Flow

Just before Matheson Hammock on Old Cutler Road, there was a Girl Scout Camp…or at least a place we went camping with our Girl Scout troop (Troop 251, if memory serves). My memories are of eating cereal out of small cereal boxes, cooking in my mess kit and rekindling the fire in the wee hours of the morning from the nearly dead embers. Everyone thought the fire was dead, yet with pine needles and dried sea grape leaves, I managed to set it ablaze, re-stoked and likely a tremendous annoyance to my troop leader who couldn’t let us pack up and leave the camp site until the fire was out. I think about that fire occasionally and that feeling of that outside authority figure impatient with me to “stop what you are doing and do what I tell you to do.” How do you just turn a fire off, even a well-contained-inside-a-grilling pit fire?

When you feel inspired how do you contain it so that you can go off an do “the real job”? You cannot hold water in your hands. No mater the form. A block of frozen ice slowly thaws and seeps through your fingers. Cupping water to drink or carry is fruitless and inefficient. So, you open your hands, let the water fall to the ground.

Inspiration is contagious. It is consuming. It is like a fire. It can blaze fiercely or be banked and held until later, when it is more useful or convenient. Inspiration is like water, it flows and seeps through minute crevices, appearing magically as condensation on a window or glass. It falls from the sky. Inspiration is a force, it has power and can renew. And sometimes…..it must simply runs its course.  You can extinguish a fire with water. Fire can vaporize water. But neither is absolutely destroyed or eliminated. It all comes back.

 

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