How Do You Find Your Muse

Finding your muse is never as romantic as it seems, and when I was a student, I had a difficult time with the whole terminology of finding subjects to work on.
Muses, seemed to me to only be things that happened to other people and when they happened it was very exciting and dramatic. Same happened when people spoke of inspiration.
I just didn’t get it. I still don’t. I never have beautiful greece girls running after me with ideas, nor for that matter do I have equaly georgeous greek guys doing the same, which in fact I would probably prefer.
I work.
I work, I get into a rhythm, I let things happen and sometimes good happens and sometimes not. Its not consistent.
The only consistence is the fact that I work. I wake up in the morning and think what I am going to work on today, and I start.
Often, within 2 seconds I am working on something completely different than I was when I started working - I suppose that that is what people are talking about when they speak of inspiration.
The one thing that I know though, is inspiration doesn’t come on its own. You have to go and look for it, and if you don’t find it in one place, look for it in another.
Gusto’s Author, Harry Swartz-Turfle, has a great post on just that, - How to Find Subject Matter according to Wolf Kahn.

Kahn told a story about going out to dinner with a professional baseball pitcher and a professional cello player. The pitcher, who had just lost a game, talked about how he pitched best when he wasn’t thinking about what he was doing. When he just reached down deep and threw the ball, his stuff was blazing and unhittable.

“That’s how I play,” said the cello player. He would practice the notes, work on learning pieces note by note, and then when performance time came the music flowed out of him without thinking. The more he thought as he played, the more the music would suffer.

And Kahn of course connected to this idea as a painter. “We should all be living examples of spontaneity,” he said.

That “mindlessness” is where it is at for me.