I end this blog on the sentiment on which this trip began. I wrote this in December, before I left:

Maybe the muse stems from our deepest wounds, wanting to fill us with all that is us. Maybe the muse is the parts of our soul we lost early on, beckoning to us to come retrieve them, but we can only do so by journeying back to the source. Narcissus, when he looked at the reflection in the stream, didn't think he was looking at himself, he thought he was seeing someone else, and fell deeply in love with the beauty of it. Perhaps the love for the muse is the love for our own image that we have disassociated from, and the courting is the trepidations yet intoxicating path back to reclaiming the divine in us.

Maybe the divine is ours.