Day 4 – Where do you find inspiration?

(Didn’t really troubleshoot for days when I’d be so busy and away from the computer that I couldn’t post. However since this was more of an exercise to get myself to write more often, I’m not feeling any guilt over missing a day ON the day. I just want to blog more and will try to get through all the topics in August!)

My inspiration comes through music and visuals. I am a very visual person and I also have synesthesia, which often translates music INTO images and texture for me. I can here one barre of music and suddenly have enough in my brain to write out two songs worth of lyrics, one short story or draw (I rarely draw anymore. I used to do it a lot when I was a teen. I’d even created my own group of superheros and a small comic.)

A dramatic string arrangement in music can fill my head with all sorts of dreams. I can almost taste the imagery I’ll feel it so strongly. I need to channel that electricity into something. Normally it’ll be some song that I write down (in various colours) and then sing into some recording device. (Lately it’s my iPod, which I don’t even use anymore, but it has memo recording capabilities and I then I save it on my computer.)

I know this might sound cheesy, but in the last two years, I have developed a thing for sunsets. I am obsessed with the colours in the sky at dusk. The sky can become so breathtaking that I can gaze up at it for the entire time the sun goes down. Capturing it on film (digital) doesn’t really do it justice, but I try my best. Between the clouds and the colours, it all feels so calming and it helps ground me (even though I’m looking up ).

I often think I need to compile all my sunset shots and have them printed up and hung up in my home. They remind me to breathe and just sit and enjoy life for a while. They make me want to write, but I haven’t been.

When I was young, we’d always summer on Lake Champlain in upstate NY. I’d spend hours out at the end of the dock, looking out at the water and writing. There’s something in water that makes me feel creative. If I get that creative over a lake, imagine if I lived near the sea? I’d be a songwriting machine!

I love texture and calm. I love dramatic string arrangements in the bridge of a song. My inspiration comes from something that I need to be able to feel right down to the core of my every being. I can’t feel a sunset, but the texture it creates in the sky almost seems touchable. It’s stuff like that that shocks me in the middle of my body, almost a gut reaction. It’ll kick my muse into gear if I can stay in one place mentally long enough. I don’t let myself feel that anymore. It’s almost as if I have created a wall to dam up the flow because I don’t have time to keep my head in the clouds. Daydreams have no time or place in the real world – especially in a corporate world.

But it’s time to start chipping at that barricade because I am desperate to feel something again. I need to look up at those sunsets, listen to some wonderfully soul-wrenching music and just let myself go.

Inspiration, here I come.

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Instagram Photo a Day 

Photo A Day August: Day 4 – Where I Sat: The driver’s seat of my car, to and from one of the most fun nights in a long time!