Step One: You Have One
For some, this seems to be the most difficult step. Maybe you're not an artist/musician/writer so you think you don't have a muse. Wrong. Everyone does. Just because yours is different than the media portrayal of the Muse, doesn't mean that she* doesn't exist. What media portrayal currently describes your struggles and your life right now? What, none? Exactly.
My mom's muse couldn't be arsed with airy-fairy art junk. She's got snarled balls of yarn being delicately barfed up onto her desk by management, full of knots and tangles and a lack of fucks to give about current tax codes. It's up to my mom (and her muse) to wrangle that hot mess into order. My mom's muse answers to the name Mrs. Peel and dreams in numbers.
Don Draper is frequently seen as The Establishment in Mad Men. He's full of hetero-white guy privilege during a time where it was extra tasty and delicious to be a hetero-white guy due to the constant buckets of money, ease of middle class life and all the under paid female labor there to help you at the office and at home. He's a brilliant ad man which even then was seen as being in league with the devil. But he's brilliant at it and his words and images evoke beauty and longing which is super useful when you're in advertising. His muse creates commerical art with him which was like saying your muse likes to create meth in a lab but muses do what muses do.
What is your Great Work? What is your Union of Opposites? I have to be honest, I don't feel everyone's Great Work is necessarily based in the pursuit of occult knowledge and that's more than okay in my book. The world would be incredibly tedious if it was. Maybe it's math, maybe it's science, maybe it's cooking, maybe it's cleaning, maybe it's flying a plane, maybe it's making a really fantastic cup of coffee. But it's in there, in you. What do you give a fuck about?
After identifying the fucks you do have to give in life, you can begin courting your muse.
Step Two: What Do You Dream About?
Muses are slippery creatures by their very nature. While the muse is often referred to as a female, there is nothing saying yours can't be male or some other gender all together.
One thing most muses have in common is that they tend to be very clear about who is the bitch in the relationship. Here's a hint: It's not them.
Have you met your muse before? If not, it's going to be a lot more work getting to her. Not impossible by any means, but more work. If you haven't, chances are she's been asleep at the wheel for a while. If you have and you're reading this, chances are yours left you out the bathroom window while she claimed she was powdering her nose. It is possibly even more challenging to get in touch with yours if you have met her and she's given you the slip.
Let's start with the scenerio that you haven't met yours yet. On a Friday, pour out a libation that you think your muse would like best (champagne, Red Bull, Scotch, pomergrante juice, clamato juice, pig's blood, it's your muse give it your best shot) and a small plate of treats for your muse to partake in (cherries wrapped in proscuitto, a Magnolia cupcake, a dove's heart, a marrow bone, 1,000 day gouda with uncured bacon, again this is your muse you would know best) and a small pink candle. On a piece of joss paper, write out why you want to be talking friends with your muse. Don't let your pen leave the paper, if it does start over. Roll it towards you with a little ginger powder dusted on it and light it in the candle and let it burn.
Wait a week to see if you get any feedback. Do you hear a specific song on the radio, in the supermarket and in your playlist repeatedly? Do you see some kind of omen that wasn't there last week like seven bunnies in every empty field you pass? Has your muse appeared to you in a dream? At two o'clock in the morning when you're supposed to be sleeping, is that bitch kicking the bed with a brilliant but inconvenient idea? You've made contact, congratulations. You're on your way to a more interesting life.
If you haven't heard from your muse in a week, obvi she didn't like your presents. She's a vegan, she thinks cherries gross, she doesn't eat sugar any more, gluten makes her stomach cramp, whatever. You guessed wrong. Or she's playing hard to get. That's a fun game muses like to play too. Continue offering different things on a Friday with a new candle and a new petition, waiting a week for her reply until your muse shows up.
Usually that approach is no bueno with the gods and spirits because sometimes, friend, They Are Just Not That Into You and it's kind of stalky which is a turn off. But your muse is a piece of you and you are a piece of your muse so due to that symbiotic relationship, all bets are off and you can be more pushy than usual.
Is your muse on walkabout? No longer responding to your calls? That means you're too boring to bother with. You need to spice up the relationship again.
* I have chosen "she" as the third person neutral for this piece because it's what's organic for me. Feel free to insert whatever pronoun you like! You're the captain of your own ship, sailor!