Posted on by LA · 73 Comments

I Took a Walk

The past few days you’ve read about things that happened when I took a walk.

A walk.

To the Farmer’s Market.

Down the streets of my neighborhood, streets that I walk along all the time.

When you stop to actually look at your surroundings, when you pause and look up or look down, you never know what you are actually going to find…or see…or experience…

You probably aren’t going to see someone get hit by a van…but who knows what you will see when you open your eyes?

Inspiration is all around you…sights, sounds, colors, experiences…

How do these things make you feel? Sad? Happy? Intrigued?

Can you see the makings of a story? Poem? Novel? Play?

Or did it just make you think about things in a different way?

Here’s your assignment:

Take a walk. You can choose the destination. Really use all your senses as you walk: What does the sky look like? What does the air smell like? Pause and look down at the ground- look left, look right. How does what you are experiencing make you feel?

Write it down.

Think about it.

Then do something creative with it.

Inspiration is all around us if we are open to the possibilities. I know how easy it is to be in a rut. I was in one a few weeks ago. I looked at the page and I didn’t care that it was blank. I was perfectly content leaving it that way.

So I took a day. I had a pity party. All the teeny tiny violins were there. Then I shook it off like raindrops that you are unprepared for and got on with it.

We are all allowed to have bad days. And if you believe the Friends theme song, it can be a month or even a year…but eventually we do need to snap out of it…

We are too important to have bad days every day ad infinitum…

We are too important to leave the page, or the canvas, or whatever blank…

We are surrounded by inspiration. We just have to allow ourselves to see it: allow ourselves the latitude to explore it.

Put your phone in your pocket.

Take a walk.

Consider this your prescription: put one foot in front of the other.

Posted on by LA · 137 Comments

How Do I Write? Let Me Count the Words…

What inspires you?

Recently we talked about how my family always being underfoot has made it difficult for me to be creative, how I need solitude in order to tap into my muse. My muse is an introverted thing, and she needs to be alone in the house with music softly in the background and the scent of lemon wafting from the diffuser, and a cup of black tea with milk and sugar sitting on the side.

My muse took up residence somewhere else during COVID…

But anyway…

Turns out I need to be alone to actually put words on the paper…

But…

In order to be inspired…

in order to find things to write about…

I need to be out and about. I need people, places and things from which to get ideas. I am never going to get ideas from sitting in a room with my diffuser and a cup of tea. I mean, those things might make it into a work, but for the most part, how much can I write about them?

ok- expect a post about my desk sometime in July

I am a sensual person. I am inspired by the things that I can touch, taste, see, hear and smell. When you are a sensual person, you need to be interrupted. You need to be amongst the people. When you are a sensual person who is looking for those ideas, you need to be disrupted. You need some sort of controlled chaos.

Quiet to write.

Distraction to be inspired.

Look at the things that I choose to blog about. I do not get these ideas while sitting in my desk chair, smelling the lemon and drinking my tea. I might read a great comment, or be treated poorly by someone. Run out of toilet paper or talk to my sister. All these things get my brain working…makes me reach for my planner and pink pen and jot down the idea…At the time I write the note I may not know what my post will look like, but I know that I’ve hit on an idea that I can expand…

The toilet paper post of this week- do you know what my note was for that day?

things I did for my family that they didn’t realize

I wrote that note months ago because I knew that somewhere in those words was a blog post. As I sat down to write and thought about that note, the incident from the previous week popped into my mind…

Inspired by chaos and distraction…

Enough about me:

What inspires you?

Where do you get your ideas from?

How do you keep track of the things that you want to write about, paint, photograph, whatever your chosen medium is?

Do you just think of things, or do you need some sort of distraction to inspire you?

What activates your muse?

Discuss