Sing in Me, Oh Muse

Originally, a Muse, the mythic figure Home summoned, that future poets would invoke, was nothing more, nor less, than a mother who knew how to encourage and inspire us. The very word “muse” derives from the same ancient word for moon, menstruation and mother after all, just as our first artistic creations as a species emerged in the caves women retreated to together when their blood flowed—offering to each other with that very blood, in those dark stone wombs, visions of the animals that were their kin and their guardians and their mothers.

Those original paintings were collective—created in collaboration with the stone, the animals, each other, and the ancient mothers who held them in their body. The stories that were told by these peoples have lasted for tens of thousands of years because they, too, were created in collaboration with the the natural world and the ancestors.

The idea of the artist as a singular visionary is a very modern, and very limited idea. Yet even so our greatest poets and painters still know that nothing they make comes from within the borders of their own minds but flows to them from the other side. Bob Dylan was famous for shrugging off journalistic questions about how he composed his songs. He had no idea. He was an open channel to voices that needed to sing.

For some of us that means we must make music, for others its a historical fiction novel whose characters are demaning their story be told, for a sculpture friend of mine, faces come to her and she brings them alive in clay. “They are the dead,” a psyhic told her, “Who want to be seen again.”

When I began writing with the dead, trusting the dead to guide my hand, I began truly trusting my intuition and my imagination. I am never alone now when I sit down to write, there are ten thousand times ten thousand voices around me. But how do listen to that cacophony? How do we translate the voices of the dead into the needs of the living? How do we cultivate our own skills and talents to be better receivers of all the messages and stories that need to come through?

How do we summon the Muses, the ancient mothers whose guidance we need now more than ever, the souls of the departed, the visions of the ancestors, the urgent messages of all of those species and beings who have things to tell us amid the Sixth Extinction?

This coming Saturday, August 22nd, I will be offering a one-day workshop on Zoom about Creating with the Dead. Participants may choose to focus on any self-designated art form: writing, painting, sculpture, cooking, quilting, singing, music making, etc. What we’ll explore together is the ancient art of co-creation.

Share

Perdita Finn is a writer, a woodwife, an old witch. She has been a chestnut tree in a vanished grove, a seal (her husband hides her skin in the attic), a she-bear dreaming inside the mountain, and always a mother to blood kin, soul kin, fur kin and odd kin. The dead have, over the past thirty odd years, led her back to the old ways of magic and miracles.

She is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseeen World and Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors. With her husband Clark Strand she wrote The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary.