I just spent a week with elders down near Asheville, North Carolina. Here on my own back porch again, the tree house that folds out into green leaves and bird song, I’m impressed by how this place restores my artist heart.

What would make this a perfect day?

Accomplishing tasks... creative work... friendship... earnings... life changing event... humor... acclaim?

Why did I once seek a stage - draw attention to myself? Could be something musicians do; we love to love and that’s how we know to do it.

I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - so help me God.  Hand on the bible, oath of honesty in a court of law.

But in Amy Tan's cosmology, as she creates something from nothing in her novels and in her life, she rejects absolutes.  Here are quotes from her TED Talk, which I highly recommend watching if you spend time with the muse:

"How do I create?  By questioning and saying to myself there are no absolute truths.  I believe in specifics - the specifics of story - and the past and what is happening in the story at that point. 

By thinking about luck and fate, coincidences and accidents, God's will, the synchronicity of mysterious forces, I will come to some notion of how it is we create.

There is uncertainty in everything that is, and that is good.  For then I can discover something new.