Muse.  My elusive, ephemeral Muse. 

Last Monday I left Philadelphia International Airport at 6:20 AM.  I traveled all the way to the red and yellow bluffs of Ghost Ranch, in Abiquiu, New Mexico trying to find her.  It’s pretty far to travel.  But I’d won a Fellowship to attend my third AROHO retreat (A Room of Her Own Foundation, a biannual retreat for women writers).  A rare and beautiful opportunity; I had permission to go and write for a week, out in the desert mountains at 6,500 feet above sea level.

The life I left behind is so cluttered that we haven’t been able to find each other, my Muse and I.  Climbing over calendars, piles of bills, driving a twenty-year-old car on fumes, waiting for payday.  Muse and I think we catch glimpses of each other, though.  We see each other in passing cars as I race from one of my four jobs to another, waiting at red lights.  Sometimes we spy each other in crowds.  But the light changes, or someone steps between us, and our minds drift back to the task at hand.  Really, what is her task if not to serve me creatively?  Why does she hold herself at such remove?

At Ghost Ranch, I sit in an Adirondack chair under a cottonwood tree.  I breathe the gritty, arid air and listen to the scrub jays and ravens.  A field of alfalfa cuts a swath of impossible green amid the hottest colors I’ve ever seen in nature.  The bluffs, sinuous sculpted cliffs, ring the verdant field, rising in silent and unearthly forms.  Sandstone, weathered by eons of wind and dust, stand like beings, like a council of elders, be-robed, wrapped in belts of ochre, purple, and terra cotta; their heads catching crowns of cloud; their fissured skin, sliding jowls, pockmarked by sage bush and junipers, scrub pines and cacti.  And, to my right, the wide, serene embrace of Pedernal, Georgia O’Keeffe’s towering mountain.  A lizard spurts across my feet as if shot from a dart gun.  Swallows dip and dance across the alfalfa, grabbing flies and mosquitoes out of the soft-fingered air… 

My mind tears open.  I cease the scratching of my pen, heart jolted with emotion, but unable to find the words I think I need.  Is my Muse back East after all? 

This is not what I’m supposed to be writing.  Not about the whispering of the cottonwoods or the hushed gestures of the aspens; not the gentle murmurs of the Native American vendors, in their timeless tongue, in the mercado behind me; or the hopping, skittering song-sparrows as they harass columns of purposeful ants. 

Days later, I sit at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, going home.  I finish the book I’ve been reading.  Surrounded by strangers, I have tears at the edges of my eyes from the ending.  This is what we have the potential to do, what I have the power to be.  Someone’s tears at an airport because of something I will write.  It would be a crime for me not to try.

My Muse, finally, speaks.  “There,” she says.  “See?  You’ve looked inside yourself.  You’ve opened your eyes and seen what’s there.  That’s how it’s done.  That’s all it is.  To write, you just – write.”

I am meant for two things in this world.  I am meant to create and I am meant to inspire others to create.  I make art, and I make words into art, and I teach.  Our journeys come in many forms.  We don’t really need to cross a continent to find our voices.  We just need to listen for them. 

Lisa Lutwyche has an MFA from Goddard College.  Poet, playwright, novelist and essayist, she is published in the US and the UK, including Mad Poets Review; Piano Press; Pitkin Review; Falklands War Poetry; Roadholder; Minerva Rising; the cancer poetry project, 2; and Fiction Vortex; nominated for a Pushcart in 2000.  She was the AROHO 2013 “Shakepeare’s Sister” Fellow, and gave a workshop about color in writing.  An Adjunct at Cecil College in North East, Maryland, Lisa teaches English Composition and she teaches Fine and Performing Arts at the Elkton, Maryland campus.  She has taught creative writing and watercolor at community arts centers for over twenty years.