Light and the being of IN-spirit

What inspires you these days? Lately I've been writing like crazy – none of it this blog. It's not that I don't have enough to say. I think of at least six blog ideas every day. But I made a rule when I started this thing that I would not become one of those tweeting “quantity not quality” folks who let every thought in their heads go right out on to the Internet. I honestly don't think most of you care whether I have a nonfat grande latte this morning, (did I say that in the right order?), if I'm wearing clean socks, or if I'm having a bad hair day.

Frankly, neither do I.

Like many of us weathering this deary, never-ending down-turn, I am doing my best to just keep treading water. I try to wake up each morning grateful to be alive, working to make things happen and try each day to help just one person. Hate to bring up that disco anthem, Stayin' Alive, but it did a quantum pop into my head the other morning and it will not leave. The gritty tempo, that determined, survival attitude, matches the way many of us are walking through each day. For the most part, we're getting by. Somehow.

But that doesn't have to be all there is.

Like I said, I write. I'm polishing one manuscript and researching and writing another. I'm doing freelance writing, digital media and contract marketing brand work, while helping to create a new non-profit and serving on the boards of two existing non-profits. The writing/publishing world says that writers should choose a “platform” -- a place to stand and pronounce our expertise. Somewhere in there are at least four platforms on which I could stand.

I choose to magically give myself eight legs, keep my two ears, one mouth and the fingers on this keyboard. I stand on a platform of light and possibilities. For me, that's what being creative is about: to produce what I've been put here to do that wasn't here before...to bring it into being.

Did you know that Italian word for birth means, quite literally, “to give to the light?” Or that great sculptors were known to say that they did not so much chisel a great work into being as that they chipped away the excess to reveal to the light the figure trapped within in the marble?

Then there is that word - inspiration. “So what was your inspiration?” we ask the creator of an “inspired” works of art, or the composer of an “inspired” piece of music. The word's root truth means to be “in spirit.” To say that a thing is inspired is akin to saying.... there because of the grace of God. It means that the creation is recognized as connected to the source of all good energy. That it was moved by the divine to be brought into being by the person who was put on this earth to do that work.

Find your inspiration. If and when you do so during these dark winter days, remember what Albert Schweitzer pointed out, “In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”

Now if I can just get that Stayin' Alive chorus out of my head.....