The Inspired Ride
Stay Wild
Finding inspiration is a journey. Sometimes the journey takes you on a long toilsome path, twisting and turning, and sometimes it’s as easy as opening your front door and finding it on the porch. When you base your well-being on inspiration, you’re likely to meet both scenarios.
For my husband David and I, finding inspiration is getting deep into nature with a good cup of coffee by a fire, warm summer evenings, a few thrills, and a good conversation. David is a self-employed graphic designer and illustrator. I follow behind with our dog, Trout, doing background tasks like keeping the business tidy while David focuses on his clients and staying centered. We spend our days waking up slowly and working late, taking time to laugh, sip our coffee, and move throughout our day consciously looking for inspiration. We travel part time in our van, Moby, and live in a small apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota, where our family and friends reside.
Finding inspiration from our moving home feels like a dream. Our backdoor leads to wondrous places and we feel spoiled rotten getting to wear the same clothes daily, smelling like salt water, sweat, and dirt.
As breezy as all that sounds, we’ve waded through some difficult times, too. When we were first married, we both worked jobs that wore us out mentally and physically. David went to school during the day and at night he worked at a machine shop. I worked full time at Starbucks. We questioned daily why we worked those jobs, but we always came to the conclusion: We work hard so we can climb, draw, surf, and dig into our hobbies. And on our weekends, we were free. Free to discover … or just sleep.
A couple of years later, we find ourselves in the Mojave desert after dark, strapping on our climbing shoes to climb a crack in the light of the moon. The wind is howling through the massive boulders, but the lingering warmth of the sun still touches our fingertips as we climb. Inspiration found us that night in the dark, and it also found us driving through Portland amidst traffic and heat with the beautiful shiny buildings towering overhead and the smell of food trucks.
To feel inspired, you have to allow yourself to be fully immersed in the impermanence of your situation, good and bad.