And on those many days, when it feels like nothing magical will ever ever happen, I have to keep reminding myself that the only promise I make is to keep going.

I choose to trust the process of working and waiting and to expect that *eventually* the words, the story, the emotion, the meaning, the music of the work will come.

Mary Oliver has a lovely section in the beginning of A Poetry Handbook, about this very topic of appointments with the muse.  She says, “The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem – the heat of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say – exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be… it won’t involve itself with anything less than a perfect seriousness.” (pgs. 7-8)

My declaration: I will show up, keep my appointment, be serious.