OF MUSING

Musing is a method that writers and other artists use to tap in to some occult source of inspiration that breathes ideas into their consciousness that might not otherwise occur to them.  When they are baffled in the course of their work, or if they are seeking another apt project suitable to their disposition and skills, these artisans invoke the Muse.

While ancient Greek legend names nine classical muses for such arts as music, dance and poetry—for all those human endeavors requiring insight, imagination, and the infusion of new ideas—latter-day cognitive sciences have reconstrued the human creative process in more mundane terms, such as preparation, incubation and AH-HA discovery stages, the last of which represents the Eureka moment of sudden discovery or awareness that seems like a bolt from the blue or the gift of a muse.

Assuming that a writer, say, is seeking such a guiding light of inspiration, she would do well to find a place congenial to undisturbed reflection, as in an easy chair with a lapboard and writing pad, her pen in hand—relaxed and receptive.  With anticipation but without anxiety, she waits, she muses, her mind drifting and shifting into a mode of reverie and reflection in which notions seem to bubble up from the depths of consciousness, as from a seabed, to burst into the air of conscious thought—AH-HA!

Then the writing begins and proceeds until needing a new ignition from another session of musing, a new spark, as from a new metaphor—like spark—to be explored.

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