You Asked About Inspiration

Everything that I am has been inspired by someone or something or some experience. I’ve been motivated by emotion, conflict, desire, but my inspiration has been Gestalt, part/whole in influence, from interaction with people, places and events.

Music, my dad, when I was five and he let me blow into an old, musty tasting trumpet he never practiced, played often or did anything with other than drag it out on some random occasion. Then the instrument disappeared, and the inspiration/influence didn’t resurface until six year later. The rest is a saga long journey worthy of Ulysses.

Art, probably instigations of my mother, something she wasn’t encouraged to follow and resented it her lifetime without ever framing it as such. I learned about my interest in art while playing with animal hand puppets, following her to the basement as she explained my abilities and interests to a neighbor. In some quantum way, although she really didn’t know it then, she was right.

This is the yin and yang of my life. Fortunately it didn’t decimate my very being. But the struggles and triumphs and setbacks and rebirths involved in my crafts, presents a viable definition of who I am and where my inspirations emanated from.

My subsequent experiences then procreated side paths. Beliefs, convictions, distractions, such as trying to write, understanding what makes a writer. Which in turn, redirected me to my life of art and music and then to the present.

The “Present” is a wily Kraken. A Loki trickster. For the life of me, I don’t know why people put so much stock in “living in the present.” To me it’s all a matter of: “It is what it is.” if anyone has a bead on that little cliche.

My inspiration comes from brief, all too brief moments of experience along a path of exploration. I don’t know how else to paraphrase it. The trick, and honestly, it does resemble some kind of Svengali trick, is in recognizing the moment and storing it in an organic stasis until you have reached a time and place and awareness to understand it, without getting distracted by mixed messages and semantics and profit for profit sake social leveraging…

Oh. But you want me to be specific? I think it all starts with a sound slap on a small, shriveled behind.

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