Amused by the Muse
When a wolf shows up, it is time to breathe new life into your life rituals. Find a new path, take a new journey, take control of your life. You are the governor of your life. You create it and direct it. Do so with harmony and discipline, and then you will know the true spirit of freedom.

RageBoy wanders back alleys in search of his wolf and turns around to find his Muse instead. Except that she's it. She's she -- the wolf in muse clothing. Like dreams, muses sometimes play with misdirection, take the words we know so well and turn them inside out. And then maybe we notice that the muse is hiding behind a mirror etched with the eyes of a wolf. And we look into those eyes and know.

Writers are always in search of their muse. Jennifer Balderama, off to Paris and beyond, is figuring that she needs to re-acquaint herself with hers. Needs to re-think how she writes fiction. Needs to get less structured, more sloppy. Her mirror image, maybe. I wonder if she's going to be out of the country -- and without her laptop, too -- when Frank Paynter's interview with Denise Howell hits Blogaria. Maybe he can reveal Jennifer next.

I haven't written any poetry for a long while. That muse seems to have gone on an extended vacation. Maybe Jennifer will run into her in Paris. Instead, a blogging muse has taken her place. She looks like a faerie and needs lots of attention.

let it rain, rain, rain
save me from myself again
wash away my ugly sins
opposing thumb, dorsal fin
that monkey died for my grin
bring my happy back again
let it rain, rain, rain
bring my happy back again
--- REM, "Lotus"

I dreamed last night that I lost my thumb.
It was the thumb on my right hand, and I didn't lose it; it broke off somehow but I never felt it happen. All of a sudden I looked at my hand and the joint where my thumb would have been attached looked like a chicken joint looks when you cut off the appendage. It didn't hurt, but seeing it missing triggered such a wave of panic and sadness and loss that I started crying uncontrollably (in my deam, that is). In the dream, my mother was there and tried to console me, but she was powerless to do so. And it was not her comfort that I wanted. Someone else's. Whose?

I moved out of the REM sleep, waking up to thoughts of Sissy Hankshow in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (great novel, btw; terrible movie). The benefits of the opposable thumb.

I told my mother about the dream, and, in typical good-Catholic-with-leftover-old-country-superstitions, she immediately went to consult an expert, to find out what the accepted "dogma" is. In this case, she consulted her book on The Classic 1000 Dreams, which said: To dream that you have injured your thumb indicates that you will shortly be in a serious quandary. You will have to choose between giving offence to someone whom it would pay you to please, and making yourself look ridiculous in the eyes of your acquaintances. Hmmm.

bIX once posted (long ago, in some other weblog at some other point in his life when he was actually posting) that dreams are the garbage dump of the brain. But I think dreams are important messages from our unconsious, from the oracles of our spirits: "pay attention, think about this" they say in their language of misdirection. But there is a message here somewhere in my missing thumb. I'm still trying to figure it out.

it's not that the transparency
of her earlier incarnations
now looked back on, weren't rich
and loaded with beautiful vulnerability
and now she knows.

now is greater
and she knows that

she just wants to be somewhere
she just wants to be
She just wants to be somewhere
she just wants to be
---- REM, "She Just Wants to Be"