MUSE IT

Share Your Musings

"Muse It" publishes your responses to THEMES we pose each month. Share ideas, insights, and reflections.  We will post your writing, a brief bio, the city or hamlet where you live, and your email address so others can contact you.  We're not seeking "literature," per se, in this forum as much as a forum to share & communicate.

The guidelines are simple.  Email submissions of 500 words or less focused on our topic of the season to ron@centertopage.com.  Clarify which theme you're responding to.  Keep submission within email textbox.  No attachments except for jpeg photos appropriately sized for web pages.  Include a two-sentence bio, email address, and location where you live.   We reserve the right to edit for length.

SUMMER '07  MUSE ON THE DARK BORDERLANDS (June-September)

"It's dark in there."  That's what Margaret Atwood so deftly points out both about the body and about the writing journey in the series of lectures titled Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.  We enter uncertainty and possibly grow comfortable with the unknown each time we come to the page.  A musician and painter who attends the Yoga As Muse Labs says she paints in the dark.  A writer I know pulls his wool cap over his eyes while he taps away on his keyboard, a tactic that quiets his analytical mind.

How do you muse in the dark?  How do dark spaces inspire you?  Challenge you?  What borderlands do you explore creatively?  Give us your story, reflections, musings., and jpeg photos.  See submission guidelines above, please.

WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT         by e. fanning fisher   c. 2007

I used to walk in the country in the dark with my sister when we were teenagers.  We’d clutch each other, laughing like mad and step out knowing that at any moment we could come face to face with a tree or end up knee deep in a mud puddle. We knew we could hurt ourselves, but it wouldn’t be too bad because we weren’t running after all - we were only walking - and we were cautious and we were slow and if one went down, well, the other could grab her, and if we both fell, well, we’d get back up. We’d make it home even if it took us forever, even if we couldn’t see our hands which we’d hold out right in front of our faces and comment about how crazy it was that we couldn’t see them.

This was country dark, and it was a deliriously stupid thing for us to be doing but we loved every minute of it.

We both knew that daylight could be more dangerous when we could see things but not “know” them. Compared to that, this was innocent; to be out at night wondering if your next step might put you in a ditch, honestly, what was that compared to the other?

Night had swirling bats and heart-stopping blackness but somehow we learned to know these roads by simply feeling with our senses the different ways they would turn, something I can still do to this day in other areas of my life, something I think you can only learn to do by being entirely open to not knowing what lies ahead.

And so if I am hesitant about something, and of course I have to stop and check to know that I am that, I remember to throw my sensors out ahead of me like some Gretel in the woods of my own awareness, tossing out small crumbs to navigate by in front of me instead of behind, waiting to see what it is about what I “don’t know” that will inform me about the darkness ahead.

There will be answers, of course, there always are, in some form or another, if one listens, if one lets go. If you can manage to step over pride, that huge obstacle in everybody’s way, and surrender to something bigger.

And, so I find that when that is the path I am diligently seeking, this surrendering to the unknown, only then can I know, sometimes as if by magic, “exactly” where my foot will fall before I even set it down, only then can I sometimes know not a thing, nothing, except the fact that I must take a step forward without any knowledge whatsoever on what, if anything, I am about to land.

It’s scary but it’s somehow familiar, and there was always something about this trusting that truth lay ahead that always seemed to light even the darkest road of my many ways.
 

Eileen Fanning Fisher is a writer who likes to think she carries her hamlet on her back like a red-polka-dotted knapsack but who actually lives a lot of the time in Vernon, New Jersey, in a chalet-style home with a cathedral window where one can see the world changing constantly from light to dark and back again.

IN THE GUARD'S SHADOW   by Farrah Nayka Ashline  c. 2007

 When I need to curl up in the underbelly of dark revelation, I head outside to a lone tree located in the center of a field at the cusp of night; I sit silent gazing at the emerging stories above me, wide in their secrets and premonitions. When I leave my hands open, I can feel the entire world's fullness and depth. Some nights I have heard a baby crying, a couple arguing, a pitter patter of animals scurrying around in the grasses; other times I have been still enough to feel my father’s arms waving at me through the wispy tree branches in the wind. When I need to be reminded to not be afraid, the clouds will come racing out to meet the sky half way, producing a gust-like wind in which the branches shake violently to demonstrate their point. The result will be that I will feel a chill and become cold, which in turn reminds me that my blood is running wild with desire and that I should probably go back inside the house and record the daily celebrations and tribulations of characters who dare to live outside the prison wall of their short existence here on Earth.

MUSE IN THE DARK    Jeff Davis

The other night, I walked into the woods, my spelunker headlamp secured to lead the way.  Under that lamp’s spell, the evergreens’ and maples’ lichen lit up like a Jimi Hendrix blacklight poster from another era.  Then I stood still, flipped off the lamp, and tried to get my bearings in the dark. 

“In the dark the eye begins to see,” Theodore Roethke wrote years ago.  It’s true.  My ears piqued.  My pores opened.  A few feet away, something crawled in the brush without much regard for my presence.  A cool wind rustled some limbs.  I became secure in uncertainty.  My daytime aggressive eyes calmed down, and my body began to see.

 Writing in the dark and writing into the dark take me to places where hands and chest get dirty. It’s where writing gets exciting. The dark doesn’t suggest to me “bad” or “wrong” or “negative.”  It implies that dusky space where distinctions blur, that space where I can write into uncertainty.  It suggests less about digging up trauma and the muck of the past and more the willingness to keep writing into stories that refuse simplification, into ideas that refuse easy grasping.

Some times, I court the dark.  Invite it in for tea.  Listen to its tales.  What I befriend and learn to love I often no longer fear.  Or at least I don't fear it as much.

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