Weekly Soul: Week 43 - Love & Inspiration (Craigie)
Today's meditation from Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living by Dr. Frederic Craigie:
-43-
Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there’s love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald, the “Queen of Song,” had a legendary career that spanned over half a century. Beginning in the early 1930s, she performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra and helped to form new styles in American popular music. She was noted both for her vocal and artistic range and for her remarkable improvisational ability. Reacting to the formulaic style of big band swing music, Fitzgerald was at the cutting edge of bebop, the jazz movement that turned away from prominent bass lines and featured extended improvisational solos from instruments like saxophone and clarinet or from the voice in the role of instruments. You can go to the Internet and see clips of her scat singing: singing nonsense syllables in tandem with other musicians as they together react to one another’s melodic lines and chord changes.
Her formula for her creative work? Love and inspiration.
Inspiration goes by different names. It is a close cousin to “intuition.” It is sought after by creative artists in its incarnation as the Muse.
The word comes from the Latin inspirare, to “blow into” or “breathe upon,” especially, as the word evolved, in the sense of breathing life or spirit into people’s experience. In-spiriting. Spirit moves, spirit flows, as the wellspring of creativity.
Where, you ask, does it move from? How do you invite the creative spirit or charm the Muse into appearing? For better or worse, there is an astounding amount of research and writing about creativity, without any consistent answers to such questions.
Some people find their ways to remarkable creative expression in the midst of troubled emotions and suffering. Think Van Gogh. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald (presumably no relation), who wrestled with alcoholism and depression even as he wrote The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned. J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, memorialized her own emotional struggles in the creation of the dementors, dark creatures that feed on human happiness and suck the life out of their victims.
Some people find creative expression in the setting of anger or as an outgrowth of trauma or injustice. Picasso’s monumental canvas, Guernica, was a response to fascism and to the brutality and despair of the Spanish Civil War. Leonard Bernstein famously arranged a stunning performance of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, the Resurrection, two days after the John Kennedy assassination, saying “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
My own experience is more pedestrian: jogging. When I’m not paying attention to the passing scenery, I find that the repetitive motion of running (biking does this, too) provides fertile ground for creative ideas. Or sitting on the front porch drinking coffee at the beginning of the day. Or, as you know, putting words to paper.
In my research, largely with physicians and other health care providers, I consistently hear that the ability to be present and to think clearly and creatively with patients rests on a foundation of spiritual groundedness. Our spiritual groundedness helps us to be more open to the wellspring of wisdom and intuition that surrounds us. As one family doctor commented, “When I’m really centered, when I can let go of all of the ideas and emotions that keep me from being present, that’s when I’m most open to the inspiration of God’s voice.”
It’s individual. It’s personal. The wisdom and the experiences that form the creative spirit in you are yours to explore and yours to cultivate.
There is, as well, a place for love. It’s hard to be creative if you don’t love what you do. It’s hard to persevere through the dry spells if you don’t love what you do. And if you find a sustained lack of inspiration and creativity with something, you might give some thought to why you’re doing it.
Reflection
- Inspiration—in-spiriting—was a vital part of Ella Fitzgerald’s creative work. What is your experience with inspiration, or intuition? Think of a time when an idea, insight, or creative innovation has come to you: the solution to a problem, a fresh perspective, or a new direction. How, do you think, did this come to be? Is the process by which this came to life something that you can learn from or reproduce?
- Who is out there, whose creativity you admire? What do you know—or what might you find out—about the process of their creative inspiration?
- Particularly for visual artists, writers, actors and musicians, there is often a lineage of creativity, a succession of teachers and mentors who inspired them and helped them with the emergence of their own voice. Pay attention to what people say about their mentors and why they were important to them. You can look, for instance, at jacket liners of music, acknowledgments in books, and performance notes in theater.
- There is no lack of ideas about exercises or practices to invite inspiration. Read Julia Cameron. Put pen to paper and write freely for ten minutes. Listen to music that touches your soul and then jot down some reactions.
- In the week to come, be attentive to times when you experience some inspiration or intuition. Write a few words about what happened and what you think created the conditions for it to come to life.
Author
Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) grew up in modest surroundings north of New York City, part of a supportive family and community. Her happy childhood years were met with loss and trauma in her early teens. Her mother died from injuries sustained in a motor vehicle accident, and not long afterward, her stepfather died from a heart attack. She fell off in her school work and had minor brushes with the law, resulting in a short and abusive placement in reform school. In later years, she said that the emotions of this time in her life helped to fuel the energy that she brought to her artistic work.
Fitzgerald had her first break in music when she sang, to great acclaim, at an Amateur Night event at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1934. This set in motion a succession of musical contacts and partnerships in Harlem—a dynamic center of the world of innovative music—and beyond. Over the long course of her career, she toured internationally, made regular guest appearances on television, won 13 Grammy awards, and sold over 40 million albums. In 1987, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan, and in 1992, the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.
Book Description:
Keywords:
meditation; reflection; inspiration; miracles; aliveness; purpose; laughter; joy; presence; mindfulness; activism; acceptance; gratitude; forgiveness; creativity; civility; hope; affirmation; wholeness; well-being; mental health; personal growth; transformation; inner peace; personal reflection; joy; joyful living; inspirational quotes; inspirational commentary
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