An Omen of Inspiration

I laid in bed for what felt like hours. My eyes remained shut though my mind swam with archetypal imagery. Tones of grey danced back and forth across the bleakness of my mind’s eye until I could no longer play along and headed downstairs. I removed the kettle from the hearth and sheepishly moved to my typewriter. Dust had settled on the peddles from weeks of my inability to even look in its direction, but somehow, tonight felt different.

I could almost hear the rhythm of the letters beating down on my mother’s desk as I stared seemingly half-conscious through it all. For years I hadn’t spent more than a day apart from this machine, almost relying on its movements as if they were an extension of my very spirit, and now, I could barely be in the same room with it. I had never anticipated my life without the constant tapping of it’s notes and therefore have never thought to fill my time with anything more than what it had to offer. I suppose at this juncture in my life I should be busied with children and a husband, but I guess I just felt like there was time for that later.

My mother would often say that later had no face that you couldn’t already see in the mirror, and I always sort of shrugged her off. She had a way of making the mundane unnecessarily abstract so this certainly wasn’t the first of her ramblings that at the time I couldn’t see the wisdom in. In some way I think I deeply wanted to portray the same sense of depth and wisdom through my writing and when she passed away all the things she represented in my life appeared to pass with her.

The natives of this land say that the omen for death is the Owl. That they shepherd the human spirit away from this world and into the next. While I always suspected my mother to be more of a subdued hue of light than some force watching from the dark, the barn owl does fit a perfect picture of her last days. She loved the shadows but only so far as the shade on the front porch, or beneath the oak tree near the mouth of the creek. After her death I often would imagine her experiencing the world through the presence of that tree. Or the creatures that often took shelter amongst its branches. At times I suspected I was being watched from one or even all of them but other times I conjured this feeling to alleviate the loneliness of their likely emptiness. I can’t say I wouldn’t mind the company this evening.

Almost the moment this thought crossed my mind I felt overcome with emotion and drive towards my machine. In a daze I put down my cup of tea and laid my hands onto the cold peddles. I closed my eyes and allowed for the spirit to move through me and onto the ink ridden paper in quick, revolutionary action. Words and words and words penetrated the once white void now making room for intuitive manifestations of the human condition. I felt my mother in the room like the spirit of Christmas past. Pleading with me to lay down the lines of poetry that have been holding my heart captive and hardened.

Words. Sighs. Tears. Passions. Enveloping my core then firing outward in rapid friction. The four elements of existential movement followed closely by the distinct stage of acceptance. A calm swept over the contents of my home, and I opened my eyes. I reached for the parchment to examine what channeled nonsense may have fallen out, but shocked and comforted, what I found stretched far beyond my intent.

“The words like lost limbs, stolen behind the clouds,

Of my heart and my whims, buried within and without.

Busheled and blooming, your eyes stare back through,

Taming, priming, and swooning, ask yourself, which part of me is you?”