You never know where you’ll find inspiration – or where inspiration will find you.
Sitting on an airplane in the summer of 2005, on the way to Fargo, North Dakota with my family to visit my husband’s mother, I came across an interview with the novelist Sue Grafton in Northwest Airlines World Traveler magazine, of all places. She spoke so eloquently about the source of her creative energy that I copied it in my notebook and later posted it on the bulletin board in my office.
“It’s from Jungian psychology,” she said. “Our dark side, our shadow, [is] where all our creative energy is. If you spend your life looking perfect and doing everything you’re supposed to do, you shut down the part of you that is most energetic. For awhile, I was concentrating on being good, on doing what people expected, and lost track of that energy to do the work itself.”