Beach

I get skittish when I'm uninspired, especially when a task at hand requires inspiration. I want to feel bolts of lightning, swells of creativity, flashes of passion that fuel me to make, bake, write, capture, click, run, sing, fly. But, as Brenda Ueland says, "inspiration does not come like a bolt...it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give a little chance to start flowing...prime it with a little solitude and idleness."

But sometimes, I still want the bolt.
I had a couple things I needed to finish last weekend, and I just wasn't feeling it. No bolt, no swell, no flash. So my mom, in a moment of brilliance and glory, says "Why don't you take your tablet out into the yard?"—which might elicit knee-slapping guffaws from anyone else but I'm all, "Yes. Out into the trees and dirt and grass to come alive." Cool right?

So I go, hauling a broken beach chair, my tablet, a pair of headphones and a can of sprite through the entrance into our yard, past the prickly tree, and just a few more steps until I've found the perfect area. A blanket of dried pine needles beneath me, a canopy of blue sky above me. And I'm sitting there in my pajamas and my rain boots, facing the deep part of the yard and trees so my back is to the houses—except our trees aren't really thick and enchanted but more sparse and open—so it dawns on me that neighbors can see me. And this is funny. A girl in pajamas and rain boots, drinking a sprite, sitting in a broken chair in the middle of a bunch of trees...with a tablet. Yes, funny. But I get over it, slipping my headphones on, humming to Demi Lovato, furiously typing while occasionally, a random squirrel flying this close to my head stops my heart. Suddenly, I am inspired. I am motivated. I am electrified by the bolt. This working in the yard thing is so happening again.

So we went to the beach a few weeks ago and I really wanted to blog about it.

I wish I could really describe what it's like. When we're there and all the planets are aligned and things are just as they should be...and there are constant moments of thinking, This here? This is beautiful. I know I say 'beautiful' all the time on this blog, but it is and, for all the posts I've dedicated to the beach, today's is perhaps the summit while all the others were just stops on the climb. Because a few weeks ago, when I was there, I saw the entire landscape--things I've never seen before--and there, on the beach with my family and my puppy, I staked my claim and raised my flag. This is our beach where all the good in our life is turned up a few notches and all we have to do is enjoy it.

And when the sun sinks low, we kiss the day goodbye. That day, we first danced in the sunset to beach tunes and then we huddled around to play the "If Game." If you could meet one person, dead or alive, who would it be? If you could vacation anywhere in the world for seven days right now, where would it be? If you could... And the questions continued as we laughed and teased about answers.

"Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination." ~Robert Fulghum