Have you ever had an idea for something that you simply cannot explain?
It’s as if you were walking, unknowingly through the long and winding road of your life, and then suddenly, inspiration falls into your pre-frontal cortex, as if downloaded from another realm, as if the idea itself was somehow meant for you.
As a reader of love & liberation daily, I imagine that feeling is quite familiar to you, as are the emotions of everything that comes next.
You have this incredible idea, now what?
Do you nurture it into being? Do you wrestle with the limits of your own ability to bring it to life, or do you let it torment you, until it inevitably goes away, seeking the consciousness of another host that can bring it more thoughtfully into being?
I’ve heard this process described in so many different ways.
In a book by Elizabeth Gilbert, she recalls a story of a young poet who could see a poem flying its way like a poltergeist towards her.
Giddy with anticipation, the poet began running from the garden, where she’d been picking flowers, galloping to the house, where her notepad lay open, waiting for moments as sacred as these.
Knowing the poltergeist of the idea would only pass through her mortal body for a moment, she prepared herself for the feeling of what was coming, the knowing that she, as the fallible mortal poet, would be just recreating a refraction of the totality of the ideas inherent aliveness on the page.
I’ve also heard of creatives who willingly re-release ideas into the ether, unready to take on their weight, and then feel grateful when they go to the cinema or to a bookstore and see that another vessel has tended to their idea's creation, thankful that someone else could handle what at the moment was too overwhelming for them.
Perhaps, you even released an idea long ago, knowing you could not handle its weight, but you have the sneaking suspicion that it’s found you again. That it has somehow chosen you. That it knows there are billions of vessels on this planet, but it only wants to come alive in the way you alone are capable of ushering it into being.
I’ve often myself felt this sense that my ideas, all of them, refuse to leave me. They are incredibly stubborn. They are knocking every few minutes on the waiting room of my brain saying:
“Um, hello? Mr. Lopez, listen... we’re just going to keep waiting out here until you get your butt into the chair and bring us into existence!
We’re prepared to wait all decade! All century even! Mr. Lopez, are you there? Are you listening?
Listen up mister, we’re not going anywhere, so you go ahead and procrastinate as long as you want — we’re making camp here in your mind.
We're in this for the long haul.”And just now, I heard even another manifestation of this conceptualization, as I listened to the audiobook for Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, in which he likens the creative process to a giant package processing facility where a conveyor belt constantly flows with delicious, exciting packages ready for the opening.
If you don’t select one — no worries, there are infinitely more available. Packages, he posits, exist all around us, waiting to be grabbed from the conveyor belt of life, opened eagerly, and proudly brought into the collective consciousness.
This was immensely calming to me.
Thinking that when I have the odd idea while reading a book, a flash of a possibility while watching a film, that I am just witnessing the source package facility, forever producing an endless array of ideas, and I am merely glimpsing a package as it zooms by on the cosmic conveyor belt of life, and that if I don’t take charge of it, someone else will, and the idea will find its way into being, and all will be right with the world.
I also like to think of ideas like fruits.
There is the orchard of source, the origin of all creative inspiration, and it yields countless types of trees and plants that pollinate and produce and bear an endless array of delicious diversified fruits for the taking.
Some fall to the ground, food for scavengers, some are picked and consumed when they are at their ripest, and still others, if they fall and rot, fester, and mold, are reabsorbed by the soil and decomposers, their nutrients re-consumed and remade next harvest season, always allowing the idea to be born again and again until someone is ready to take ownership over it. Until somebody is ready to bring it to life in the collective.
One might even think of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, and if we want to get super metaphysical, perhaps it's not even fruits, but fully-fledged sentient beings, birthed in another realm, who are looking for caretakers, who can only exist in our world through the vessels of human minds.
Perhaps even the portal between our world and theirs, the world of ideas, is one with an endless number of thresholds, veils that can only be crossed should the human host, the creative, the suddenly inspired, the one who has the flash of vision in their mind, should they finally look outwards, beyond themselves, into the heavens of that unknown place, and whisper, “Yes, I am ready. I will bring you to life. I will bring you home.”
I hope you enjoyed today’s piece from love & liberation daily. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments, and let me know how creativity manifests in your life. I would love to hear how ideas make themselves known to you and what steps you take next. Please also, if you feel called to do so, share this post via Substack Notes, so that it may reach more readers. I am grateful for your time today, and sending you peace and love, in all its forms. If you would like to support this publication, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. When you become a paid subscriber, you make it possible for
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You really know how to capture the unexplainable, my friend. I know this feeling so well. I’ve been working on a piece trying to explain how inspiration comes to write these letters to my son. I think I have the words I was looking for only beucuse I know I’m not alone now in trying to capture the unexplainable. Thank you!
This was fab to read! So glad you mentioned Liz Gilbert as I immediately thought of her book Big Magic and the anecdotes of the ‘ghosts’/ideas/stories flying about the air.
I experience it similarly but also have ADHD and have tons of ideas every day. My the point I manage to sit down to put pen to paper the ideas have often already faded away again 😅