Inspiration and Art-Work

After several posts on or relating to love, we’re wrapping up with inspiration. 

Love and Inspiration

Inspiration is a notion tossed around like it’s a miracle, a blessing from the muse. A flash of light, an idea from the invisible. 

It’s true; inspiration is a blessed apparition which appears when you’re open and looking. Then, once the beautiful notion comes to you, you’ve got to hunker down and do the work. Inspiration may give you a nudge, but nothing gets completed without doing the work. 

It’s a lot like love that way. After the initial spark, what are you going to do to keep going? Where’s the follow through? That comes from you. 

I’ve come to believe that love: giving, sharing, and celebrating  love, for the long haul, has to be both learned and taught. 

Learning and the Truth about Love and Art

In youth, I took offense to the idea of love being work. Afterall, true love should be easy and flowing, like a rushing river in fairy tales. Unfortunately I thought the same of art, creating art, that is. Because, sometimes creating is easy and sometimes love is easy. 

Then I realized that artwork is true. Great works of art require great work – even when they are (maybe especially when they are) borne in a flash of inspiration. 

In fact, I wrote a poem along these lines for my uncles’ wedding a few years ago.

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Last year I shared about what to do when you have no inspiration: write where you are. It was grim, hard, and felt very much like a grainy, black and white movie. I did the hard work of writing without inspiration because I was living through an even harder labor of love, sitting with my dying mother. Yet, we did not speak of love. The love was in the work, not the words. 

I knew I would regret that. But all I could give was the work. 

I wrote through it. Most too rough to share, but there was this:

I realize that all of this…all of this experience, these moments of reflection, hard truths, and harder lived lies. These minutes that alter between cleaning up, caring for, enlisting help, and often just watching…that seep into numb hours, still provide learning moments.

Lessons.

Stories.

The textural backdrop that fills in everything which connects us. 

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Someday, when I’m staring hard into the darkness, or straight into the sun, looking for inspiration these experiences will resurface camouflaged and mingled among the new.

Inspiration comes easier when you’re open to it. (As does love). Inspiration also comes from refueling your creative soul and asking questions. Questions like what if? Why not? And what happened next?

Inspiration comes when imagination meshes with our common humanity. When your #truth collides with fantasy…terror…desire…

This is a gift it comes with a price
Who is the lamb and who is the knife
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
And turns me to gold in the sunlight

– Florence and the Machine

Every bit of art and work comes with a price.

Raise it up.

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Where does your inspiration come from? Are you willing to work for it? This is a #BlogHop, tell us more…

This was shared as part of Brita’s “Love Blog Challenge.”