Inspiration

3/14/08

There’s no telling when you’ll be struck by a surge of power that compells you to turn all of your raw energy into something you can hold in your hand, or let spiral down the funnel of your ear and descend down into the sewers of your brain - or perhaps this surge just motivates you to get up and go buy some groceries. There’s an invisible web preventing you from doing these things, keeping you where you are in your puddle of contentment, your pinhole of complacency. It’s just apart of being human, though. Don’t feel too down and out about it. An object at rest tends to stay at rest. It’s hard to conjure up the momentum to swing your body into an orbit around a goal or a prize, attaining something your heart desires but your body cares not for. This is the constant human struggle, the spirit versus the ever-sluggish physical formation of what you really are upstairs.

A body moves at a finite speed. Your brain thinks at the speed of light. This human delay isn’t likely to improve in the near future. What if the souls that manifest these temples of transportation have so much more to do than what their means of conveyance are capable of delivering? Our brains think without us, so quickly in fact that we’ve come to learn to ignore most of its processes in order to go about our mundane lives. Some of the most brilliant minds in history came to be who they were because they managed to harness just a slightly greater percentage of this power of the mind more than the average person, and thus came operas and playwrights and equations that map our universe. The only thing we learn in time is patience, ironically through our own impatience about where we want to be going or where we’d rather be standing. We are but building blocks hovering on all fours in a giant pyramid of our kin, above those before us and below those to come. We have a set role in this delicate structure of the meaning of it all, for better or worse. The knowledge of this offers us humility to calm our otherwise egocentric nervous system. Patience is our only option.

I spend much of my time sitting on a couch in a quiet and dark basement, waiting to catch ideas in various traps I have set out all around the room and beyond. These traps collect sparks, notions, observations, ideas, arguments, conversations, and sometimes just boots and paper clips. I sort them all out later. I then shed my guise of an Alaskan crab fisherman and trade it in for the downgrade of being a caveman huddled over a pile of soggy logs in the rain, attempting to create something kindle. Hours, days, weeks, whatever it takes. I’m not even talking musically. This is my proud process of everything I create in life. It’s a wonderfully dreadful process that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.

Inspiration is everywhere. It’s on the street, in the paper, through the television screen. It’s in your own head, or under your bed or probably somewhere locked up inside of a dream. The truth is you have to set up traps where ever you go, and answers will thaw out like water being freed from the snow. Whatever it is you’re after in life, whether it be writing or finding a job or finally figuring out exactly who it is you are, you’re not going to get far very if you don’t set up some traps and keep your eyes open. Pay attention. Stay awake. That’s all there is to it.  The rest is on its way.