My treasures

At the back of the storage. Underneath a box of Christmas decorations and behind the fold-out table we only use if we have more than five people over for dinner. In a tattered cardboard box that once, many years ago, carried “quality baking potatoes” from some, to me, unknown farmer in Ireland to a small greengrocers in the West End of Glasgow, Scotland.

That’s where I keep them, my treasures. My songs.

On coffee stained, weatherbeaten pages that almost fall out of their covers I read the blue and black ink. I travel in time to the days and the places I wrote them down. I feel the love, sorrow, anger, elation and excitement again. I hear the melodies and feel them play in my heart. As clearly, as if I had just put down the pen after writing them down.

I’m a firm believer of living in the present, but I can’t help to notice how much of what I do now takes power from what I have been through. Every page of my novel comes out of what I did “back then” and my songs all focus on the past.
I don’t see anything wrong in this but it sure makes me wonder when the songs about the present will come and what they will say.

“Some day we’ll look back at all this and laugh” doesn’t cover it. All things are not funny in retrospect, but they are easier to understand. I smile and place yet another fully scribbled notebook in the box.

I was digging for treasure today and found it. In the margins of the over-edited renderings of a conquest, I found gold. Very frank notes that spoke so much louder than I had ever imagined they would when I wrote them down.

At the back of the storage I hide my treasures once more, until the next time I will need them again.

Wednesday Musings

My dictionary says

“ Muse n.
1. Greek Mythology - Any of the nine daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus, each of whom presided over a different art or science.
2. muse
a. A guiding spirit.
b. A source of inspiration.
3. muse A poet.”

The original Muses were from Greek mythology. They were goddesses or spirits who gave inspiration. Much argument and discussion about the number of them has gone on through the centuries. Three, five or nine. How many the “correct” amount is doesn’t feel like an urgent question to me, but most people seem to be of the opinion that there are nine of them.

There are so many things and people that inspire me to write. I have written notebooks cover to cover filled with songs about the things I see happening to those around me. It’s my way of processing the surrounding world. My way of trying to understand why people are the way they are and through that figure out how I can change myself for the better. Most of the songs I write are far from great, but every now and then a melody attaches itself to the words in a very special way and it feels just right, I feel blessed. Those instants make it hard for me to see it as my composition. I was merely there at the right moment, in the right state of mind, to scribble it down. The sensation that it came from somewhere that wasn’t of my conscious thought is so strong that if I didn’t know better I would have guesses it was nothing but pure luck.

My muses are usually my closest friends and family, who are most of the time unaware of the inspiration I find in them. Everything I write has a root in reality, I wouldn’t be able to write anything remotely interesting if I just pulled it out of thin air with no reference to my surroundings, my feelings, my dreams and my past. The question of if what I’m writing is a literal or metaphoric rendition of events, I will leave that unsaid for the time being. I think interpretation is half the fun of any kind of art and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you.

Despite all this, I will try to make my ramblings here on the blog a little clearer than my songs and stories, let you know when I’m making things up so you know when I’m trying to keep a dialogue. I’m an old dog stuck in her habits, trying to learn this new trick called blogging.

Thank you for the inspiration