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If your passion is making art or music, throwing pots, or growing an artful garden, you are an imaginative person, and you need to stay in touch with your muse. Call her to you anytime you are feeling blocked or uninspired. You can make a very special tool that will draw your muse to you with sweet-smelling smoke.

You’ll want to keep a pot of the hardy and sun-loving herb sage on your windowsill so it is handy at all times. Here is a simple way to use this herb to create a wand for instant inspiration: Combine a long stalk of fennel with a twisted bundle of sage and long sticks of your favorite incense, such as cinnamon or nag champ (my personal favorite). Braid the materials tightly together into a wand using purple (for power) and gold (for money) string or thread. Before any artistic endeavor or meditation, light one end of the wand with a candle and wave it around to clear your environment, allowing the smoke to clear your mind in the process.

Whenever I am blocked in my writing, I watch squirrels. I see them bouncing from tree to tree or chasing each other. At other times, one squirrel will dig up a nut that another had just buried. Once I witnessed a lone squirrel sneaking up on a curbside vendor to steal a nut-bar from her truck. Before the hapless vendor could react, this crafty squirrel leapt off the countertop and scampered off with its prize.

Squirrels inspire me with their activity. Rarely staying still in one place, they leap from one tree branch, grab another limb, and then jump to the ground. This reminds me of my free writing, when I jump from topic to topic. Working with my squirrel muses, I seldom know where they will take me in my writing or where I will finally end up.

I was so happy to see The Muses come dancing into my life this week when I did my weekly draw from the Goddess Inspiration Oracle. I've been struggling off and on with writer's blocks for much of the last five years, and increasingly I am feeling, as Maya Angelou would have said, the weight of the untold stories inside me. I find myself longing to write more and more often, and frustrated by the things that get in the way -- or, perhaps, the things I let get in the way. I've been reading Christina Baldwin's Life's Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest for the last several weeks, and am finding that it's inspiring me not only to think about my journalling practice, but about the craft of writing and finding purpose more generally. I am excited to see what The Muses' energy infuses into these ponderings and into my work this week!

This post will make a lot more sense if you have read the first part.

H/t to Mama Fortuna over at Walk Softly, Witch for introducing me to The Faculty of Horror podcast and getting me thinking about glamour/Otherness.  Meliad also ponders about Witch as Other over on her blog.

I.

And I am a writer, writer of fictions / I am the heart that you call home / And I've written pages upon pages / Trying to rid you from my bones / My bones/ My bones / And if you don't love me let me go / And if you don't love me let me go

One of my favorite places on earth has long been Stratford, Ontario. I first visited this magical haven when I was very young; my mom was taking a Shakespeare class, and she decided to introduce me to The Tempest. We read it and discussed it together every night leading up to our trip, and then I had the spellbinding experience of seeing the words come to life in the Festival Theater, a beautiful space boasting the first thrust stage constructed in the world since the days of Shakespeare himself. There were trap doors and magical things, and I walked away completely captivated.

In the years that have passed, I’ve been fortunate enough to sneak away to Stratford regularly; it was easy enough, since I lived in Michigan for the first twenty-four years of my life, and the drive was under five hours (provided everything went smoothly at the border). It has become harder to make the pilgrimage since I moved to North Carolina, but Stratford has now become a special spot for my husband and me, since we spent our short honeymoon there six years ago, and just returned again this summer for another amazing artistic experience.

(An insomniac's Prayer to the God of Sleep)