Magical Words: Inspiration

“... the baffled king composing Hallelujah...” — Leonard Cohen

Welcome to Magical Words, where I dig into the metaphors buried in everyday language.

Melody of Wave by Chiura Obata. This painting has the feeling of a dream, an ethereal movement with a mind of its own – and maybe a face?

Inspiration

Walking from the beach with a foam board balanced on my head, I couldn’t stop chattering, dancing, wet and barefooted like a child. After my first few days surfing, I was exhausted but giddy – “stoked.” At night, with my eyes closed, I felt my mind undulating, processing the language of the waves, full of life.

The word inspiration has a lofty feel to it, like a wind that blows only among the Michelangelos of the world, perched on their marble towers. On the contrary, I think inspiration is a necessary element of even the most humble life. Without a consistent stream of awe, insight, and joy, our spirits asphyxiate.

The Dance II by Matisse

Breath

“Inspire” and “spirit” both come from the Latin spirare, or breath. Every living force seems to take on this shape: inspiration and expiration, waking and sleeping, birth and death, migrations to and from. Life never stops in one place.

When we are inspired – to create a work of art, to make a terrifying leap of faith – something in the environment stirs us to alter our trajectory. It moves us, pushes us downstream toward a roaring river of ongoing movement.

This isn’t to say that inspiration is purely passive, a wind that blows over you as you recline in a beach chair. It’s something you seek, which beckons you. You approach the surf, hypnotized, wanting to be among it.

Bathers by David Park. There are butts in this painting.

Interest

No one approaches the ocean with disinterest. To see the ocean is to recognize some forgotten element of our being, the saltwater moving in our veins.

Strangely, humans are able to guide the current of fascination; we take the features of our environment and mold them into stories, which can turn the most quotidian experiences into revelations. Every book you’ve read consists of more or less 26 characters; the only thing a book does is point (Buddhist teachings are often likened to a finger pointing at the moon). As a reader, your goal is to see beyond the content; as a writer, my goal is to bring the source of inspiration into clear view.

Great artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, are not always better endowed than their counterparts, but they’re always more interested. As Einstein said, “It’s not that I'm so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Steve Jobs wasn’t a world-class engineer, but he was stirred by a vision. Edward Hopper was a self-declared bad painter, but he focused on scenes that captured the austere loneliness of modern city life.

What guides these people is inspiration, a resonance with some property of life and a medium with which to convey it. Or, they themselves become the medium, the vehicle for an elemental force that begins to move through them. They become a force of nature.

The rest of us approach them, fascinated, like we approach the ocean.

Rooms by the Sea by Edward Hopper, 1951. One of his most unusual paintings, touched by the surreal.

Your children are not your children

Above all, inspiration is an invitation to realize that the things that matter aren’t yours – they move through and beyond the petty systems, habits, and tools you’ve built, the crumbling statues of your kingdom. Nothing eternal is constrained to the blip of our existence... not even our offspring. As Kahlil Gibran writes:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

My mom FaceTimed me recently, teary-eyed, telling me she needs to “let her children go.” Once children become adults, they need to “get lost,” both to fulfill their wanderlust and to move toward the painful limits of their being. Living to the fullest means being a kid, running around in the yard until you inevitably scrape your knees.

Hawaii was the period in my life when I was the most lost, alone on a rock in the ocean. But my time there – rolling in the waves, trudging through muddy trails, keeping my cool while hunting dogs approached me at night – was the foundation of everything I’ve learned since. This movement from the center is fundamental. It’s as if life is defined by how far you err and how precisely, creatively, and beautifully you integrate it into your core.

When you let go of your children – whoever or whatever your children are – you open space for them to complete their prodigal orbits and return home, to be welcomed with open arms, where they can rest and continue their journey. Or, not theirs but the world’s.

What guides salmon back to their breeding grounds is a mystery. Surrender to the bafflement.

✤

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Some related art with commentary

Berryessa Valley by Dorothea Lange, 1956

This woman is standing on a plot of land that she would soon lose:

Demands for more water caused the death of the Berryessa Valley. It disappeared 125 feet deep behind a dam in order to store water for the bigger valleys below and to provide industrial water for the expanding cities. It was a place of cattle and horses, of pears and grapes, alfalfa and grain… And the valley held generations in its hand. — The Paris Review

This photograph is about grace, patience, and faith in anticipation of disaster. It’s about the joy and sorrow of life’s inevitable changes.

As the dawn began to break
I had to surrender
The universe will have its way
Too powerful to master

A “third wind” is what you catch at the end of an ultramarathon – that last piece of energy that you didn’t know was there. This song has the feeling of joyful strain, eking out the last drops of a melody.

To me, Bach’s music is about cosmic order. This piece feels like gliding along the source of grace. (Also, the cellist HAUSER kills it in this one.)

Like all of Aaron Parks’s pieces, this one is partially composed, partially improvised around a concept – the ongoing pulse. A melody grows organically out of an ambient field, then falls back into it.

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