Sparks of Inspiration

Inspiration is a fickle business. It can disappear and leave you for days, weeks, months, only to suddenly show up and sneak into your head like a Trojan horse of thoughts, until your mind is full to bursting. Recently, I've had such a massive string of ideas floating through my head, from story ideas for the webcomic I've been struggling with, to design concepts for various projects I've been working on for years, to the urge to pick up my violin once again and just play all the notes exploding out of my mind. Even this blog post is a little spontaneous; the idea popped into my head an hour earlier, and although I had intended to wait a few hours until after my classes to write this, I couldn't help it; I had to get it down right now, even though this wouldn't post until half a week later. I've always considered myself a bit on the artsy side, but I'd forgotten just how much was missing until recently.

I have no idea what triggered this. It's been many months since I've had this much creativity flowing through my person. I can only attribute it to the return of my spiritual muse. Do any of you have muses? An avatar of artistic creativity that speaks to you? I feel like I do. I've known her face (yes, it's a she), for years, and she has driven my spurts of artistic growth.

I'm not sure I really know how to explain it exactly; when I consider the various facets of who I am, certain personalities crystallize into distinct characters in my mind's eye. Some even have names.

There's others, but these are the ones that are the clearest. I'm sure I sound pretty crazy right about now, but hey, I don't deny it. Who says crazy should be a bad thing anyway?

I use the term "art" here loosely. It's not just drawings and music, but it also extends into my work as an engineer. If this were several centuries earlier, I might say that machines speak to me; I look at gears and springs, pistons and actuators, and somehow, it all makes sense intuitively. I can look at a mechanism and form a mental picture of it, and spin it about like a hologram to understand where everything is going. With the recent return of my muse, I've been able to see so much more clearly, some of the things I've wanted to build over the years, but never had the time to do. Case in point; one thing that I always wanted to build was an electric skateboard. Without going into details, a lot of the design problems I had been having trouble with practically solved themselves in my mind the other day; drive shafts connected themselves, joints and suspensions fell into place, and the whole thing became clear as day. I'm not sure if any of this makes sense as an explanation, but it's like I can see the entire blueprint in my mind, like a schematic out of some scifi movie. In my head, I can see the entire machine, zoom in on a specific mechanism, explode it to consider the individual parts. Maybe this is why I'm such a fan of steampunk; these sorts of things just make sense to me.

Granted, I probably won't find the time (or funding) to actually make the board, or any of the other ideas I have, a reality anytime soon. But damn if it doesn't feel good to have some artistic clarity again. It's like they say in Inception; an idea is like a virus, resilient and highly contagious, growing like a seed until it either defines or destroys you. And finally, I'm once again excited to see the directions that my ideas will take me, for better or worse. Watch your head people, and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. It's gonna be an interesting ride. Probably with some fire and explosions mixed in for good measure.