Daily Photo Tour - An Evening at Snow White's Grotto

There's an ebb and flow to maintaining a blog that you don't really consider as you embark on your first post. There's immense excitement or inspiration that seems to launch you head first into whatever it is that you're passionate enough to blog about. This is enough to sustain you for some time, even years, but after a while it wanes and as the excitement lessens, you find yourself searching for some source of inspiration to drive you forward. I think there's this misleading idea that if you're doing what you love you're constantly inspired (what a life that would be). What you don't hear about very often is what happens when you're struggling to find inspiration. After a few years of little to no sleep and complete disregard for what I was ingesting (practically living off of coffee for the first two years), I learned my lesson. I was burned out, riding on the fumes of the inspiration I once had. I wish someone would've told me sooner that it isn't enough to depend solely on inspiration; you actually have to balance your priorities and take care of yourself in the process. When you depend too much on inspiration or emotion to drive you, you create a roller coaster for yourself. You never know if that brilliant idea or spark of excitement will show up to spur you and what if it doesn't? Rather than drudging through those times, trying to hand crank a well that feels like it's been dry for some time, I welcome it as a challenge to push myself through how I'm feeling emotionally, because that's really all it is, emotion. I sit and draw, edit a photo or brainstorm new ideas for film projects or the website re-design. When I do that, creativity meets me half way and stuff "magically" happens and gets accomplished and it feels amazing. It actually feels better to push through and accomplish something rather than allow how I'm feeling determine how much I get accomplished in a day or how well I do it. I still get inspired quite often, but I don't allow it to determine my level of creativity.