reflection:
Meeting Your Muse: A Mary Cassatt Moment
Naomi Rose, Book Developer & Creative Midwife
Your Muse can show up when you sit down and call it in. But it also can show up anywhere, even when taking a breather at a park where families congregate.
The Intimacy of Inspiration
A Better Way to Write a Book
I was at the local marina with my husband last Sunday to spend some time together in nature. As soon as we got out of our parked car, we were met by the wind whipping off the open bay, a bracing, blustery experience. Heads lowered against the wind, we made our way instead to the inlet on the other side of the road: a protected, calmed area near the yacht basin where families gathered on the grass, young people strolled and biked, and older couples made their slower, more contemplative way. It was a warm summer day in Emeryville, California, and many people also must have felt the urge to come and play by the sea.
We sat on a wooden bench and enjoyed looking around at the clear blue sky and rippling water, the birds flying, the rushes and the trees, the people. Right before us on the grass was a young mother and her daughter, and some other adults sitting on their blanket. We could not hear the words they were saying, but the mother and daughter’s postures spoke volumes.
The young mother’s back was towards us as she knelt on the blanket, talking with her friends, punctuating whatever it was that she was saying with eloquent movements of her left arm and hand. And with her right arm and hand, she kept her daughter – perhaps two or three years old – close. That arm protected, contained, and nurtured the girl, not as an afterthought but as a complete, wholehearted act.
Even though the mother was having a grownup conversation that she clearly was engaged with, the gesture of her right arm and hand made it clear that she was completely present for her daughter. And the girl leaned completely into her mother’s side, must have felt the warmth of her mother’s body and heart, gave over her trust quite naturally and let herself be supported.
It was a beautiful sight, even from the back: the mother’s straight torso and her dark upswept hair, and her arm around the blonde girl dressed in pastel colors leaning into her.
I turned to my husband. “It’s a Mary Cassatt moment,” I said.
Mary Cassatt, “Mother and Child” Inspired Images of Intimacy
Mary Cassatt, if you haven’t yet been privileged to know her work, was an American painter who lived in Paris in the late 19th–early 20th centuries and was influenced by the Impressionists, especially Degas. Her predominant subject matter was mothers and children, with a few forays into opera-goers and individual portraits. But mothers with children were her fascination and her specialty.
Not a mother, herself, she was able to crystallize, in the most natural-seeming way, that tender, protective bond between a mother and child, and the child’s natural trust in response. Cassatt painted mothers bathing their children, holding their children, playing with their children, taking them boating, helping them pick apples from the trees, reading books with children, and all sorts of quite ordinary pastimes and activities that would not be surprising to view in real life. It’s the intimacy she captured that — in addition to her beautiful compositions and impressionistic layers of color — to me, makes her work classic. For that bond is the original human one, the essential one, and we all know it or in some way long for it.
Being Called =
Being Inspired
(to write what’s in your heart)
What has this to do with “Finding Your Muse in You” and book writing? I think whatever calls you towards it with that kind of intimacy and/or longing is there to inspire you. Writing from the Deeper Self, as I share it and have experienced it, includes being inspired: you are going towards something that’s calling you to it, even if the way there has patches that are dense and oblique and initially hard to see clearly.
I’d go so far as to say that the best way to write the book of your heart is to be drawn towards it – even if it’s just a whiff that draws you, even if it’s just a trace, a whisper. Something from the invisible, not-yet-manifest world has chosen you (and vice-versa) to make it known to yourself in the course of writing about it. The object of your Muse can change over time, but the nature of being called is the same.
Mary Cassatt, “Picking Daisies in a Field”“I was a hidden treasure,
and I longed to be known,”
God is said to have said, in explanation of why human beings were created. We as humans have the same longing — to be known, and to know the deeper strata of our true being. It’s rarely publicized as part of people’s “bucket list,” but it’s there in the soul all the same.
When you write a book from the deeper Self, you allow your Muse to find you. Whatever may show itself on the outside — mothers and children, for Mary Cassatt; a beautiful vision of my work, for me — the movement towards meeting that Muse happens on the inside. That capacity — that requirement — is in you. You can meet your Muse not only on my website but also in yourself. It’s not all that far away once you open to it.
The Book of Your Heart
Awaits You.
If this stirs something in you, I'd be glad to explore it together with you.
You're warmly invited to a free 30-minute Discovery Call.
This is the end of the reflection, “Meeting Your Muse: A Mary Cassatt Moment.”
To read more on the creative process of Mary Cassatt (and others) so you can be more in touch with your own creative process, see the “Creative Process” page.
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