Inspiration, Expiration, and the Pause In-Between

Inspiration:

1: a divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation.....

2: the act of drawing in; specifically : the drawing of air into the lungs...

I know, I know: starting a piece with good ol' Webster's is the last refuge of the lazy. Mea culpa. But I've spent the last half hour stuck on the beginning, and I needed to get unstuck. Sometimes we have to resort to dire measures to leap over the obstacles in our path.

I'm thinking about inspiration because I've been inspired by so many things lately. But those inspirations have expired before making it anywhere near the page.

I let myself off the hook, saying, well I've been too busy to write. Well, not too busy, really, but I don't have the brain-space to write. Well, the space is there, but everything else is too important. Oh, REALLY? my muse says, tapping her foot. What's so important? Well, I stammer, I've got to balance my checkbook, and uh, figure out the chemicals in the hot tub, and you know, like, watch every episode of the The Killing. My muse gives me that look, you know, the look. A perfect blend of scorn and pity.

And then last night I went to a live recording of the radio show A River and Sound Review (part quiz show, part music, part poetry reading, part shenanigans), and I heard my colleagues Nancy Pagh, Oliver de la Paz, and Bruce Beasley read their work. NEW work. Work with such power it snuck past all the static in my brain and stuck. Became a spark. Or kindling. Or both.

Nancy teaches two writing classes. Oliver has three young boys under the age of four. Bruce deals with the intensity of his teenage boy stumbling his way to manhood. All of them are much busier than I am.

Yet each one of them manages to do the important thing: write. Write in the interstices that life offers. Inspiration, then, becomes not a mystical thing, but quite practical: sparked by a brochure, a photograph, or a treadmill at the gym. Or a Facebook posting, a Youtube video, a magazine. In a busy life, inspiration becomes truly like breath: always there, whether you notice it or not.

......


I'm back. I snuck out there for a couple of hours to go to my Saturday morning yoga class. A class where we spent a lot of time in pranayama, just breathing.

But in pranayama, what is usually unintentional becomes intentional. We count our inhale, hold for two beats, then count out the exhale.  We do it again, each time elongating that held space in between inhalation and exhalation. Two beats, four beats six beats, eight.

If you don't panic, if you don't insist you need to take the next breath right now, that pause in between becomes quiet, but alive. You feel the breath swirling inside you, nourishing what needs to be nourished, then nudging for the exhale when it's ready. Once you get the hang of it, you feel like you can stay there--in this little sliver of infinity--for a long time.

Inspiration is a transient thing, and can be as brief as the moment from one breath to the next. Inspiration is perishable; it has a built-in expiration date. So, perhaps it's our only task then, as writers: to elongate that space in between. To nourish what needs to be nourished. In this way we get "qualified" to receive and communicate sacred revelation.....