What Inspires You?
I love Webster Dictionary’s definition of “inspiration:” the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative. What latitude in that definition! And yet we know exactly what is being described: it’s that feeling: that jolt of intense interest; that grapple hook in the mind that’s suddenly thrown around a visual, concept, thought, solution, or idea and pulled toward us. It’s the sudden lurch into action; the impulse to create.
I think it’s one of the best feelings in the world.
I also think it is one of the easiest things to ignore. After all, creative artists are told “Don’t wait for inspiration to strike! Just do it!” And there’s much to be said for simply putting nose to grindstone and doing the work, regardless of lightning strikes or lightbulb moments. But too much nose to grindstone ends up making you forget to look up and see, too. When that happens, we often feel the weight inside us: the lack of verve. “No one and nothing really inspires me,” we moan. “I’m not surrounded by such things.” It’s no wonder we feel this way, as it’s hard to be mentally stimulated to do or feel something when we’ve gotten into the habit of not looking for it.
Inspiration, perhaps, isn’t something we get to simply receive, like a gift dropped from the heavens, but is rather something we get to seek, and therefore find.
Keeping this in my mind this past week, I started looking for it, purposefully, at all times of day, in every place I’ve been. And what I realized during my self-imposed week of experimentation, is that it was in the very act of looking for it that I found it.
What I found:
The half-eaten fruit of the dogwood tree dropped all over our city courtyard garden. Half-eaten because all the urban neighborhood crows have harvested them during the day, bad-postured and cawing, and all the squirrels and raccoons have done so at night. The outside of the dogwood tree fruit looks exactly like a giant raspberry or round strawberry. But inside it’s orange-yellow, and heavily-seeded. It tastes like mango: the taste of all deep soft things. I like how the crows pluck them from the branch, holding them in their beaks like dogs with a ball, while the mammals scrounge theirs from those that have dropped on the ground. Without realizing it, for this brief autumn season, our urban tree, planted between a courtyard, fence and a concrete alley, feeds wild life.
Autumn light: You know this light. It’s warmer than other light, even as the air begins to stretch and thin into coolness. Splashes of golden-hour light right smack in the middle of the day shimmer on the shingles of our neighbor’s roof, on the drying blossoms of cream-pink hydrangeas, through the glass vase on our kitchen windowsill, so that it becomes wavy and watery where it’s splashed onto the wall. It was shining while it was raining on Monday, so that the drops on my windshield turned gold. My entire window was a sheet of shimmering beads: one drop of gold per drop. When I turned on my windshield wipers I almost expected them to smear into a golden wash across the glass, obscuring my vision. But the golden beads disappeared on contact: gone.
A Human: I saw a woman helping an unhoused man put on socks. He was painfully brittle. Hollowed out. Grey. She was plump, colorful, with big hair and slow, caring hands. He watched her face as she watched his foot, guiding it into his sock. It was so beautiful it made me cry.
Seeds: As I walked our dogs with my husband in the dark, the sky low and darker than dark above us, starting to shed its water onto the tops of our heads, I saw a money plant arching out over the sidewalk. Its seed pods, nearly translucent during the day, had turned into silver ghosts in the dark. I touched one and it—so incredibly poised to detach from the only thing it had ever known—fell off into my hand. Inside its papery shell it held three perfect dark seeds. I put it away, dry and out of the rain: seed money in my pocket.
A “Weed”: A friend of mine moved to Germany for two years. Her beautiful three acres, which she and her husband have worked so hard on, is in danger of being smothered by bindweed. Bindweed is not ugly: the flowers of Morning Glory are cup-shaped and elegant. They open and close with weather and time of day. Their stems grow and cling and climb like we wish all other, less wild vines would do. Yet it entangles tightly around other plants; uses up their nutrients in the soil; grows here, there, and everywhere. I pulled bindweed out of my friend’s garden even as I admired its tenacity, and strength. For it can’t be eradicated; only kept on top of. It doesn’t apologize. It doesn’t try to dampen its enthusiasm. It’s not afraid to be ambitious.
Community: I’ve been pushing myself lately, reaching out to my community as we establish Parsley & Rue. Lately I’ve met an herb farmer, a leader of a Neighborhood Association, the daughter of a mom who immigrated from Vietnam and who now runs her own flower farm, a contractor, a restaurant owner, the head of a senior center. For someone who has always been drawn more to nature than people, it was nice to be reminded once again: people are part of nature.
And although it’s not the end of the long list of things that inspired me this past week, we’ll call it as such for this blog post, as although it was the physically smallest of what I observed, it was also shared with my son, in fact noticed, first, by my son, which made it all the sweeter: This morning, as we were waiting in the car for the schoolbus to arrive, my son said, “Look. There.” At first I couldn’t see it, but then all of the sudden I could: a tiny white spider, climbing up the outside of the water-spattered window. Seeing it from beneath was different; a treat. Through the glass we could see the length of its rapidly-spinning legs, its compact body, like the shape of the number 8. We watched it climb up the entire span of glass—like climing Mt. Everest to us—and disappear out of sight. It had chosen its moment well: I was sure it was up there, tucked into a door seam or roofline crack, safe and secure. A white spider making a run for cover with tremendous, and tremendously-timed, small-legged poise.
It's funny how inspiration works, once you find it. Here at Parsley & Rue I’m all about floral design, and Allison is all about ceramics. I know for us both so much is taken in from the surrounding world, and it informs what is done with leaf, herb, flower, twig, stem, clay, glaze, form, hands, wheel. I’m not sure quite how the alchemy works: how the certitude of the white spider and the wavering golden light on the wall and the half-nibbled dogwood fruits will inform my next floral design. And yet I know they will, if only in that I’ll look at the plants before me, and I’ll feel that feeling: that mental stimulation to feel or do something.
Maybe inspiration isn’t dropped on us from above. Maybe we look for it, we find it…and it changes us somehow. A strange, small or gigantic internal twist of the clock of creativity. The result might be the outcome, but I’m starting to think the looking for the inspiration might be the point.