The Mind is the Candle

On the migration of inspiration

It’s so hard to tear myself away these days. All I want to do is write and write and write.

I tap out notes on my phone as I walk down the road. I dream in sentences, which boomerang back to me when I wake, miraculously intact. I leave myself crackly voice memos while I drive, concerned for safety but also for the safekeeping of ideas. During intermission at my friend’s play, I stay in my seat even though I have to pee, so that I can transmit the backlog of thought that’s been steadily building in the background all day. I am available, at every moment, to the archive.

This is one of my favorite feelings in the world. When I become so immersed in a project that I tune into a new frequency, and every element around me begins to resonate in one magnificent chord. When the work becomes a lover I can’t wait to see again, and I am left breathless and wanting more. To be in a place of inspiration is to be in a place of belonging—nothing lies outside the view. I can see everything, and everything is connected.

Once at an outdoor party, I noticed that a candle in the corner of the patio had dripped onto a spiderweb. I paused in the middle of a conversation and stared, transfixed by this beaded fractal, hovering in mid-air. What was once invisible was now rendered in thin scarlet wax—a magic trick revealed. 

In a state of inspiration, the mind is the candle, the world is the web.

In the fall, I was awarded a small grant from a community foundation to work on my book. It’s a memoir comprised of a series of personal essays that I’ve been working on for a couple years, with varying levels of passion and commitment. Back in April 2022, I was at a bar with a friend when I announced, after two glasses of wine, that I was writing a book. My cheeks pinked with equal parts pinot and pride. I then went into the bathroom and tweeted: Just said this out loud for the first time: I’m writing a book! (And now, as a Capricorn, I have to do it.)

I did not do it. I lost steam. I lost heart. I lost direction. And I was filled with a lot of shame for not doing this thing I had set out to do, this thing I had even publicly announced in an effort to hold myself accountable and to make it real. I set many internal deadlines for myself to finish a draft and send out proposals to agents, and those deadlines came and went. Then I had a baby, and I resolved to set the whole project aside. I hoped no one would remember I’d ever said anything about it to begin with. I completely forgot I’d applied for the grant.

When the email came in from the community foundation, it felt like a message from the universe. It said to me, this thing is not dead. It said, somebody believes in it and believes in you. It was a resuscitation, a lifeline, worth far more than the actual monetary offering (though as a fully self-employed person, that has been a huge gift too).

I understand now that the project was and is on its own timeline. It needed to be left alone for a while. It has its own seasons.

Like the birds I love so much, I like to think of other things in my life as migratory. Sadness, good fortune, tanned skin. The muse is migratory too. As the year turned and heaved toward the light, it flew back to me.

We take the baby to his first diner, and I hand him little packets of Smuckers jam: strawberry, grape, orange marmalade. I stack them into a pyramid like I always used to do at the diner in my hometown, and he takes his pudgy hand and knocks them to the floor. It’s a game we repeat again and again, the clatter of the packets on checkerboard tile.

When I get home later, I record this moment in a slim notebook entitled NOTICING JOURNAL. Jam packets, pyramid, fist. It’s an assignment for the writing workshop I’m taking—to observe and archive—and it’s given my mind the kind of hot precision of a laser through steel, cleaving away ambient thought to hone in on the twinkle of little moments.

• A glass jar of almond hand cream on the nightstand, the diameter of a silver dollar.

• Eating a donut outside on a cold day and licking granules of sugar from my bare white fingers.

• The red-tailed hawk I inadvertently chased down the road, its body flying and landing down the length of wire, as if I was kicking a can.

It is all beautiful, all meaningful, all charged with new energy. These days, the world feels almost obscene in the way it exposes itself to me—all its magic and wonder laid bare like flesh. Revelations and ideas hitting me with the soft weight of shed clothing.

It’s impossible to exist in this space of inspiration all the time. Like any joy, I know it’s not lasting. I will have to take the glasses off at some point, and the jar will be a jar, and the jam will just be jam, and I won’t be blinded by the sparkle. But I trust now that it always comes back.

I understand that to be an artist is to stack our little packets to the sky, and no matter how many times they get knocked down, to keep building again.

There’s a nameless plant on my desk that’s going crispy with neglect. Lacy leaves curling in on themselves in defeat.

Back when we lived in Brooklyn, we named all of our plants: Princess Katherine, Jean-Claude, Juanita, Bubba. Each of them adopted from the combination bodega-nursery up Franklin Avenue. Bubba, a bushy philodendron, curled along the curtain rod while the rest of the family took up the sill below, sucking in sun that filtered in weakly through the crosshatch of bars on the window. Snake plant, prayer plant, peace lily. By the time we moved out of the apartment a year later, they were all dead. I stopped naming plants after that, afraid that the act of naming was somehow an act of condemnation.

I take a sip of water and then tip the rest of my glass into the plant pot. A sip for a sip. The same way I say, sip for Mama, sip for River, before bringing the glass carefully to my son’s lips. All of us connected, drinking from the same cup.

I swear I see a leaf breathe. It says to me, this thing is not dead.