Atonement for the Muse

Sea Change.....Pardigm Shift......Shit Happens. As a writer, I've benefited from a force that was everpresent and seemingly everlasting....until it was, no longer. I benefited in a strange way, from the pain and turmoil that roiled below the surface for nearly 3 years.....and then it stopped. What has torn me as a writer is that the source of this inspiration was pain, angst and dark visions that haunted me to the ends of sanity......so I rode away from them into a physical netherworld that gave me peace, tranquility......and in hindsight, an over-inflated sense of what the world was about.

I sit here writing about something I've now contemplated for the past 6 months. I am happy. As an artist with my background....this is a curse. I'm not bitter.....to be forward...I am ecstatic ....but I miss the cathartic flow of words that seeming gushed from my fingertips into the keyboard on a weekly basis......just a ride away from inspiration

I now realize some truths of happiness that I've struggled hard to realize.....this struggle has been harder than acceptance of death. When you think about this, it makes sense. You can't deny death.....especially when you find it laying there in all it's ugliness....alone....before the paramedics, firemen, policemen & trauma counselors show up. You can sure try to deny it.....but there is not a single neuron to be found in your mind that denies the simple fact......death just happened.

But.....you can deny happiness. As a writer, I've always felt I should be talking about things that are difficult. So in a way, I got lucky....if you can call losing your career of 13 years, your wife dying, losing your house and your dog....all in 6 months.....lucky. To put it another way.....I made lemonade from lemons.....really bitter lemons.....and I knew it, so I added a lot of sugar ....and my sugar was the one thing that very few people have ever been given......Time.

From this position I took the one weakness that the enemy of my happiness had, and I turned it against it.......Time......I had lots of it. I capitalize "Time" for a reason.....it is the one thing in our culture you can't sell and can't give as a person. Time happens independent of who we are.....we think we might control it, but we don't. I have it on good authority that time does not even exist....that it's merely a construct of the human mind......but I digress.

Time was my savior. For every injustice my personal emotions incurred....I had Time. To paraphrase Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, I had time to wait, to think and to fast.....and so I did....and I did it on my bike. I occupied a bike seat as the world fractured around me into a thousand tiny pieces.......I hear a person lied about his life fracturing into a tiny thousand pieces on Oprah and even sold a bunch of books, but I rode through it and just documented it on this blog....I never made a dime....but I did find a path through to the truth. What I realized in this process was that my will to survive was contingent on my ability to find beauty wherever it might lie.....and this is the bridge into my life as I now see it.....because as once before.....I find this is the only thing I can hold onto, however tenuous it may seem these days. Find the beauty......the grace will follow.

During the time before......I took pictures.....and I wrote.....I wrote about riding past exhaustion into sunsets that rose crimson into my emotions, lifting me from the morose of a tired day into the euphoria of a day spent seeking the beauty only to be found out there. At night, I lay naked and raw....but content.....viewing the cosmos above and alone.....but strangely happy. At dawn, I propped my head up on my backpack and viewed the coming day in all of its beauty. Never once on these trips did I experience the violent and sensory altering dreams I was encountering at home.....waking at night pacing and screaming until someone close to me would shake me lose....or I would wake. At no time in my solo trips into the middle of the desert, did I ever have trouble sleeping.....I found only peace, beauty....and grace.

It's with irony that I now find myself occupying seat 4a on a flight too and from from Washington DC, that I write this. I've struggled with the turn of my muse.....I no longer have a muse to claim. My muse for the longest time was my grief......and I grieve no longer......and yet I miss her.....my muse....not her. My muse was the source of a creative flow that was cathartic. Now, I realize that I must be my own muse. I must be the source of my own inspiration. I must drag myself from the comforts of modern society and place myself back out there. I must take a leap of faith.....and push myself past my ever shrinking boundaries of comfort.

We as writers have to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We are not the page writers of what always happens and certainly should not be just the tellers of the good times or the easy ones.....we must tackle the things that are difficult. For me, what is difficult is how to embrace this happiness I now find myself in. I found it easy to accept that my life before was a shrinking one.....a place where powers outside my control took things from me.....a place where my dreams were extinguished both in thunderous instances and tortuously long ordeals. I accepted this and after a time, I was fine with it. A very close friend of mine recently told me that for two years, I went Gollum.......I can't disagree.....because I was focused on a singular precious and let everything else go in the quest......what scares me now to no end is how easy it is on any given day, to let it all go and not care at all because I seek my precious.....my muse........

This is my atonement for the muse that gave to me such rich subject matter for such a long time.....I'm grateful for it....but good riddance you wonderful, creative, insightful bitch. You gave me beauty I could control and held it in front of my drunken nose long enough for me to appreciate, capture and write about it.....a beauty no creator could destroy because to destroy it would have been to destroy the creators creation. But now that you've left me, I'm glad......the horizon is clear and now I'm on the ocean of creative uncertainty once again......only this time....it's called happiness. We're all uncertain....and that's the way it should be.....with the winds of creativity tinted with a hit of the muse from time to time.....we just have to be sharp enough to capture that wind and run with it......