It is said that only the heart can see, anything truly essential to know is invisible to the naked eye. I believe that is so, I have had my muse a long time, she sits on my desk and revels in the afternoon light, where she has always been placed. I think all writers are superstitious, they believe there is a special alchemy to writing. My desk is surrounded by statues, totems, Madonnas, it is bit of a phantasmical museum in here. Spirits abound. They have gotten me this far, 28 books and many more words.

I chose my muse because she seems gentle and quiet to me, gracious and loving. She is a peaceful muse, she comforts me rather than pokes or prods me, she reminds me to go inward. Saul Bellow wrote that a writer never has to change a word he writes in the middle of the night, and that is true for me. In the dark, I am free and open, there is something to solitude when it comes to writing, and solitude is mostly lost to us in the information age, we are never far from the outside world.

My muse seems very much alone, even lonely.

My muse reminds me to think. She reminds me that if  am afraid of something, I must write about it. In this way, I have come to terms with the great fear that had gripped me for much of my life, but which has receded. I had many years of talking therapy, but I think it was the spiritual work that healed me the most, the meditation, the work on patience and acceptance.

For weeks now, I have been entangled in one of those modern day health insurance mix-ups that are a staple of life in America. Suddenly, some medications are rejected, others accepted, we will never know why or how. It has taken weeks to sort it all out and we are not done yet. It has gone on four four weeks now, confusion, misunderstanding, crossed signals, calls to government offices.

We are almost done.

I resolved at the beginning to remember that this is the nature of our world now, we can either accept it or be consumed by it. Today at the pharmacy, two of the young techs came up to me and thanked me for being so patient.  We are getting to know one another, they said. See, I thought, even in this modern morass, there is community.

It was, I knew, no one’s fault, we live in a series of systems that we do not always control, and the test of our spirituality is how we respond do the challenges of living in a system that is detached from us, and does not, at the core, care about us.

I told myself I had to be good to the people I was dealing with, on the other end of long phone waits, at the pharmacy, at the doctor’s offices. Being good to one another is the antidote and the remedy, we are all refugees clinging together on the boat, if we all stick together, we will prevail, if we don’t, we will drown in a sea of confusion and rage. If we are good to each other, we win.

This is the message of my muse. Be steady, turn inward. Find peace inside of yourself, and the right words will emerge.