Three Hundred Sixteen

Ideas can spring into being unexpectedly. An email exchange with a friend a short while ago got me thinking; what inspires creativity? What provokes thoughts that, as they snake their way through one’s consciousness, illuminate the dark recesses where creativity hides? One such trigger is pain. Not necessarily excruciating pain. Even a minor irritant, like an eyelash stubbornly twisted and wedged in the corner of the eye, is sufficient. A grain of sand inside an oyster’s shell is a metaphor for creativity born of pain, the irritant to which a pearl owes its existence.