"Theme". See: "Awe".

My plays start as voices in my head. I write down the words, and identify the vocal and emotional patterns to figure out who's talking. I will do this for quite a while--months, usually--before the play takes on enough mass for me to try to arrange it into something with a beginning, middle, and end. I know I am ready to take that step once I have a theme, an overall feeling, a lesson to be learned--for my characters, myself, my audience, or any combination thereof.

I think we're ready.

Inspiration is an extraordinary and intimate gift. Too often, we reduce or simplify relationships in order to fit them into one of a few pre-existing definitions. What should be regarded as a complex web of emotions, thoughts, and circumstances is often derided as ambivalence, ambiguousness, indecisiveness.

Life is richer than that.

We can allow the mundane and the inane, the gossip and the drama, to force us back into one of those pre-defined compartments. Or we can transcend the petty, and focus instead on the gorgeousness of someone's imprint on our lives. We can give a person the gift of seeing themselves the way we see them--almost always, a vision more exquisite than they ever would have imagined on their own.

No where is it easier to do this than in art.

Creating and sharing art presents the unique opportunity to direct our audience's attention to that which is awesome in the most true and literal sense of the word. Why not take it?