We have a little saying around here: Disasters of Creative Inspiration and Epic Proportions.
Aka, oh my god the house I can’t even.
But we’ve talked about that before. The external environment is a mere mirror of the internal chaos. The more in the creative process I am the more disastrous my house appears (to the uninitiated observer). Michael turns his OCD to the weeding because the great outdoors is less of a disaster.
Oh yeah, it’s a wreck at the moment. But whatever. I wrote a song I’m really happy with, so there.
However, my mind was a total blank when it came time to write this week’s blog post, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll just think it through in real time, and we’ll see what we come up with. It could be hilarious. It could be weird. It could be like watching paint dry. You just never know with me, you really don’t.
Where to start? What have I been noticing/thinking about/learning/doing/hearing/tracking . . ?
I’m getting ready to jump into our Level 2 Sound Healing class with both feet and have been reading lots of books on energy healing, sound healing and tuning forks . . . Could be some good fodder there, sure.
I’ve been watching the whole Rudy G + Stormy Daniels + Michael Cohen + He Who Shall Not Be Named debacle go down, and it’s given me a lot to think about, because there is, honestly, absolutely no good guy to root for here. The person closest to being in the right is just trying to get out of an agreement she thought she had to not sell her story to anybody for lots and lots of money because she wants to sell the shit out of that story for even more money than ever before, and well . . . that’s not exactly altruistic, but . . . the slimeball antics of the wanks on the other side of the dispute are nothing short of horrifying when they aren’t pathetically hilarious. I’d like to be able to root for somebody, I really would, but “Yay, porn actress who thought having sex with THAT thing was an okay idea at the time . . .” doesn’t really run anything up the old flag pole, if ya know what I mean, and I really, really, super-really don’t want to know anymore about this than I already do. So probably not much there.
My home state just passed the most restrictive abortion ban in the entire nation, and our woman governor signed it with a big shit-eating smile on her face because she hates women . . . But I’ve already done a post about that.
Ah, dowsing! There’s something I’ve been rediscovering and working on again! I could riff on that a while, for sure! I knew I’d think of something. So . . . what is there to talk about with dowsing?
- Why dowsing is so fantastic
- History of dowsing
- Tools and techniques
- How to make your own tools (and why you should make them as easy and cheap as possible)
- How to do it
Look at that, it’s a whole blog post for sure! And it only took me half an hour and all these other words to come up with it. Well done me!
But that’s not the subject of this post, so I’m going to reserve it for another week, because it looks like it’s going to take a bunch of research and several photos and a lot of time, so . . . we now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post . . .
Which is about the creative process. Well, really more about the inspiration process.
So what have we learned?
That inspiration comes from life, from the little things we are doing day in and day out, from watching the world and thinking about what we see and putting it together with the impulse to do some good. Is a single painting going to change the world? Depends on the painting, of course, but generally speaking, probably not. Will a song? Some of them have made some powerful statements, and have become revolutionary anthems for movements that changed the world . . . Not quite the same thing.
But it is clear, we need inspiration. Sometimes we don’t have the words or the images or the sounds to express what we are feeling, what we are angry about or how we want things to be, and we depend on artists and writers and songwriters to pull all those feels out of the air and turn ’em into something we can grab on to and use to fuel needed change in the world. Creatives see into the cracks, feel into the betweens, pull form out of fragments, and transmute things into other things. Sometimes they transmute pain into beauty. Sometimes they transmute confusion into some kind of abstract truth; we look at a painting or listen to a piece of music and think, yeah, that’s what that feels like, I’m not alone anymore.
But inspiration is no more, or less, magical than any part of life. Planting a seed and watching it sprout and grow into a flower or something you can eat is pretty magical, but we sort of take it for granted, or think it’s just biology. We don’t think about the act of planting a garden as something so profoundly creative that it could make one weep. And it is – think about it. You lovingly prepare the soil. You commune with the birds and the bugs and the worms, and you break the earth just a little bit and put seeds into the wound, and you cover them up tenderly and pour water on when you’ve finished. You watch every few days for signs of life, of the ground giving birth to the food you will eat, to the herbs you will harvest and make into tinctures to heal and nourish yourself and your family, to the flowers that will bring light and joy and a sense of the sacred to your garden. You tend these babies, you watch them grow and you harvest their fruits and they become your body and bond you closer to the land.
Inspiring, yes?
Inspiration comes from living. If you spend all your time consuming, inspiration is going to be a scarce resource. People who plop in front of the TV or Netflix and stop moving are going to find themselves less inspired than those who take continuing education classes, study for the fun of it, journal, walk in the woods, have deep conversations, read good books, and incorporate recreational consumption of entertainment into a balanced blend of activities.
Do stuff. Get ideas. Play. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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