Inspiration...and Adventure!

So my lovely friend Caitria asked me to do a guest post about inspiration on her writing blog, Stories in the Mind. You can head on over there to check it out if you like! Here's a link to the post: Inspiration. It's a fantastic blog!

I'm hoping to post some poetry this week...it's been awhile. So stay tuned!

I have crazy news! On Wednesday I found out that I have been given the opportunity to go to Kenya in six weeks. Yes, I said Kenya!!! AHHHHHHH!!! I was invited to help out with a missionary retreat and at the end I'll be going on a two-day safari... I'm so thankful for this incredible opportunity and I feel like God is going to do some awesome things in and through me. Be praying along with me, because I've never been so far from home by myself. I'm soooooo excited! I will have lots of pictures to post when I get back!

 

Inspiration.
 

It’s a silly, wild, elusive little thing, isn’t it? So necessary to art and writing and life, yet so often hard to catch.
 

Catch? Hmmm. No, that’s not quite right...

 

Inspiration may elude or even run from us, but it is not something that can be captured. It was not made to be caught and tamed, put on display and wondered at.

 

Oh, but it certainly is something to be wondered at. It is quite possibly the very life-blood of a writer’s existence.

So why does it seem so hard to come by sometimes? That we can sit and stare at paper or screen for hours and have nothing to say, no words to describe, no ideas to present...

 

Ahhhhh, writer’s block! We moan. We doodle. We daydream. We poke around on Pinterest. But nothing comes...must just be out of inspiration. It must be hiding again...hmmm.
 

Well maybe it’s not quite so rare as we might think.

 

What if we could open our eyes to see that inspiration really is in and all around us – the people we know and the strangers we don’t, the world we live in and the places in us that we no longer visit? What if I told you that inspiration is all about how you see the world around you and yourself and the things you write or sing or draw about?

 

(Because let’s face it, we’re all artists whether our tools are paint and canvas or pen and paper or keys and computer screen...but you knew that.)

 

Our task is to capture the wonder of people and life and emotion through story and words, to inspire our readers, to find it for ourselves...
 

Wait what? Write to be amazed ourselves? Oh but don’t we? Isn't that the first reason we write – to discover for ourselves the wonder of a beautifully described character, a perfectly conveyed emotion, a scene so clear you can see it, a line of poetry so pure it gives you shivers?

We write ourselves into other lands and other people and other times. We write ourselves in and out of emotions and joy and pain.

 

And inspiration fuels it all.
 

What is inspiration really?
 

I looked it up and one resource defined inspiration as “the act of drawing in.” I like that. It’s so true.

 

When we open our eyes to the little things around us – the way the sun catches the autumn trees, the mischievous grin of your favorite two-year-old, the friendly twinkle in the eye of that old lady in front of you at the grocery store, that song that comes on the radio at just the right time – drawing in all those things that make it worth climbing out from the warm covers into the freezing room in the morning...that’s where inspiration flows freely from the world and into us and then out of our fingers onto paper and screen.

 

That’s when you realize that all the inspiration you need is right there in your backyard and your house and yourself – like that funny quirk your neighbor has of standing by the mailbox and throwing away half his mail without opening it, or your little brother’s habit of singing while he does the dishes, or the way you turn to writing when you’re trying to figure something out.

 

It’s all right there. We just have to learn how to see...