I’m guiding a group of women through a year-long exploration called Women Create! This week we were talking about inspiration.
I love being inspired – don’t you? Those little explosions of light in the brain, that fizzy warm feeling of recognition and possibility, the sense of being truly alive and connected.
Inspiration can come from anywhere. We can seek it out in the beauty of nature, at an art gallery or a live music event. We can find it within the pages of a book or in the flow of conversation. An inspiring idea can drop in as you’re sitting doing nothing.
I think of inspiration as a little bit of life force that is carried on the breath. We breathe it in, and it lands like a seed. The fate of that seed is then up to us. Will it land in fertile ground or is your mind too busy and crowded for a new creation to thrive? How do you know which of the multitude of inspiring ideas to engage with? And if you’re excited by a possibility, will you bring it to fruition – or will you lose heart? How many potentially fulfilling creative projects have withered because you forgot to water them with your love and attention? Or because old trauma and conditioning that lives within you nips creative possibility in the bud – again and again?
Today I’m going to tell you a story to illustrate what I mean by being soul-inspired and how a soul-inspired idea might unfold over time.
Grief can be the catalyst
It’s autumn 1986 and I’m 37 years old.
I’m driving down the A9 from the most northerly tip of Scotland, back to Edinburgh where I live. I’m returning from a visit to my partner following the tragic death of his mother by suicide. This has stirred me, particularly since I witnessed my own mother’s pain as she sought to survive within a stifling marriage.
On a particularly bleak stretch of road an idea drops into my mind and electrifies my whole being. I am compelled to pull over onto the hard shoulder to write it down. This is something I never do – I’m always in a rush and I’ll drive for hours without stopping. But today, I stop and commit this idea to paper.
It’s a seed for a book about Women and the Creative Process and I’ve been preparing for it all my life. First, through the outrage I felt as I witnessed my mother’s pain. And then through the exciting early years of the Women’s Liberation Movement, which showed me and the whole generation of women I was born into, how we had been oppressed under Patriarchy and how we might begin to liberate ourselves. And then also through the delicious revelations of my own creativity that had begun when I learned as a child how to create sanctuary through writing stories. In my twenties I completed a not-very-good novel and then burgeoned into soul awakening through the spontaneous upwelling of poetry. And now, in my 30’s, my creativity was manifesting by day as a feisty spiritual warrior changing the world through writing innovative training materials and championing the dispossessed, and by night as an archaelogistof soul bringing through a sixty-page mythic poem of the heroine’s journey.
Seeds grow in the earth of your being
I received the idea for the book, but that moment was not a good time to start writing; my life was full and busy. So, I planted the seed somewhere in the dark of my being and left it to take care of itself.
This is a bit like a fairy tale – Jill and the beanstalk – because five years later that seed had grown, and it started to nudge me and call to me and fill me with longings and pull on my heartstrings. Until finally I reached a place where all I wanted to do was find a quiet place, far away from the busy world, and write my book. And, through a series of synchronicities, that I could never have thought up, that’s what I did.
It was another few years and a few false starts before I set off to the north-west Highlands of Scotland and, looking out across a sea loch towards the mountains, I wrote all day and every day, in a ferment of creative excitement, until the book was done.
Your soul inspiration will lead and guide you if you let it 
That was the beginning of my Soul Journey, and writing was woven together with explorations of soul and the spiritual quest, and living close to elemental landscapes, and breathing intoxicating fresh air from the sea and the mountains.
And from there I took off to Aotearoa-New Zealand and the quest continued over another twenty years. The draft of Women and the Creative Process remained a draft – and I still have the paper copy of it, here in my room. Waiting for me to complete it. And the work I’m doing through Women Create! is a continuation of that thread and excites me still. When I’m exploring the creative process with other women, I know who I am and why I’m here, all of me is alive and growing. This is one very vital thread of my soul work.
That’s what I mean by being soul inspired. An idea comes in from out of the blue, it lodges in you, even though you may ignore it. It’s got your name on it. It calls to you and guides your life. And that one seed can grow into many different forms, and none of them ever feel finished. There’s always more. You’re on an adventure which is exciting, liberating and fulfilling, always new and challenging.
And it’s up to you whether you make space for that in your life.
I’ll be starting a new Women Create! group in 2026, if you feel the call, please contact me and let’s connect.
