I lost a good friend several years ago. The grief got stuck in me because life got busy and I was consumed with taking care of business. Shortly after the memorial service, though, I broke. I took my little guitar to the coast by myself and sat by the Pacific ocean every day, finally letting myself feel everything that had been frozen inside me.
In that space, a song I’d set aside after struggling with it for months suddenly emerged. In one grief-filled episode, sleepless in the middle of the night, words and melody poured out. It was almost like a hallucination. A spontaneous purge of emotion. What had been awkward and incomplete became an homage to life, love and loss. But I didn’t write that song, I received it. Words, harmony, and melody. A complete song was delivered through me from a source outside myself. I felt it, viscerally.
If we’re truly “creating,” where does the idea actually come from?
To be clear, this isn’t about dismissing craft or technique. Once an idea arrives, the real work begins. You may spend months refining, editing, revising, getting every detail right. Craft matters enormously. And plenty of art is derivative—reworkings of other artists’ ideas, variations on our own earlier work, deliberate homages. That’s fine and part of the process. But sometimes there’s a spark that comes from somewhere else entirely. Where does that come from?
We carry this illusion—a burden really—that we must use effort to surface our ideas. And we get something from this: the ego gets to take credit for our creation, and we can claim ownership of it. This creates enormous pressure. We exhaust ourselves trying to generate from nothing, believing creativity depends entirely on our individual will.
But what if creative blocks are actually spiritual blocks? What if the struggle to access our creativity comes from being disconnected from something larger than ourselves? I spent years as a young man feeling like I was an artist without a creative outlet. I kept searching for different mediums, different approaches, thinking the problem was technical. If only I had the right skills, or a different instrument, then I could create. But I couldn’t. So I copied instead.
I borrowed, or outright stole, every idea I ever put into a composition. Yes, it was filtered through my perspective, touched by my gifts and imperfections, but there was no original creation. Perhaps you could say I made something new, but only in the way that a remix is new. This doesn’t diminish the value of what I was doing, but I craved something I couldn’t access—that state where pure inspiration flows. It wasn’t until I realized this was a spiritual problem that things started to change.
Some ideas arrive like visitors. They come through us, not from us. The artist becomes the vessel, channeling an idea that already exists in potential. In those moments when an idea flows through you, it surprises even you. Can we really call this creating? Or is it actually the result of getting clear enough, and being prepared enough, to receive what’s already there?
This is collaboration between your consciousness and an infinite, universal source of creativity. Some may call it source, or God, or the Divine creator. I don’t think we need a name, but we do need to acknowledge the mystery. To access it, we need to stop forcing and start listening. This requires stepping away from the noise and finding quiet space.
The path to that quiet space varies. For some it’s meditation or journaling. For others, it’s a fanatical obsession that drowns out all distraction (I confess to being guilty of this at times), or a mind altering substance that creates that space—effective at first, but increasingly unreliable, and largely unsustainable. For me it’s getting lost in nature. Particularly sitting and listening to flowing water—really listening. Feeling the earth beneath my feet. Watching the sun reflect through the leaves. Returning week after week, month after month, witnessing the changes as nature constantly evolves. It is this practice of presence, of truly paying attention, that allows me to receive inspiration rather than always manufacturing it.
Even when inspiration arrives as a gift, craft transforms it into art. The idea may come in a moment of clarity, but dedication to discipline gives it the form it deserves. The spiritual element is receiving the seed. The majority of the work comes after.
This openness is available to all of us. When you stop trying to force ideas and start creating space to receive them, you discover that art will emerge not from effort to be brilliant, but from willingness to get out of the way. We become the vessel, the translator. All of our perceived flaws—a singer’s naturally wide vibrato, my wrists rendered useless by pain that forced me to adapt—make us the unique instrument through which the infinite expresses itself. Perhaps we’re all drawing from the same source, each of us giving it our own voice. And in surrendering to that, we find not less of ourselves, but more.