Dear <<First Name>>,
In case you didn’t know, you don’t get to pick your magic animal. They choose you. Personally, I would have preferred a goose, but my magic animal is a mouse. At least I think he's a mouse, I’ve never actually seen him. But judging by the droppings he leaves behind he is most likely a mouse.
The thing that makes my mouse magic is that every Friday night for the last five years, without fail, he has visited my bedroom while I slept and pooped gold.
In folklore, there was once a goose that laid large, perfect, golden eggs. Oh to be that lucky.
My mouse leaves tiny little turds.
On Saturday morning I awake, rub my eyes, and glance at the designated spot to see if Fievel unloaded any gifts for me during the night.
Bingo.
I get out my miniature broom and sweep the kernels into my tiny dustpan. I bring the evidence over to my work table and turn on my lamp.
Under a magnifying glass, using a tweezers and a fine brush, I attempt to separate the gold flakes from the excrement. No, my mouse friend rarely drops complete gold nuggets, he makes me work for it.
Within the turds, if I am lucky, will be a single self-contained chunk in the debris. Mostly I am hunting for flakes. If the flakes are too small to salvage with the tweezers I go into old prospector mode. I place the dust in a quarter-sized tin pan, add a few drops of isopropyl alcohol from an eyedropper, and gently shake the pan to separate the sludge from the gold dust. It’s not glamorous.
Usually the entire ritual is complete by lunch time, but occasionally it takes an entire weekend. Like any job, mining mice feces is an art. You get better with practice.
After the flakes and particles are isolated I clean and disinfect them, weigh them, and put the gold in a tiny vile. It sparkles when held up to the light. As I swish the water around I wonder if it was worth it. How many miniature bowels have to empty before I have collected enough gold to move the scale?
The final step of my weekend ritual is to proofread my work before gathering the courage to let others read my creation. Every essay I publish feels like a gamble. Will they see gold in my words or will it smell like mouse farts? It could go either way.
I won’t say I don’t believe in naturals. Maybe there are artists who effortlessly push out masterpieces. If that’s you, congrats. But for the rest of us our best hope is to lose ourselves in our craft. It may look to others like we are wasting our time, spending more hours than any rational person should, digging, hunting, polishing, and excavating abandoned mines. We do it because we know that there is alchemy in routine, in showing up every day with your shovel and the willingness to sift through mountains of crap in search for kernels of gold. Keep digging, my friend.
I’ll write again next Sunday. Stay creative.
Your friend,
Adrian
P.S. I want to apologize for the profanity in the subject of this letter in case I offended anyone. I firmly believe that profanity is almost always the laziest form of communication. But in this case the juxtaposition of filthy language and a beloved wholesome cartoon character was too much for me to resist. Forgive me.
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