Nature

What is your inspiration? What moves you? What is it that never fails to motivate you, to get you going, or make you happy?

My inspiration? Nature. Nature and its never-ending cycles and phases, ever-changing faces, and multiple facets. It never fails to move and motivate me and at times makes me momentarily happy. I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic. Someone wrote (I think it’s Byron)

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”

Anne Frank said:

“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. 

And to directly quote Van Gogh: “I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”