What happens when you lose inspiration?

What happens when you lose inspiration? When you don’t feel like doing anything creative? I’m in a long term slump that I can’t seem to explain.

I don’t take the camera for trips just to create images, I rarely take the pen around the page to write a poem or anything else that is interesting, just some scribbles here and there, and random thoughts in a journal. Everything feels like a big “blech.”

And, I’m not sad or anything. Life is great and getting better all the time. I have bees on our farm as I want to start seriously beekeeping, our gardens are growing (not just plants, but in area), since Lent I’ve been attending Mass regularly.

In order to help, I’ve been reading a lot. I read all of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, put it down and knocked out Heller’s Catch-22 (more on those later), started rereading Scalia’s That Nothing May Be Lost… But reading is an excuse to not create. Also, I started reading articles in different magazines and journals about Western Civilization and art. Yes, it helps inspire, inform, connects you with art, but… it is too easy to just read and read and read without doing your own work.

The one thing I did was attempt to write a villanelle. I did this because I’ve been wondering if there is a place for the classic forms (like Dante) but with a contemporary voice. Of course, the villanelle was hard to construct, but I did come out with a poem that I liked, then I promptly broke it into couplets and made it free verse. So…

This morning, while looking at something else, I decided that I need to get this going to flesh out my thoughts on poetry, photography, etc. The obvious other thing is to put pen to paper, finger to shutter release, and get making.

But how do you get back the groove, the inspiration? How do you get back into it without feeling forced? Let me know!