Found by the Fox

You sit down with a blank sheet of paper and say, “I’m going to be creative now”.

……

…………

(Zero ideas)

Time and time again, I have found inspiration to be a sly little fox; the more I chase it, the more it seems to elude me. Try as I might, it cannot be summoned on cue, which is why it became clear that continuing with the above approach would be the definition of insanity. I had to stop chasing and let it find me, so instead of looking down at my paper, I remembered something and I looked up.

When I was little I used to lie down in the grass and stare up at the sky. I’d let my body relax, my mind zone out, and my eyes lose focus on any particular point. As the clouds rolled slowly by, I would start to see faces, animals, and castles in the shadows and highlights of those puffy, ever-changing masses. A bunny would turn into a cat, and the castle would turn into a boat. All I had to do was lay still, open my mind, and these images would reveal themselves to me. And it wasn’t limited to the clouds. I could see them in the texture of the walls, the embers of a fire, the bark of a tree, or the folds of a blanket. It seemed they were waiting for me in the strangest of places, as long as I took the time to look.

The creature that was waiting for me as I looked up on this particular day, I now affectionately refer to as the Cloud Monster. He showed his face to remind me that he and his friends never went away, I had just stopped looking for them. Once my eyes were re-opened, I saw they were still all around me. It was when I was looking at a photograph of Saturn’s moon, Atlas, that Goblin Fish revealed himself to me, and it was as I was looking at the image of a lightning strike that I saw the woman in the Electric Dress. Their forms come into focus through the lines and shapes of nature, each one a creation born of the fusion of the physical world and my own imagination.

You and I may be friends or we may be strangers, and regardless, as we look up at the same patch of sky, we each would see our own unique and wonderful creatures. So wherever you are, look up, look down, look out, just look, and tell me what you see.