Off in the distant timber, I saw flashes of red and black mackinaw jacket as Straw Hat acted out a repetitious foraging sequence of looking, seeing, stooping into the brush, pausing to cut, and rising from the tangle again to toss a severed mushroom cap into his camouflage rucksack. I followed him north, over the crown of the wooded ridge and down a slope which led on into a bark-lined darkness.
Shifting from moment to moment, the sounds of heavy rain and gusting wind through the taller trees mingled, coalescing into a single sound which babbled and shushed as though it were that of a swollen stream splashing over jagged stones. I followed my friend, but my heart wasn’t in the Sunday morning hunt, and I found myself going through the motions, looking less for supper and more for a surrogate muse to drive a lovely word or two from the emptiness which has increasingly defined me these past months.
An hour and change later, while my buddy and I sat in the truck with warm air blasting through the vents and across the puckered skin of our chilled fingers, I blinked and heard a voice from the past arise in my mind. Quiet as a synaptic whisper, Mischka Uno’s smooth rasp gently scolded and reassured me. “Your muse isn’t outside your own heart, you know,” she said with calm and steady conviction. “You shouldn’t look to other places, to other things, to other people for the kind of inspiration which will always exist inside of you, waiting to be recognized, to be lifted up, to be trusted…”
As her words faded into the crackle of the citizen’s band radio coming over the speakers, I felt my head nod of its own accord, took a sip of too-hot coffee from my thermos, noticed the last bright vine maple leaves tossing on branches beyond the windshield, and whispered back into the space from which she spoke. “I wish it seemed so easy…”
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