Just keep singing, or walking, or smiling

when you need inspiration

Apr 29, 2023

A single yellow daylily against the green leaves — Yellow Daylily © Kathryn LeRoy

Hello friends,

I started today’s post four or five times, more if you count the thoughts that followed me yesterday like a yapping dog. Ideas swirled in and out collapsed into heaps of mud.

Maybe you’ve had days like that, too, where everything you want to do, need to do and have a passion to do—refuses to budge. I wish I had a solution for you and for me.

I looked for inspiration.

Nope, not today. Yet, I stumbled across the words, music, art of other people, and the birds. Have you ever noticed that birds never stop singing? It doesn’t matter if it’s cloudy or the sky sparkles a brilliant blue.

Our feathered friends keep singing. They don’t get all moody or depressed by gray skies or the cold wind of a blustery spring day.

When I need a boost, an attitude course correction, or a dose of inspiration, I use several strategies.

Take a walk

Fresh air, even on a windy day, blows the cobwebs around giving me a fresh perspective. Sometimes I even find fascinating and unusual things growing in the garden.

A white fungi growing at the base of a red bud tree in a strange shape that you could imaghine as a gnome, elf, man, or woman. — Fungi in the Garden © Kathryn LeRoy

Listen to music

Beautiful music lifts you and touches you deeply as this solo guitar performance of “La Paloma” by Pepe Romero.

Read — books, magazines, poetry, quotations—just read

I have a few favorite authors that I read and again. I have passages and lines highlighted that I return to for inspiration or to savor the words on the page.

The one approach I can always count on?

Smile.

Without fail, turning up the sides of your mouth can always spark a flicker, if not a roaring blaze, of delight. Try it.

Be inspired!

I’m still writing poems each day for National Poetry Month. I remembered my Grandpa when a flashback paved dreams of coal-black hair and blue eyes.

Brené Brown is one of my favorite researchers, writers, and speakers. She gets at the heart of human nature in Braving the Wilderness in this brief ten-minute video.

We all need someone who inspires us. Chicago describes it perfectly in “You’re the Inspiration.”

“They might not need me; but they might. I’ll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.”
—Emily Dickinson

Find a little wonder this week, walk, read, listen, and smile.

With gratitude,

Kathryn

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