing or two about the book or the practice of novel writing, the conversation quickly turns to the economics of authoring... So you write without any idea of getting published AND if you get published, you probably won't make any money?

This is when I see their eyes begin their inevitable gymnastics routine.

The conversation eventually turned to me. Their questions had little to do with career building. I was plainly asked, does it feel good to write?

I was stumped for a moment. Yes. No. It's easy. It's hard. When you think you've done something good, tomorrow it isn't. Yet, for that singular moment when a line strikes just right, you feel at one with... something...

And then out in the world among the earners and the driven, you wonder if you've gone mad. I said, with more mulling, every sentence, every word counts, you know? They didn't. I don't know. I don't feel like it's me...

Hearing myself grew a bead of sweat and I could feel it sneaking down my hairless head. I mean... the voice on paper isn't the voice in real life... I dabbed the lonely drop, but more were coming. I mean you kind of plug in to something. I stammered and may have said something even more ludicrous, something about Carl Jung and the collective this or that and I got full confirmation through their crimping eyebrows that, yes, I had gone mad.

But that something is out there. That something could be my muse, for lack of a better term. It could be everyone's muse that ever tried to make real what was never real before. A sculpting hand. A struck key. A drift of words. If I stomp around my imagination long enough, I usually find that something, or it finds me, and if not today, then tomorrow. I hope.

Which brings me to the bird above. I took the picture on a preserve walk trying to get to a creek's edge through a bunch of high grass and bramble and a small grove of trees. These walks usually produce a few hundred photos. Some I know will turn out well and, of course, they never do. Others I’m sure that I missed prove me wrong again and again. In this particular case, I almost deleted the image. But then I cropped around. Changed format. Changed a thousand things over a few weeks' time. What I had started with turned, by no purpose that I knew, into the dark eyes of a bird starring through me. The swirl of life all around. The moment she stayed still long enough to be seen.