On memory & the muse

an inner invitation

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” ― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Creativity became my spirituality when I was somewhere around twenty. Maybe because I grew up with it, disowned it, then reclaimed it. Maybe because I needed its medicine. Either way, it felt otherworldly to express curiosity, joy and pain in ways I couldn’t allow to surface off the page.

The paper in my journal felt, if not safe, urgent. It offered me a different perspective, a new vista of the past, and a reminder of the magic I believed in when I was a small child. The magic I saw in others, in nature, and myself.

At first, it felt as though this urgency was coming from nowhere, as though a muse had arrived and that was that. But I now think of my muse as a perfect mixture of attention and memory. It is only with the ripening of certain memories, after all, and a willful attention to life today that we can find the desire to invent (and reinvent).

Memories that are inaccessible on the surface are still quite present in our lives. They can be tapped for our creative efforts, but it’s not always easy or predictable. The problem of repressed memories—beyond fallibility and emotional trickiness—is that they often materialize with force and present an unwanted, ill-timed obstacle course that pushes us to mental extremes. If explored, however, the memory may feed something unexpected and beautiful.

I'm learning it's not that easy though. When writing to tap memory or because a memory arises, it is necessary to slow down the process and truly approach it with tenderness and care.

It was shared with me by a brilliant woman I recently met that to offset the onslaught of media and hyperspeeds of the world, the best practice is to revisit familiar spaces and notice the subtle changes. In other words, walk the same block you always do with ease and attention. Walk it again and ask yourself what’s changed.

To do so—to repeat—soothes the creative mind and allows us to get to the space we need to be to go to the deeper places that only dedicated writers know. The place I called spiritual earlier, which could also be called flow.

Here, we can journey safely, but not without reawakening the emotions of times past. The joyous memories warm us when we feel frozen by inaction and remind us how temporary and beautiful the cycles of life are. The difficult ones test us and nudge us toward our deeper selves.

If memories are a struggle to capture, there’s always a sensation to act as our portal. This is the ultimate foundational writing advice: note the smell or sound we remember, the temperature of the room and the texture of the hardwood floors, or the busy-patterned carpet we sat on as a child. If the memories are still stubborn, walk the path again. Explore the same paragraph, the same textures and scents, and joys and pains. Write that paragraph over and over, until it becomes something more like a door that you can walk through and into the creative depths.

Creative prompt: Describe a place where you were exposed to a new idea, through a book or conversation. How can this memory of place intermingle with where you are right now?