My Muse Has Left the Building

Meditation in the North Woods From the ebook Encounters In Nature © 2011 B.T. Newberg

Last week I sat down to write and was struck by a horrible feeling. I didn’t like where my writing was going. Nothing seemed to work. My wife and best friend Saumya suggested I go back and re-read some of my earlier pieces (for completely different reasons) – I did. I began to feel that was the cause of my funk. I like to blame things on her, but really the blockage was all me. After writing The River is In Me, I longed to write more like it reaching for my departed muse; all my attempts failed.

There are some old pieces that moved me. I revisited: Crisis of Faith, There Is No Hell and My Other Family. Nothing seemed to work. I listened to Encounters In Nature, mainly because my friend Mauricio shared his feelings on it. Did it hold some kind of mojo I could tap into?

Replay complete: I’ve decided it’s time to take stock of how my life has changed over the past year.

Action v. Intent

We’ve had a lot of discussion in our house on the subject of action v. intent. Intent is what we mean to do, what we mean to be doing, what we meant to do. It’s usually a pretty rosy picture, but it can also be delusional. Action is what we actually did. Action is the truth of ourselves. There is no coloring, rosy or otherwise. There is no meaning other than truth. It is what we do, what we did. There is no lie in who we are with action, although it may not paint us the way we wish to be seen.

I view my intent often through the lens of my ideal self – the person I think I am. I intend to be someone, so I think I am that person. But I’m actually who I am by the way I act, not the way I perceive myself. My actions often diverge from what I meant (my intent). It’s much harder to admit who I am using this value system. An example of this is donating to charity. I intend to do it more often than I actually do. I can go into so many different examples of how I see myself diverge from what I’m actually doing.