Active flux.
Strong inside but weak outside.
Things completed support the penetrating;
Also entering, the just and great.
Of course, my beloved partner, Nancy Coscione, is not the Muse. She only embodies the Muse for me a great deal of the time. She has her own set of gods that are part of her personality. There is much more to her than her effect on me or my reaction to her. However, the Muse does spice up our romance when she is projected onto her. Nancy seems to be able to handle the burden of the projection. I have also found that the ideas presented in the book, Getting the Love You Want, to be true in that the object of our love has both negative and positive characteristics of many of the care-givers from our childhood. This influences how we see our lovers and how we may possibly engage them in conflicts that are more about problems that were in the prior relationships. Awareness of some of those conflicts may help circumvent some of the problems arising in the current love relationship.1
James Hillman has discussed how we may have a propensity to project our gods on innocent mortals due to the lack of acknowledgement of our gods within ourselves. We must see each other in as many different ways as we see ourselves. If my lover, Nancy, has many characteristics of my principal care-givers, then she would have many characteristics of Krishna, the Dog, and the Mockingbird as well as the Muse for me since each of those allies also corresponds to my principal care-givers (respectively: my brother, my sister, my father, and my mother).
Again, Nancy has her own personality made up of different parts which may have very little relation to mine. She and I performed a Novena entitled, the Oshkosh Novena, after the place where I was born in Nebraska and close to where the Novena was performed. Nancy was very upset from our traveling conditions, insecurity about my expectations, camping, and her being away from the children for so long. I was very sensitive to her need to be more comfortable and towards giving her freedom from any assumed expectations from me. In short, the piece became hers while I observed and interacted with her. She felt more comfortable after she had talked to the children on the telephone and I turned on a television set that I brought along. Turning on the television was a symbolic act which totally ended any sense of pressure from expectations.
I wrote a narrative about the trip mostly in her voice in order to see if I could match the personality she believes she projects to others. In other words, I wanted to see if I knew her well enough to speak with her voice. She assures me that I did. I was helped by her journal and with a few words of advice from her. Before I start the narrative, I will introduce Nancy Coscione to you as she is, separately from me, a little more clearly than I have so far.
1 Hendrix, Harville. Getting the Love You Want; Harper & Row; 1988.