Well, here's a simple little story about inspiration. Let's see if you can go along with it.

My art school (St. Lukas, Brussels) asked me to make some illustrations for a small selection of poems to give away as the school's yearly New Year relation present, together with the design of their New Year card. By the way, at that time, I was drawing and painting all the time (I got a master degree in fine arts).
So I started reading the poems. I read them over and over again for days; they were difficult, hard to grasp... deep and mysterious. It took a long time to get through to find the essence and true meaning, especially knowing that you have to make the illustrations fit.
There was one poem that I liked very much, about someone arriving, silent and lonesome, at the Western gate. By the time that I thought to have understood the poem, I started drawing the preliminary sketches for my illustration, concentrating on two elements: a man and a gate. I knew how to draw them, that was not the problem. Or so I thought...
I soon discovered that 'knowing how to draw them' was exactly my biggest problem. The poem was dark, unclear, mysterious, blurry, elusive... my drawings were clear, elaborate, sharp and detailed. They didn't match.
So I started stripping down my sketches, simplifying the composition, omitting more and more details with every new sketch. Looking back on it, it was a process of throwing away everything that I had ever learnt, piece by piece. Until, after several days, only the essence remained: a hint of a small, vaguely human presence facing a flood of light coming through an opening in the darkness.
That inner process was reflected in the changing choice of materials: I started with fine crayons and pens, and ended up with soft charcoal, a cloth and my bare fingers as the ultimate shaping tools.

Taking it back to the inspiration theme: there and then I learned that the purest and ultimate inspiration doesn't come from what you know or from what you think to know, from what you have seen and learned, nor from how you have always thought it should be... but it comes from sensitivity and understanding, from bareness and receptivity, from the willingness to allow emptiness and un-awareness in your mind and openness in your spirit.
This may sound like a whole lot of crap...
Ah well, maybe it is ;o))

We do not see things as they are. ǝɹɐ ǝʍ sɐ sƃuıɥʇ ǝǝs ǝʍ