The other day, while out meeting a friend for coffee, I found my mind drifting while I waited for her to bring her steaming hot cup of deliciousness to our table.  This is not uncommon for me, usually I am thinking of the new writing project I am working on, either editing it or what will come next, or something along those lines.  While I am not much of a planner (the whole idea of planning to write versus spontaneously writing will be a post for another day!) I do often let ideas tumble around in my mind.  As I sat, sipping my own cup of Heaven, I began to tentatively reach out for inspiration as to what would come next in both the children's book I am working on and the new novel.  Ideas came and went, fluid and continuously moving, like a softly babbling brook in late spring, enthusiastic but not boisterous, industrious but not buzzingly busy.

What I found, surprised me, though it shouldn't have.  Inspiration lay everywhere around me, turning patiently waiting eyes to me, as if it had been merely waiting for me to find it there.  Suddenly the laying of a man's hand on the small of a woman's back, the steam rising luxuriously from my coffee, which I had just liberated from its lid, all of it took on an almost romantic quality, imbedding itself in my mind and my heart to be called upon later when it would be folded into some detail of a story.  I began to remember the mystery with which I had viewed things as a child, finding magic again in the every day things that had been slipping by me unnoticed in my hurry to scutter from task to task in my day.  The realization was epiphany, not just that inspiration was to be found everywhere around me, but that writing had brought it back to me, that wonder, that creativity, the appreciation for the ordinary moments in life that make it so precious and blindingly wonderful or tragic in turn.

That day, after returning home my writing came alive for me.  The tiniest engagements of words seemed to vibrate on the page, the characters shared moments that wove fabric into their lives and the stories they found themselves in. In my life, the bouncing, ringing laughter of my children sounded more melodic and less ringing, and the brush of their hands against mine, more priceless than ever, an inspiration to my writing, and more importantly to my heart and soul.