Sunday, January 16, 2011

When Creativity Needs a Spark of Inspiration…

Try looking up. Look up when others are looking at the sidewalk. Look at the rain clouds instead of looking at the puddles.

Or look at the reflection of ‘up’ in the puddle. Look at the top of the skyscraper or church steeple or oak tree. Do you see anyone up there looking down? Who or what could they be? Look at the tops of old building and the stone lion’s heads or gargoyles you never knew were there.

Look at the birds on that wire and wonder where they’ve been. Look up at the heron flying over the stalled traffic jam while others are looking down and texting that they’ll be late…again.

Look up at the jet and wonder where the passengers are going or coming from. Look up at your eaves and notice the tiny fern growing in the corner…no, don’t notice that you need to clean the gutters.

Most of all look up on a clear night and think about all you can see. You can see back in time, you can see billions of stars and possibly billions of billions of living things. You can see objects that hold more magic than the most fantastic science fiction story or fairy tale ever told.

Below to the right is a picture of a globular cluster. Ever seen one? You can if you look up at night into the summer constellation of Hercules. Binoculars help.

A globular cluster is a snowball of tightly packed stars that orbit a galactic core like our Milky Way. Like the moon orbits the earth, these clusters orbit our galaxy and no one really knows why or how they came to be there. And other galaxies have them too.

Now there’s a spark for some creativity if I ever heard of one. What do you think?

1 comment:

Quill and Greyson said...

Those are great pictures!

I get inspired on long road trips and as I'm falling asleep for writing ideas.