My mortgage broker Karen wrote a short piece about her spiritual journey collecting Native American jewelry and sent it to me.
“Maybe one day I will write a book,” she said over lunch. She was a woman with depth and weight in her past and character, so I assumed whatever she had to share would be enjoyable to read.
I didn’t expect to be reminded in her story again of my run ins with the eagle. She tells a story of a grandmother who sends an eagle feather to her grandson in Vietnam through thin air. While this can be unfathomable to those who don’t believe in transference of energy and source, for me, having the eagle appear in my dreams forced a search of meaning. I found through research that an eagle totem appears to “inspire (push) you to reach higher and become more than you think you are capable of. They tell you to be courageous and really stretch your limits and see what you can do. They bring a sense of courage and a desire to explore and grow.”
The eagle was only one small part of her story, collecting Zuni squash blossom necklaces, but it reminded me I hadn’t seen an eagle sign in my life in a while, or thought of the eagle. I was preoccupied in the last couple years with seeing signs of the Eiffel Tower (it was almost madness how frequently they appeared) until I booked tickets in 2021 to Paris with my daughters (complete with a hotel room with a view of the Eiffel Tower) and then returned in 2023 for a writing retreat. While I still see random signs of the Eiffel Tower here and there, their appearance has diminished and now I wonder if the eagle is making its comeback. What I also realized in reading her story was my uncle Paul had a Greyhound kennel when I was growing up and what do you think the name was… Eagle Kennel. How did I not connect that? I was gobsmacked. I have know this my whole life. A long time ago I started writing a TV pilot about Greyhound racing, but I couldn’t find enough family history about it. My uncle died tragically, taking his own life trying to dry out of alcohol abuse. Now I have to go dig it up that script. What is the muse telling me? Never ever in a million years would I think that reading Karen’s short piece would make me think about the eagle and then my uncle and his kennel. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s everything.
The muse is alive and well today.
Today, my teen daughters are home, loafing about doing this and that in the living room, and I was taking a beat at my computer, thinking I needed to really do nothing but sit here and see what came to me. I remembered I needed to read Karen’s piece. In doing so, I was evoked to re-recall totems, creativity, signs and a piece of my past I had not saw as so profound. So I opened the door a little bit to my muse by simply engaging in nothing with a priority or a purpose. I stated to myself that I needed some “just be” time.
In some ways it can be downright annoying what the muse unearths. Great, so my uncle had a kennel named after an eagle and I had a totem as an eagle, so what? But that is what is so beautiful about sitting for even twenty minutes in the busy stream of all we have to do and just allowing the muse to talk to us. She may say a lot, she may say nothing, but even in the nothing there is everything.
As much as I can get lazy about listening to new music, or reading an essay in the Paris Review, or a blog someone told me was funny, or one of the books in a big stack by my bed, when I engage with the ideas, dreams and epiphanies of other writers, I have my own experience of getting lost into the possibilities of my own creativity. We can’t do everything in the box of our mind. We need the stimulus of the collective to remind us what we may have buried that can be dislodged.
We get to connect dots that may lead to paths to nowhere, but I can tell you at the end of any wandering is some delicious piece of the pie. I keep a miracle journal for this very reason. To see where even the smallest nod of an occurrence has altered me in a very subtle way, that ripples through the course of my life.
What is your totem animal? Open your eyes and see what appears to you. Where it is leading you. Shut down the doubt of frivolity or grandiose spirituality. Flow and discover. The muse will be there when you call her.
If you enjoyed this post, please share it with friends. Also, I love seeing comments and responding to them, so go ahead and start a conversation about what inspired you here. We sit alone so much as writers. We need dialogue to break us out of the lonely diatribe in our heads.
Love this; a snake appeared in my front yard yesterday and it was fascinating to see one in the wild. As I gently moved closer, the snake slithered on and I then saw a second one on the path! Snakes represent change or rebirth. And I am absolutely drowning in this process of re-creation. I believe it’s a sign that as painful as it is, my current path is correct and guided.