The wild river of inspiration.
The incredibly human condition of living in relationship with imagination.
Sometimes I have so much to say I can’t get anything out. Like a melting river breaking up the ice. It all gets pushed to one spot and creates a dam, and then, and even though we can’t see them all there are forces working away at the jam. The temperature is softening the blocks, the current underneath is wearing them away, and there is enough pressure from behind as more water and ice come until the whole thing cracks and starts to move with great force. It’s both a relief and a bit damaging to the sidelines.
That’s what it feels like to try and write sometimes. The imagination/inspiration/connection I have sometimes access to is a river that always flows and I don’t have any control over how it wants to be moving. Sometimes when I visit it is calm and quiet and requires little of me. Other times it bends unexpectedly into my mundane life and knocks me over.
I need the engineering wonder of an active beaver colony to make me a whole bunch of soft, quiet pools to store the resources that come down that river for me. So many things flow straight on by without me being able to grasp them, maybe I will find them someday as I keep moving downriver in my own life. Other things swirl in the shallows and show me enough to make me wade out and reach for them because I can’t resist.
My inner Euphrates is the source of everything and also floods and drowns me or dries up and leaves me searching for answers and nourishment.
How human to live with such a thing that is in no way mine, but is also so very necessary to me.