DANCING THE MUSE - Danial Neil

   There are times when I awaken when I don't know what I'm going to do that day. I want to do something meaningful, something rewarding, some purpose. I am momentarily lost, without structure. And then I take a photograph, or write a good paragraph. That was my dream after all. Why such consternation in the early hours when dreams fade and another dream begins? I think we need such times to direct our attention to our blessings. I am humbled most days by all that I experience. I look around and see the suffering in the streets, the shopping-cart world that I do not know. I am grateful for what brings me joy, what moves me. Gifts perhaps - I don't know. But it is what I can do, the explorer of landscapes and mindscapes. And to share the human experience in my own way, and to be accepted and loved, is the true meaning and purpose of it all, to me at least. And the eagle in the tree, driven there by ravens, only waited for my camera lens. His/her preflight posture and the

  Standing alone, I see the colourless, the poetic boundaries of the world. It gives me my place, my lane so to speak, where I can construct, or imagine, my stories into being. It is not detachment from felt experience, but rather a subtle felt experience where what one imagines, takes up the same memory space as real experience. What is real after all? I use this often in relating how writing fiction enriches my life. A memory of something I did last summer feels much like a chapter or scene I wrote during that time. The imagery and details are similar. To the mind, both are experienced, both have left impressions. To be honest, to experience life in real time cannot be replicated, or equaled. Still, I have both experiences and grateful for the opportunity to create characters and scenes at any time in our history. That is the gift, to create stories, to inspire and entertain, and even educate. And all the while it comes from our own minds, or does it?  It is difficult to separate the