Muse and Musings

Do you believe in the mythical figures buried in the rich Hellenic pages of old? If yes, have you heard or read about the Muses? The Muses were the sister-goddesses who presided over the arts and sciences in Ancient Greece and later came to be regarded as the ultimate source of human creativity and inspiration. Classical Greek literature identifies nine Muses: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania. According to Hesiod’s Theogony (c. 700 BCE), which served as a foundational text for later authors, the Muses were the daughters of Zeus, king of the gods, and Mnemosyne (“Memory” personified). They came to embody knowledge, creativity, and the arts, particularly through poetry, literature, dance, and music. Their veneration was especially prominent in central Greece, in the Valley of the Muses near the slopes of Mount Helicon, and at sacred sites such as Delphi and Mount Parnassus, where Apollo (god of arts and music; also the sun god) was honored as Mousēgetēs or “Leader of the Muses”.

Image credit: Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre

Throughout antiquity, authors and artists frequently invoked the Muses at the beginning of their works, seeking divine aid in crafting poetry, hymns, or epic narratives. Such invocations were often appeals for inspiration or for the Muse to speak directly through the author. This convention appears in some of the most influential texts of Western literature, including Homer’s Odyssey (Book I; c. 750–650 BCE), Dante’s Inferno (Canto II; c. 1321), and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Act I, Prologue; c. 1600). The legacy of the Muses extends beyond classical antiquity. Their enduring presence is also evident in modern language and culture: the term “muse” remains synonymous with an individual who serves as a source of artistic inspiration, while the term “museum” was derived from the Greek mouseion, a sacred space dedicated to the Muses.

In this essay, though, I speak of the Muses not as distant, abstract figures summoned by the sheer labor of imagination; but as living, breathing presences. While literatures named nine, I have met six. I will recount in the order I've met them: Uki (pronounced /ˈjuːki/, “yoo-kee”), Pan (pronounced /pɑːn/, “pahn”), Sun (pronounced /suːn/, “soon”), Ryu (pronounced /ˈrajuː/, “rah-yoo”), Oni (pronounced /ˈuːni/, “oo-nee”), and Red (pronounced /rɛd/). To others, they might’ve seemed like ordinary human presences, unremarkable in the flow of daily rhythm, but to myself, each carries a quiet, transcendental power, in ways I am still learning to understand. This essay is, in some ways, an extended reflection on a thought I first shared in a tweet on X (formerly Twitter). Allow me to extend that narrative here and recollect my encounters with them, and how through their presence, I was transformed.

Canto I: When Windows Open to Light

Following the first stirrings of presence and perception, I began to understand that the Muses do not arrive like the heavens collapsing down upon you, bathing you with divine insight. Instead, they invite themselves in quietly, almost unnoticed, altering perception without announcing themselves. To meet a Muse is to feel your world shift just a little bit, just enough for curiosity to trickle in gently; like dawn brushing you delicately with its warmth, easing into the lingering chill ever so slowly. You acknowledge the warmth as true and benevolent. You gradually surrender to it. Until it infuses you, saturating you with renewed awareness and a rebirth of consciousness. Their influence are subtle at first: a glance, a phrase, a fleeting gesture, but it accumulates, layering the familiar with an unexpected depth.

Only through the quiet patience of noticing and remembering could I begin to approach the coming of Pan, whose presence is at once mischievous, transformative, and gently instructive. The reckless onset of youth carried me to my first encounter with him, when the room still felt like it was framed in glass and handles. I met him, his face sculpted from the planes and angles of unspent youth, smooth and unlined, as if to belie the age-old yearning on his eyes I could not yet name. We would often lingered at each other’s windows, and in those brief exchanges, I felt a storm passing, an overcast readying itself to give way to light, waiting to break through streams of clarity.

Looking back, I see Pan as a rainbow waiting to scatter his colors. He was never one shade, but a spectrum: imbued with grace and callow gayness. To meet him was to discover the prism within: to be one and yet also many. He invited me, gently and without demand, to feel at ease in my own skin: to live truthfully, to claim oneself, and above all, to accept it. In that lingering, I recognize the quiet confluence of inspiration: waiting patiently, scattering light and color where the heart is ready to receive it, leaving a trace that reshapes the way one feels, perceives, and remembers.

Today, Pan celebrates openly, in revelry and pride. I wish I could dance beside him, though not yet. Still, I hope the disruption will come soon. For in retracing these moments, I find myself altered, not by grand gestures, but by the slow accumulation of small awakenings that together form a larger constellation. One only asks that I pay attention.

Canto II: Solar Return

I remember Sun stepping into my life carrying a torch (figuratively, of course), during what felt like the slow, unraveling fade of romance. A moment when my heart was caged away in a very grim place; desolate, oblivious, and caliginous. When he appeared, it was as though the world cracked open just enough for light to pour through. After so long in the dark, you forget what warmth feels like… until it touches you again.

He carried light as though it belonged to him. Warm and life-giving. It spilled from his smiles, stimulating like gentle apricity. There was a brightness to him that reminded me of sunflowers or sun-ripened clementines. Being near him felt like standing face-to-face before the sun itself; impossible not to turn toward, impossible not to be changed by. For a moment, I thought I was Kal-El, drawing health from a yellow sun. But no, it is him. He is Kal-El.

In my mind, I also often think of Sun as some royal Taeja (태자; 太子) from his past life, an oriental crown prince. I always loved the way he wore his long hair, and the way his eyes seemed to shy away when he smiles, as if to kowtow in quiet reverence to creation itself. Perhaps in knowing him, something in me was altered, too. I began to see the world as an artistic expression I had never realized before: raw, outpouring, and ungoverned. That the world never exists in black or white. But in a palette promising you with vigor.

He always carried himself with a polished air of nobility and finesse, but was always tempered by a resilient gentleness. Perhaps a trait that could mean so much to him in the days ahead: he is training to be a physician now. And I believe he will be the kind who saves not only bodies but spirits. If there is a hand that could steady the pulse of the world, a touch that could persuade breath back into stillness; it’s his. I should know. I’m a living proof.

Canto III: Spring Starts

Speaking of palettes and colors, Red bloomed into my quiet garden on a fair, sunny day, when the air was soft with coolness enough to breathe it in again. It was spring now, and spring flowers hung thick in the surroundings. Red was different from the other flowers, though, I finally noticed. I remember how the light seemed to fall differently then, unhurried, as if pausing to admire him, too.

He was a sight to behold: there was a fullness and robustness to him, glowing in warm tones of vermillion, shaped perhaps by the many seasons under the sun, yet he was tender and delicate all the same. At first, I thought he would be like those ephemeral schadenbergianas. But where others passed through in brief bursts of color, unlike them, he lingered. He took root, and ever since, my garden had been fuller because of him.

The grass always seemed greener wherever he finds himself in. There is something about him that belongs to the old magic of earth. Red is one of the rare few who can talk to the trees and wooded life, and the trees would bend back to greet him in reply. He knows them; not just their shapes and shades, but their odes, their laments, their elegies. There’s something in him that makes the world open up a little more, as though the earth trusts him.

And I would often watch from a distance, caught between awe and wonder, knowing I was witnessing something rare: a conversation between man and the living earth itself. “Devadof de gohenad an (n)esnad agoref.” I thought I heard him softly murmuring in Sindarin. “We would seek... your forgiveness... for the injury... we have done…”

In his intimacy with nature, he has always been a solivagant at his core—wandering beyond places even maps would get lost into, seeking not destinations but quiet conversations. To him, the plants were never silent, they were companions, he listens as though every leaf carried a secret meant only for him.

I aspire his independence, that ability to belong everywhere and nowhere all at once. To trust the path by trusting oneself. To find the quiet confidence to wander. And if ever given the chance, I would trust to follow him to the ends of the Earth, in search of plants and connections unknown.

Canto IV: A Close Encounter with Calliopos

Oni is perhaps the one I miss the most. Not because I never see him anymore, nor because we speak so rarely these days, but because he’s the most elusive of them all. His digital footprint is so faint (almost deliberately so) that you’d think he doesn’t want to be found. Or maybe he simply wants to exist quietly, in peace. Which is exactly like him.

Oni isn’t one to talk much. He just listens: deeply, intently. But when he does speak, it’s as though every word is measured and alive, leaving you with a strange and beautiful clarity. That’s his magic: he speaks to you with intent, with kindness, with warmth. I don’t think I could ever win an argument against him; I’d fold every time.

Speaking of folding, I remember those days when we’d show up in the lab in the same shirt color again and again. Whether it’s black or navy or ash or green. After a while, I stopped believing it was coincidence and started entertaining the delusion of a psychic connection between us. One day, I finally said it out loud (that “we’re twinning again!!”) and he just smiled. One of those smiles that could burn the world. My world.

Those were happy days. I don’t have any idea what’s keeping him busy now, but if by some rare chance he’s reading this (unlikely, given all you know about him by now), I would want him to know something I never said out loud: you were the only person who made me feel there was a place for me at the table. You made me feel seen. You made me feel I mattered. Because of you, I was braver in my thoughts, kinder in my work, simpler in my ways, more certain in my steps. And I am a better person for it. I hope, with a quiet and persistent hope, we meet again someday at some unexpected crossroads; twinning or not.

Canto V: Between Games and Glances

In the fast-paced blur of young adulthood, it felt like both a privilege and a quiet joy to reconnect with Ryu again, after nearly a decade of life quietly unfolding in our own separate corners.

We had been childhood friends; close in that easy, inseparable way only kids can be. He used to come over to our house, sometimes with a whole crew of friends, and we’d huddle around my PlayStation, the room thick with anticipation, as X-Men Mutant Academy or Street Fighter EX2 Plus loaded on the screen. On other days, I’d find myself at his place for a Yu-Gi-Oh! card duel. And then there were the afternoons we carried our games into the streets, letting the asphalt become our arena until the sun surrendered before we did. Back then, wins, losses, and bruises were our currency, and nothing else in the world seemed to matter.

Time, as it does, moved on without asking. And then, our reunion arrived unexpectedly; at a time when life seemed to be offering each of us what felt like its sweetest slice. He had just topped his boards, and I was finding my momentum as a young blood in the early rush of working life. Our reconnection felt as natural and certain as rain only ever falling downwards. I never truly understood the depth of friendship until I met him again. And perhaps it was also a kind of love I hadn’t yet learned the name for: the kind that feels like a homecoming, like Earl Grey warming you on a stormy afternoon, like the soft lactonic scent of freshly changed bedsheets, like the gentle relief of Oh… it’s you. I missed you.

If anything, Ryu reminded me that real connections can stretch across years and kilometers without breaking, held together by something stronger than presence alone. I’m so proud of him, not just for what he’s achieved, but for the person he’s always been! Even now, he’s off somewhere far, carving out his slice of the world. But I still keep a piece of him here, in the quiet corners of our home where we once lived out half of our entire youth, side by side—or perhaps, console-to-console.

Canto VI: Psalms Erect a Living Pantheon

Uki was my coming-of-age awakening. I met him a little before I turned eighteen. Back then, he always had his ukulele, as if it were an extension of himself. His fingers could dance on the strings with grace in a way that seemed both practiced and instinctive. But his voice was something else entirely, perhaps a voice that could rival Orpheus himself. It carried a certain je ne sais quoi that seemed to gather the air closer. A voice that could bravely descend and journey into the deepest unknown corners of my heart. And unlike Orpheus’ tragic fate, his voice met me gently at the surface. It wasn’t music anymore; it was a tether.

He was perhaps the catalyst for the many seasons of love I would come to know over the next decade of my life. He was the spark that kindled the embers I had kept hidden deep within, the quiet steady pressure that coaxed me until I could erupt into someone capable of truly loving. I felt like a young island suddenly born out of a seismic event he never knew he caused, naïve and jagged at the edges, but already dreaming of the forest that would one day root itself from all the feelings I had yet to name. I’m not everything I want to be yet, but I’m a lot of things I wanted to be ten years ago, and what a wonderful thing it is to realize that.

It was him that I began to understand what holding on to bonds really does to a person. Bonds don’t just keep you from drifting; they root you, tenderly but firmly, in the soil of the people who matter. And I think that is why, even now, he remains a living thread in my story. His inspiration was perhaps what binds everyone here, in this piece, together. And might be the reason why I’m writing this piece in the first place. His music continues to weave everyone in memory, so it can hum quietly in the background of all the seasons still to come.