When the Muse Doesn’t Know

I ask you what animal you would be.

“Elephant,” you say, without hesitation. Grounded. Intuitive. Loyal to your herd. Guided by both memory and emotion.

Your answer has weight. Mine flutters.

The question first comes up in a leadership workshop where the exercise asks, If you were an animal that reflects your leadership style, what would it be and why? I ask the facilitator if birds count as animals. Everyone laughs. I am not joking. Birds lead differently. Through instinct and air.

When you turn the question back to me, I say hoopoe. You look it up and tell me, amused, that the bird can release a foul-smelling secretion to ward off predators. I say it reminds me of my own gastrointestinal tendencies. Maybe that is a kind of biological leadership trait too.

You laugh, the kind of laugh that travels through a screen but lands human.

Later, I send you When Time Changed Shape, the story that begins with Rooh ki Saheli. You ask who that is. A soulmate?

“Not quite,” I say. “More like a muse.”

The word lingers.

You tell me you wouldn’t mind being a muse for a painter. I take it differently. Not as stillness on a canvas, but as the living question that tilts someone toward truth.

“Maybe you have been,” I tell you.

“Maybe you are.

We are multitudes.

Who knows.

There’s always the butterfly effect.”

You say it reads like a poem. To me, it’s probability.

Somewhere in those exchanges, you mention Camille Claudel. I think of Quills. You ask if I have read anything by Marquis de Sade.

“I have,” I say. “And yes, madness is the handmaiden of creativity of that kind.”

It still feels true.

“I am home with the flu,” you say. “If someone were to paint me, it would be tissues and the shine of Vicks VapoRub under my nose.”

I tell you the picture envisioned has colors that are quite bright, mayhaps not as intense as other scenarios. You say my word mayhaps makes me sound like an Edwardian gentleman. I find that quietly endearing.

By then, the hoopoe has stopped being an answer. It becomes a movement. Inquiry turning into intimacy. That is the musing. Musing isn’t worship. It is reflection. Not the marble muse who waits to be gazed at, but the kinetic one, curious and unguarded, midwifing clarity without claiming it.

You unsettle rather than flatter. You open a door I didn’t know existed. Sometimes what spills out is laughter. Sometimes, a bird with digestive honesty. We speak as much nonsense as philosophy that day. Between the two lives something real. Connexion.

Only later do I understand something simple: you had entered the creative space in my mind long before a single line was written. Not through anything dramatic. Just the accumulation of you. The way you think, the questions you ask, the books you reference, the tilt of your humor, the energy you bring into a conversation. Even the visuals of you: your tattoos, the Moonlight Sonata on your arm, your playlists, your love of dance, the ease of those rooftop salsa moments. These things lodged themselves quietly. So, when the words finally arrived, they weren’t starting from zero. You had already taken your place in the inner world from which creation draws its first impulse. The writing only arrived to meet what the mind had already begun.

Maybe that’s all I mean when I speak about the creator and the created being in sync. Not a grand idea. Just the way an outer impulse nudges an inner stirring, until the line between the two thins enough for a story to slip through. Akin to the dancer–dance dynamic. Maybe that’s also where the old what-if and what-is tension lives - in that small, real-world gap where the mind runs ahead and the moment pulls it back, and meaning forms somewhere in between.

You never know when you are being the muse. Neither do I. We only notice once the current has carried us elsewhere. The hoopoe turns out not to be my leadership animal at all. It becomes a metaphor for that current, the space between question and mirror, absurdity and revelation. Its honesty, however foul-smelling, feels right. Beauty and absurdity often share the same perch.

If dance is the body’s prayer, musing is the mind’s. You lead, then follow, then recede. I listen, speak, listen again. A duet without choreography. We never speak of leadership again. Your question changes how I think about dialogue and about creation.

Leadership demands control. Musing invites surrender.

Some people lead armies. Some lead teams.

A few, without intending to, lead someone quietly back to themselves.

from Rambling of an Itinerant

References

• https://anitinerantobserver.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-epiphany.html
• https://anitinerantobserver.blogspot.com/2025/12/life-of-chuck-my-story-my-way.html

Acknowledgment: Co-created with a Muse (who doesn't know) and a touch of GenAI.