Flashpoint Inspiration: Rembrandt in Your Attic and Memoirs of a Geisha

What would we do without moments when inspiration strikes like cloud to ground lightening? I've had a copy of Memoirs of a Geisha on my shelf for, well, since author Arthur Golden was the keynote at a National Writers Workshop some years ago. I hadn't read the book and stuffed it into my bag. While waiting for the train (what else is there in life these days), I pulled it out, and as I sometimes do, turned to any page. Here's what I read on a dreary February morning. In Chapter 9, the protagonist is musing about a moth, really about her mother, who along with her father has died. She realizes she has felt dead, too, but that she's not—she's alive. " … I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future." She wonders what the future will be. Suddenly, she realizes she will receive a sign, as a result of a man in a dream who tells her: "Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future." The scene was so elegantly framed, the scenario so finely drawn, it was finding a Rembrandt in the attic and feasting on the wonderful placement of light.

To put today's musing into inaction, see the tip at the top of the list. As always, let us know how it goes.