Rachael

Written on December 5th, 2020

It is, after all, 
a command she understands. 
Sit. 
So we do. 
Stay is harder. 
Rest in the breath is only as good 
as your hammock mind allows,
and currently the swing is occupied by:
ten undone monkeys,
a small, cheerful rat,
an elephant wearing a magician’s cape,
and one very nervous jackalope. 

She doesn’t mind the interlopers, though. 
Age has mellowed her prey drive,
and now she nods to squirrels affably.
It’s dulled her hearing, 
and now she enjoys a 
good fireworks show as much as I do.
Her sense of smell is still acute,
So acute it’s asnorable.

But I don’t baby talk at her 
from my cushion
(for once).

Instead, I put on a serious show.
Eyes closed spine straight hands still legs crossed,
ignoring the hammock menagerie
as they perform circus dives into cups of water
and hoot rudely at the crows overhead.  

What I can’t ignore is her: 
Next to me, she sits better than I do.
But then: 
a jostle, 
a shove that would be rude on the train, 
her head juts under my elbow and
without my permission, she’s in my embrace. 

The sign in my mindsky flashes in neon green: 
DO NOT PET DOG WHILE MEDITATING.

But with a wrist-twist, 
I touch her chest, 
and under my fingers, 
the feel of her rough silk 
becomes my prayer. 
She won’t be here long. 
Nor will I.
Stay.
We try. 

She picked Lala. Thirteen years ago, we went to the pound to look at another dog, but the one in the cage next to that one just looked at Lala and asked to be met. In the meeting area, she leaned on Lala, and Lala leaned back against her and that was it.

She liked two things – everyone, and all food. She wasn’t crazy about other dogs, but if you were a human, and especially if you were a human who knew how to carry food in your hands, she was your best friend.

She was the cuddliest dog I’ve ever met. The perfect little spoon. Her snores were so cute that we called it “snorebuggling.”

Once, a man we didn’t know came over to buy a couch we’d listed on Craigslist. He came in the house, sat on the soft, and Clementine raced in from another room, launching herself at him. She tucked herself against him and almost snuggled him to death. That’s how she was for STRANGERS. Imagine what we got from her. Every day.

She enjoyed hammocking with me.

Sun – all day. She soaked it in. (And look at those earssss!)

She was a pocket pitty, thirty-five pounds of love. We always said she looked like a beagle wearing a pit-bull costume.

She was a goofball.

The only picture I’ve ever painted was of her for Lala for Christmas, sitting with the jasmine vine tangled around her neck. She’d constantly get stuck there and then just wait patiently for us to cut her out.

She had her very own cat, Waylon.

Clemmy’s been in hospice for about 6 or 8 months, and had graduated OUT of it twice! (Seriously, Pet Hospice has been the greatest thing to ever happen for our confidence that we were doing it all right, as we trudged this difficult time.)

And hey! We’ve been cooking her food for her morning and night for a year (pancreatitis and kidney disease). SHE LOVED THAT.

And we’ve been home for a solid year! YAY PANDEMIC! Always with her, ready for a cuddle! SHE LOVED THAT, TOO.

And today, when hospice came to help her on her way, her cat helped, too. Waylon was with her until the very end right along with us, and kept his paw on her as she died.

Our hearts are broken. Thanks for loving her, too.

You’re already ready. That’s my battle cry and my deepest truth. There’s nothing you aren’t ready to make, to learn, to do, or to become. 

But you may have already noticed that doesn’t make it easy. 

Just being ready to do the Big Scary Thing you want to do isn’t a cure-all. Simply being ready doesn’t make you leap up in the morning to work hard to chase your dream. 

And that sucks! I know. 

Often, artists (like you, like me) wait for the inspiration to follow their dreams. They wait for the Muse to take them by the hand and lead them to the magic. They wait for the moment that conditions are just perfect for making their art. Or they believe that they just have to find the exact right process that works for them, the process that will finally allow them to work more regularly on their art. 

And they think that if they just do the work more often, it’ll get easier to do it. 

But—sadly—doing the work of our heart never becomes easy. Ever. 

One of the biggest joys of my life is working with new writers who want to write or revise their books. Most of them enter my ninety-day classes expecting to find out that once they’re on track and working regularly, things will smooth out. The thing they’ve been missing, they think, is commitment to the project. I can help with that—they get external accountability, which is incredibly helpful, yes. They make a concrete plan of action (which is changeable, just like life), and yes, that’s also awesome. 

But then, a few weeks in, they all start to realize something at the same time: Oh, damn, this is still really hard!

Dude, that’s a real downer of a realization. 

Making the commitment and showing up to do the work—isn’t that enough? Shouldn’t they be rewarded with pleasure and ease? 

I understand the pain they feel of crashing into this question because I’m a forgetter. I forget the things I’ve learned over and over, and I ask when my art is going to get easier all the time. 

The more books I write, the more I expect the Muse to show up. I like to believe that someday she’ll wake me with a gentle kiss on my cheek. Then she’ll make me a perfect cup of coffee and guide me to the desk, where she’ll not only open my document, but also inspire me to write sentences and paragraphs and scenes and chapters and whole books quickly and easily because she’s chosen me. I have committed to the process, and therefore, I will finally be the Muse’s teacher’s pet.

Hell, no. It just doesn’t work that way. 

You already know that, don’t you? You can feel that in your bones. You’ve been waiting for the heat of the Divine Muse, but you’re really pretty chilly most of the time. 

The Muse is often ascribed fire-like properties. She burns. Shakespeare said, “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention.” When caught in her arms, you’ll burn, too, all the passion in your body and heart bursting into a creative blaze. 

And okay, a small part of this is true. The Muse does require warmth. She hates the cold, and she’ll definitely go on strike if the temperature drops below sixty-five. 

So that makes you, the artist, like Laura Ingalls Wilder when she woke to find that “ice crackled on the quilt where leaking rain had fallen” in The Long Winter. Every single damn day, you wake up under the covers, clutching the little warmth that’s left. Shivering helps a bit as it rapidly contracts your skeletal muscles, generating just enough heat to stay alive. 

But you have to relight the fire, and no amount of shivering will do it. Praying for the Muse to come in with a blowtorch might be a fun wish but she doesn’t work that way. 

So every day that you’ve scheduled to work on the thing that holds your heart, whatever that is, you have to pry yourself out of the covers and throw on every sweater and jacket you own while you screech like someone’s just thrown you into a Norwegian fjord. 

Then, you bolt for the wood-fired stove. You pray there’s still a tiny spark left under the log from last night that’ll help the newspaper catch faster, but if it’s been more than a day since you worked on your project, the stove is as cold as your fingertips, and you’ve got to work to get that sumbitch warm.  

So you shove in the paper, spitting curses that would make Gordon Ramsey blush. A little kindling next, but you move too fast, and a splinter shoves its way into your palm so far that you feel it pierce your spleen. Then you reach to add a nice, small piece of dry wood, except, goddammit, it’s been raining, and you forgot to bring any small pieces in yesterday to dry so you’re going to have to use even more kindling to catch a bigger, drier log, and meanwhile, your frigid bones sound like a pair of maracas being shaken by a giant. 

Slowly—oh, so slowly—the first log starts to catch. 

Even more slowly, the heat stops going up the flue and starts pushing out into the room, into you. First your face warms, probably more from exertion, but you’ll take it. Then your teeth stop clacking. You’re able to stand and turn your backside to the growing warmth. 

Then, finally, you’re warm. You can move again. You can do the work you wanted to do. Your hands are warm enough to hold the paintbrush, or your fingers can hold the pen you’re using to write your poem. 

In fact—and here’s the magic of this—as you do your work, you just keep getting warmer. 

While you’re working, ideas start to flow as easy as tossing another log on the fire to keep the heat going. You realize your book needs a dragon—why hadn’t you seen that before? It’s so obvious! You’ve been struggling to figure out how to up the stakes and to show how foes become friends—this is genius. 

You turn to thank the Muse who’s just given you this incredible idea, but you can’t see her. 

Huh. 

Weird. 

Kind of like you can’t see your own face when you turn around. 

Hi, guess what—YOU ARE THE MUSE. 

The Muse as an outside force that comes to help spark your inspiration doesn’t exist. 

We think we have to wait for the right mood to do our creative work. We think we have to wait for inspiration to strike before we pour our hearts into what we love. And sure, that sometimes works. For me, it averages out to about two days a year. Twice a year, I launch myself at my desk with joy, just because I feel like it. All the other days? Inspiration and joy wells up only when I’m actually doing the generation of the heat myself. 

Madeline L’Engle said, “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.” She knew that she was the Muse, and that showed in her books—her characters always found the answers inside themselves (because that’s where answers always live). 

You have to work your way to inspiration, not the other way around. 

And work it is. Would I rather lie in bed every morning than getting up and relighting the fire? Hell, yes. From bed, I can reach for my phone and tumble into the heffalump trap that is the constant cycle of refreshing email, then Twitter, then Instagram, and then back around again. Our brains—used to getting pings on our phones or our computers every few minutes—crave that dopamine hit that comes with novelty. Each time you refresh an app, there’s a deep down hope that this time will be the time that satisfies the urge. You already know that never happens but you do it anyway. (Don’t feel bad! You’re not at fault for falling into a trap that was set precisely for you. You’re human. The first step to getting out of the trap is realizing you’ve been caught.)

Okay. You’ve set the phone down. You’re wishing like hell to find the inspiration to write one more scene, or work on the dance move that’s been literally tripping you up for weeks. But you, the Muse, are shivering. 

In order to warm up, in order to feel creative, you have to do something creative. 

Honestly, watching my students realize that writing their books will never feel easy but that they can light their own Muse’s fire is something that never gets old for me to witness. 

It’s not going to get easier, is it? 

No, I say. 

But every time I do write, I find inspiration. From the work itself. 

Yes, I say. 

Even on the hardest days, doing the work feels better than not doing the work. 

Exactly, I say. 

And it’s really not going to get easier? 

It doesn’t get easier, I say. But it keeps getting better. 

So: light the fire. Yes, it’s hard, but the more fuel you give it, the brighter it will blaze. As you work, the inspiration will come, in a slow trickle at first but the more you go back to it, the hotter it grows. 

You are the Muse. And how I love to see you burn. 

I realized last night that I’d gotten all caught up in thinking that each post here at You’re Already Ready should be deep and life-changing. And of course, that led to thinking I needed these to be well-written and lyrical. 

Now, you already know this about me. I can write well, and I can write lyrically. 

But mostly, I’m a sturdy writer, and proud of it. 

Sturdiness is great, in both mind and body. I have short legs. In fact, just this morning I stood naked at the kitchen sink, downing that first gorgeous glass of cold water, and my wife exclaimed, “Just look at those short legs!” I tried to be mad at her, but it’s hard to be mad at a simple fact. 

I’m compact. I’m built like I was made to pick potatoes, or berries. My center of gravity is low, and I’m just as comfortable squatting as standing. My body, when it’s working well, is serviceable. It’s functional and durable.

My prose is serviceable, too. It serves a function—it speaks to you. With it, I talk with you. 

I don’t ever want to get on a soap box and wobble out platitudes made of snake oil, words that do nothing but sound like the current trendy thing to say. 

Nope. 

So I’ll tell you a few things that are really, deeply true right now. 

1. Joy hums like bees inside me sometimes. I’m feeling it right now. Slightly dangerous, but capable of making such sweetness. 

2. I can’t live without peanut butter and bananas. Especially when both of these are spread on toasted sourdough. 

3. I’m drinking more coffee lately because someone said I should (I can’t remember who, but it was specifically a health thing) and thank you, Baby Jeebus, because every few years I abandon coffee for other health reasons, and it’s always, always a mistake. 

4. Kamala Harris was sworn in on the morning I started writing this (it sometimes takes me a while to post), and I didn’t see it happen because I was sitting on the couch in my office, trying to figure out what I was feeling, and why it hurt. This had nothing to do with my body, and everything with my heart. 

5. So I wrote a poem in those moments. Here it is. 

For four years,
Hope has been wedged 
between old suitcases
and the box of holiday decorations
we didn’t even bother to 
pull down last year. 
I’m shut like a forgotten tomb.
I’ve forgotten where hope fits.

But she is the key to the rusted lock.
(It hurts to feel the pins move.
Slowly, so slowly,
my soul’s rheumatic lament.) 

Then she starts to sing, and I realize:
I still know every word by heart.

6. Then I went back on the livestream and watched Biden’s speech and heard Amanda Gorman’s poetry and remembered that, yes, art is how we recover. 

6.5 I’ve sold more books in the three weeks of the Biden/Harris term than I have in a very long time. I’m not the only person with more space in their heads for joy and art and books and peanut butter. 

7. Making art is hope made visible. 

8. I finished a terrible first draft of a funny, sweet book on Friday. It’s neither funny nor sweet yet. It’s not even a book. It’s a collection of phrases lying on my office floor twitching their tails hopefully. I’ve promised each one they’ll be in the final version someday, but I know I’m lying to some of them. Please don’t tell them—they’re all so earnest. 

9. Lists, when done right, can also be art. 

10. I am so lucky that I can write this while in bed. My window is open, and I can hear a goldfinch chirping and above it flies the Oakland bird of all seasons, the ever-present black helicopter. 

11. I got tired after getting to number 10, and took a nap, because resting was my One Job at that moment, and I’m only finishing this list a couple of weeks later. Which is also okay. Lists can hold literally anything, hopes and fears, what you need to get at the store, who you’ll be when you grow up, and the reminder to get a smog check which is a bullet journal item that slips from list to list, still undone week after week. 

12. I really need to get that smog check. Doesn’t it seem kind of silly to need a smog check for a SmartCar? I mean, I think our air popper is less green than my car is. 

13. Do people still skip the thirteenth floor when labeling stories in a building? This always seemed rather magical that they were allowed to do it—the thirteenth floor just IS, no matter what you call it. Does pretending it’s not there really make a difference? 

14. I’ve always thought that the number thirteen and black cats are lucky. A black cat crossing your path is really lucky. But my mother always said that a black cat who starts to cross your path and then changes its mind—that’s unlucky. I think mostly because you have a much greater chance of hitting it if it doubles back, right? 

15. Once, when I worked 911, my medics couldn’t find a house where someone was having an asthma attack because the residents had decided their house number wasn’t auspicious and just changed it by simply painting a new number on their house and alerting no one in the city. Everything worked out okay, so I guess they were right to do it. 

16. This. This is what I needed to shake me out of the feeling that You’re Already Ready has to be “good.” It doesn’t. It has to be done, that’s all. What I’m meaning to do is catch moments and string them together, that’s all. Each moment that I hang up is a tiny light, and when they’re all turned on, my soul glows like a million fireflies. 

17. Your soul, too, has the same tendency to glow and brighten the space around you. Why not let that shine today in some very small (or very big) way. It doesn’t have to be pretty or perfect or good. It just has to exist, and only you can make that happen. Use a list, or use a song, or dance your way across the kitchen floor. You’re worthy of hanging those lights for yourself, and you never know exactly what you’ll illuminate. 

The lists within me honor the lists within you, my sweet friend. Now, glow.