I can’t not create something. It seems there’s always something brewing, something in the works.

Maybe it’s a batch of biscotti, perhaps it’s one of these blog posts. Sometimes I’ll hear a song on the radio and give it a classical spin on the piano, full of ascending and cascading arpeggios that give a nod to the familiar. Recently it was an idea for a documentary; a quick, wine-fueled brain-dump resulted in a single page turning into a full write-up in no time flat.

A number of months back during a particularly slow day in the office, I felt the need to identify beauty in the mundane and, in this case, said beauty came in the form of a haiku — made out of a work email.

I mixed up the words from a paragraph-long request for data, rearranged them and before I knew it I had something shiny and new, sparkly and interesting. What landed in my inbox as a black-and-white, blasé bundle of nouns, verbs and the like was reborn. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a shot of energy into a regular ol’ workday was found in three lines of 5-7-5.

When it comes to creating, inspiration can come from the most interesting of places. It doesn’t always shout, “Look at me! Here I am!” Instead, it can come in an email, in the way a falling leaf drifts to the ground, in the glow of a sunset, sometimes in the smell of freshly brewed coffee. It can come from the way a book’s pages feel as you flip through them, from the sound of a breeze stirring in the trees, and even that moment where something in the air just catches you the right way — something that makes you perk up a bit, stand a little taller and smile.

I’ve crafted a few more haiku since the first, and it’s always amazing to me the way they transform something so gray into a myriad of colors. Who knew something so uplifting could be just around the bend? Who knew that something so charming could be crafted out of a reply, a forward or an email delivering an attachment? For inspiration and beauty that might be hidden but which are never all that far away, I am thankful.