Inspiration

It’s 11am and here I am again, trying to write. For some reason, the letter ‘I’ is not an easy one for me. That is not to say that I am looking forward to ‘J’ with any degree of happiness, but I suppose the prompts for these two weeks have not really inspired me.

Thus, I will talk about inspiration. If it won’t come to me, I will just have to find and dissect it…

Inspiration is an interesting choice of topics for a bard of the OBOD. From the first, we are taught about the mystical ‘Awen’; the root of our magic and our arts is awen, a truth and knowledge that begets new truths and knowledge. It’s all wrapped up in pretty metaphor, but that’s the basic idea.

So, given that I am a writer by trade, I suppose I should know a little something about inspiration. It’s my bread and butter, the source of my income and my output; without it, I’d be nothing.

I suppose inspiration is something hard to grasp, hard to explain and rarely understood as well as people think. You hear about things which inspire an artist or about the ‘muse’ abandoning them, but the truth is that inspiration is not an external thing. As a writer, I don’t sit around waiting for a supernatural being to bash me over the head with an idea or for something to set me off; if I am uninspired, I go looking for it.

To me, inspiration is more about a receptive state of mind. We live, especially in the information age, in a world saturated with ideas and information. We read a few hundred words before we even arrive at work in the morning, watch a few dozen stories being played out in the time it takes to walk or drive to the school or office. Even someone who drags themselves out of bed and shuts themselves in a home-office without seeing another human being will usually read their email, maybe look at Facebook before they get to work.

We see so many things that can inspire us that we have actively trained ourselves not to see them. We blot them out to avoid information-overload. We allow our eyes to pass over the couple sitting at a bus-stop holding hands, the father and daughter sharing a packet of crisps as they walk to school, the two people sitting side-by-side on the bus and, cheeks blushing, deliberately not making eye-contact. That is the trick to modern life, the ability to not see things.

Awen, to me, is not about being given something; it is already there. Inspiration is what happens when you look at the data before you and try to fill the gaps. It’s about listening, watching and just letting the truths and the knowledge enter you. Who cares if you do not have all the facts, you can combine multiple glimpses of multiple stories into one narrative. It is about the truths that emerge when you combine the disparate elements and see what the misshapen amalgam looks like.

If this sounds like other things, things that even a non-writer pagan does, then you may be right. There are many other rituals and exercises that work in similar ways, but turned inwards. Vision quests and meditations usually involve quieting the mind until you can hear the truths you were drowning out, but the important part will always be the part where you stop and listen.

So, inspiration is just what happens when you stop talking and start listening. It’s not something to chase with a butterfly net, running all around the houses to find, but something you simply have to let in and stop chasing away.

It’s like crossing the road; you stop, you look, you listen and then you prepare to go forward once the time is right…