I used to think you were born with imagination. Now, I know it can be inspired
I used to believe I was incapable of imagination. Envious of the writers capable of dreaming up worlds and stories entirely from the depths of their own creative minds.
I was in awe of the greats, building wondrous worlds full of curious creatures and surreal sights. They take readers on a journey to far-off lands with nothing but their words and ideas.
Unable to understand what elicited or inspired such a capacity for creation in authors and artists, I was sure it must be inborn. A gift of nature. A genetic anomaly.
My thinking changed the first time I traveled. Venturing outside my own tiny, familiar corner of the world, I experienced firsthand how new, exotic places can ignite imagination and cultivate creativity.
On my first flight to Colombia, my introduction to the magical Andes Mountains came in fleeting flashes. Witnessed from an airplane window. As bolts of lighting lashed disorientingly through the dark sky below me
Inexplicably, the skies stayed sufficiently clear to spot the rugged range and shadow-shrouded valleys intermittently despite the wispy puffs of electrified mist, fog, or cloud, depending on a viewer’s perspective.
The mountains showed off for me that night, inspiring stories of mystery, magic, and adventure. They hinted at lost lands protectively preserved in secluded sanctuaries. They whispered stories, tales, and legends of peculiar places and people, magic elixirs, and hidden passageways.
Each time I see them from a new perspective, in a new light or season, they share new stories, and my creativity is reinvigorated.
Through travel, I’ve learned imagination isn’t inborn or inherited. It can be elicited by experiencing the exquisite beauty of newly discovered destinations existing right here, in the real world.
I now believe magical worlds of wizarding wonder and intergalactic islands for ageless adventures aren’t pulled from thin air. They’re inspired in the mind upon witnessing the wonders of the real world.
Imagination isn’t impossible.
I grew up in the rural farmlands of Pennsylvania, where nature abounded. Nevertheless, it was so commonplace after a lifetime it never inspired me.
Now I live in Colombia, where l overhear parrots squawking commentary about my husband’s fútbol (soccer) matches. Where ants march like soldiers in the park, toting green leafy flags. And where I regularly spot sneaky geckos spying from the shower wall.
No longer surrounded by the ordinary and expected, I’m free to wonder and imagine.
BLEW WRITING LLC 