Shaky Foot Wisdom
XI.
September 12, 2020
The Words Have Grown Weary
For the past at least eleven years, ecstatic words have flowed daily from my heart opened to wonder. Yet now there are days and even weeks that go by without the whisper of words whose past desire was nothing more to than to float like falling leaves to the page. Once alight upon the page, there was the fond wish that someone, perhaps even you, would find in a poem ecstatic words and a message that could only have been written for you.
Now awash in the riptide pool of dopamine’s loss, I still hear poem titles spoken in people’s conversation, yet they never find their easy way to the page as they have before. You must understand that my muse spoke to me in titles and once I simply put a title atop a page, the most wonderful poem flowed as if from its own volition. I was content to be the mere scribe.
I grieve the loss of such easy access to inspiration. For eons, I have heard the echo of the professor’s dreaded words, “a writer to write, must apply his or her seat to chair, with hands poised above the keys like a pianist composer and wait for the notes to sing aloud.”
I am not so certain that I am still able to hear the notes sing or maybe the chords have just changed, and I am left like Beethoven who at twenty-six became deaf. Could this not be such a bad mad thing for me?
Just as I am aware of the flow of my life having changed, it may be in shaky feet tapping a new rhythm, that I find notes I have never heard before. Like Beethoven, I must tune into a new internal frequency to hear the soft whisper of my Beloved Muse in new and different ways.
I go now to rest my head upon my instrument to become familiar with and to feel these new vibrations and pray that I do relearn to hear my Beloved Muse speak clearly and often in this new way even as the riptide further recedes.
