People ask, what inspires me, well nature inspires me. My short story, “Geese”, came from me walking out my door years ago and seeing Canadian geese settling down for the night on the shores of a lake. I have a biology degree, as well as an English degree, and I have always found equal inspiration in nature and in words. Though I think that nature feeds my soul a little bit more than it feeds my writing. What follows is my early morning. It didn’t translate into many pages for the day, but it was a mood recharging beginning, and sometimes as a writer you need that more than pages.
My first animal of the morning, besides our three dogs, was a chipmunk. How can anyone look at a chipmunk and not smile? Then worms were fleeing across the walkway, well, as fast as worms can flee. I looked to see what the disturbance was and – mole! I watched the earth heave and roll as the little digger chased worms underground. Worms, especially earthworms, are some of their favorite foods. Yes, moles disturb your lawn, but they also aerate it, which is something we pay men with machines to do, right? Why not let the mole do it for free? They will also eat harmful grubs that destroy your lawn, flowers, and vegetable garden. By the way moles have the softest fur I’ve ever touched, though today’s mole never let me see him/or her at all. I carry the memory of the mole that got into our house in Indiana like a sensory touchstone. Mole fur makes mink feel rough.
I saved one worm that got lost on the bricks, and put him away from the mole’s hunting area, and then a bird sang high and bubbling in the holly tree just beside the house. It sang out several times the sweetness of the song falling down around me as if joy could be translated into sound. I’ve checked and double checked and the small bird that I barely could glimpse through the thick branches, I believe was a field sparrow. They are supposed to like more prairie than we have in our yard, but we do have a hedgerow area, and with habitat vanishing maybe they’ve gotten more adventuresome, or maybe he was just passing through for the running water. We’re getting birds to the water that wouldn’t normally bother with suburbia. It might have been a warbler who’s song I’m unfamiliar with, but it moved more like a sparrow, and wasn’t quite as small as most of the warblers I see in this area. I’m always loathe to bird just by ear – I don’t seem to trust it without another birder to say, “Yes, that’s the song.” But for right now I think it was a Field Sparrow, and whatever bird it was, another male answered in the distance. I’ll have to check that direction and see if there’s a grassy field area. If I’m closer to the right habitat then them coming for the water makes more sense.
To top it off I had a pair of Cedar Waxwings just outside my office in the big sugar maple right by the pond. They are one of my favorite birds! I never saw any until just a few years ago. They love the water garden. One of our robins chased them off, because Waxwings are fruit eaters and so are the robins. Everyone is raising babies, so they guard their food sources.
Will any of the above translate into more story ideas? I don’t know, but one thing I’m learning is anything that fills up the tank of my energy, creativity, or happiness is useful in some way. I spent too many years trying to just write without thinking about where the creativity comes from, or what feeds my muse, what feeds me. In the last year I’ve really looked hard at that, and one of the first things that sparked that excitement that is so necessary for an artist, or a scientist was ladybugs and irises. I remember squatting in the grass by a tree, pushing the grass aside and finding a cluster of ladybugs like bright red and black jewels, so shiny in the sun when I revealed their hiding place. There were purple bearded irises growing against the white picket fence. I stood and gazed up at them as they rose above me. It was the white picket fence and irises, that my grandmother had never mentioned to me that convinced her it was a real memory. We’d rented the house so briefly that she’d almost forgotten it herself, but it bothered her that I remembered it, almost scared her, because babies under two aren’t supposed to remember details like that. I don’t remember anything else about the house, but the wonder of those tall flowers, and the cluster of insects, that first sharp smell of ladybugs as I poked at them with my fingers, that remains. Flowers, insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, all of it can still fill me with wonder and joy. It still feeds a part of me that first toddled out into the sunshine to stare up at flowers taller than I was like some pre-school Alice in Wonderland. As an artist you need to find out what feeds your inner child, because a sense of wonder needs to be a permanent part of you as an artist. I know it’s cool to get jaded and world weary like Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, and Gods know that I can get weary of the world, but if I let it make me feel jaded I lose something I need to create. It harms something I inside me if I forget to admire the beauty and life around me. Think back to your earliest happy memory, what was it? What thrilled you as a child? Usually whatever that was is something you still need in your life. It will refresh your heart, cleanse your soul of that harshness that seems to gather. It will feed your muse.
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; –
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away . . .”
William Wordsworth (1710-1850)
Don’t give your heart away, you need it to create, to love, to be.
The picture is of me about the same age that I saw those irises and ladybugs. That may even be the same house. That’s my mother with me. She died when I was six, and she was twenty-nine.
