I wrote about inspiration last time and I’m going to write about it again. I’ve spent the last fifteen years reading books about writing and creativity hoping that some of their clarity and surety might find their way into me given that I am endlessly confused and scattered and often afraid. It has been rare to find one that doesn’t talk about walking.
Everyone seems to be in agreement: walking is how to get ideas. It is essential to the creative process, how books get written, how paintings are resolved. Walking is something you must be willing to do in order to receive inspiration. Whilst walking, the mud of your thoughts can settle and clear so that the universe’s brightest and highest offerings can rise to the top of you. In this way, you are fed. You are inspired. Nobody in all my years of reading mentioned what to do if you can’t go for a walk. In my unwell body, I always felt a biting sense of exclusion at that but I guess it was just bad luck to me: I was out of the inspiration club. I figured that anything I was likely to receive would probably be by accident or what was left over after all those diligent, determined healthy people had been out round the block and had their fill of everything else. It’s certainly felt like that some days.
I am always hungry for inspiration. I am horribly greedy for it. I long for good, creative ideas the way other people crave sugar and cigarettes and booze. When inspiration is in short supply, I feel very lonely, as if I’ve been judged and found lacking. Every time I grasp around my mental cupboards and find nothing but confusion and doubt, I feel the ache in my belly. It feels like the worst kind of rejection, a rejection by life itself which is surely, right now, filling other people up. Why can’t I be chosen instead? Is it really just because I can’t go for a bloody walk?
The other thing I have spent the last fifteen years doing is realising that most of the things I repeat to myself as fact are utter nonsense. Of course this is true of this too. It occurred to me recently that maybe able-bodied writers and artists — rather than being the pinnacle of creative aspiration as I often hold them to be — simply lack some imagination and experience about all the different ways we must sometimes exist in a body on this earth and that’s why they talk about writing and art in similar ways and all tend to give similar advice. They know what they’ve experienced, but they’re not actually an all-seeing authority on inspiration or how it works. Ha. The thought knocked me for six.
Maybe inspiration — how it’s shared out, how it’s received — is bigger than that? Bigger than whether or not we can walk or run or stand on our heads or see or hear or be healthy or anything else; bigger than every single person who has insisted otherwise. Maybe instead of always deferring to others certainty, I could explore wider, wilder territory.
This is all quite a long-winded way of me trying to tell you that I’ve been really quite sick again lately, as is typical, and because I couldn’t do anything else, I decided to let go of some old untruths and found that a new door swung open.
It turns out that meditation is a doorway. Didn’t I already know that? I have been learning again, patiently, a kind of meditation that isn’t so much about sitting rigid and focusing which I have always found exhausting, but about a slow and persistent kind of staying quiet and awake to yourself all day long, as you look out the window and fold clothes and cook food and lie in pain and laugh and brush your teeth; just knowing, really seeing, what you’re doing all the time and deciding not to obsess about it, just to watch. It turns out, too, that if you set a mobility scooter to its lowest speed and crawl along the pathways and throughways near your house, so slow that the world flows past you so gradually and boringly and wonderfully, slow enough that your sensitive eyes don’t hurt and your tender bones aren’t jostled, that this becomes a doorway too.
It turns out it was just me that had to open again. And again and again. And I knew this to be true a hundred times before and I just forgot.
There is expectation and demand and stubbornness and ego and superiority and self-pity and self-entitlement and bitterness, and in my endless, exhausted searching, I remembered again that it is these things that keep me out and away from inspiration, nothing more. Nobody is leaving me out. I am simply often too loud, too noisy and complaining, refusing to hear or see what’s being offered, or what would be if I just shut up and stopped trying to control everything. Illness does at least help you to do that.
Meanwhile the world, gentle, smiling, knowing, shows me itself as I scoot round the streets so slowly that the fast-walking people must overtake me and stare at me as they do.
Here we are and we’re moving into nature’s most abundant season. Everywhere, there is food. Talk about a metaphor. Blackberries ripening, wild urban plums turning red and purple, elderberries like black pearls festooned on great, draping strings, rowanberries the colour of cheap lipstick, acorns still tiny nubs in their green cups but growing, growing and nearly all of it going unseen, unappreciated, missed, or at least certainly by most of us. Of course there is inspiration aplenty. Inspiration that doesn’t care what shape my body is in or how well I’m able to follow advice. Inspiration is offered like berries in a dirty hedgerow, not served on a platter. Perhaps it isn’t what I dreamt of, perhaps not even what I’d choose if I’m honest, but if I get very quiet, there is a thread, a tug in my chest, breadcrumbs on the floor, a whisper in the air, something to listen to and follow, hard to keep track of and oh so easy to ignore, but there, there all the time. And it’s mine, if I want it. Offered just to me. Mine and no one else's.
How ridiculous I have been to think that once everyone had had their walks that there wouldn’t be enough of this world left over for me. How tight my chest feels now in gratitude and understanding as I write down the steady flow of glimmers that arise in the stillness and, yes, in illness too, and see how good and full and filling they are.
Thank you. Thank you, life.
I don’t want to forget any of this again.
(I know I will)
🗓️ I’ve been busy…
Doing nothing much. I had a whole series of infections and then got a virus that wouldn’t let me go. I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging as promised. I am learning again that I am, endlessly, setting myself expectations that my body can’t meet. I’m working on it. If there’s a ‘next’ lesson to try and learn, it’s probably that.
❤️ I’ve been enjoying…
My son being home for the holidays. We are quiet and often in separate rooms, but like the tides pulling in and out, we come together for meal times and many chats and an afternoon board game session and guitar practice on my bed. He turned 15 last month and I am enjoying him — his humanness, particularly, the unique way life has put him together — more than I ever have.
📚 I’ve been reading…
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman which I love because it’s like being in a fast flowing river. It is, however, giving me some very odd dreams, just as if Anansi himself had crawled in my ear and spun webs and caught stories that try to escape as I sleep.
💭 I’m looking forward to…
I have, unusually, four days to myself coming up and not a lot of energy to do much with it. I do have a plan though: to make a kind of fake wall out of cardboard that I can prop up, stick bits of paper to and paint on while sitting on the floor. I’m excited. No studio, no floor space and no wall space is always a challenge when you want to experiment. Let’s see what happens. My body might say no and then I will think of something else.
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You're absolutely right. Walking is merely one way (the easiest, most 'to hand' way for able bodied people) to achieve a certain thing*. Said thing can be achieved by other routes, which may prove the more valuable and effective for being hard-won.
*For me that thing is mainly to stop staring fixedly at my laptop and instead nudge my mind out of whatever track its in, and then to show it some things that aren't made of me and which I don't control. Doing that seems to free things up to make new connections. But it's merely a trick I've learned and nothing else.
Thank you Melissa for sharing Josie and Josie for sharing your bimblings on inspiration for the non walkers. I also have mobility difficulties, and if I have a day when I think I can try to walk a little, my focus has to be on picking legs up otherwise I trip over and have to wait for the pain to subside enough to get up, or somehow get back to the house. Taking the time to notice and appreciate the movement of the seasons, the generous offerings that are there in rhythms and cycles. It’s lovely to be reminded that inspiration can come from the simplicity of attention given to the magic that unfolds in front of our eyes. (On a good day).
Inside now on a foggy, windy, rainy day in Ireland, pain humming through my body I watch a crow as it sits on the spindly tip of an exposed Ash tree, gauging it’s assault plan on the apple tree below. I can appreciate its agility, it’s timing and it’s sense that today I will not be clapping at it in an attempt to scare it away. I’m now aware of the others, it’s a squadron in a planned raid under cover of mist!