Disjointed, joined thoughts:
I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way last year, and ever since, I’ve been chewing on the idea that all art we produce is an offering to the gods and spirits.
Another idea that’s been rolling around in the slipstream of this grey matter is Gustav Mahler’s famous assertion that “tradition is not worshipping ashes, but tending the fire.”
In Taiwan, most of the Taoist temples have a stage attached. People gather in the courtyard to watch divine theatre, holy puppet shows.
I’ve also deleted all my social media and have been spending a lot of time writing longhand, using a 100-year-old typewriter, and making music on a Dobro from 1972. It’s not hard for me to lean into this more analog existence; I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
I went to a Bread and Puppet performance this past fall; it was glorious.
I grew up doing theatre. Performing poetry. Open mic nights.
How Music Works by David Byrne made me think about the event of people, making music, in a room. It made me really consider the difference between recorded music and live music.
Perfection is flat and soulless. It’s reified. Unattainable. The art we make should be meaty. Sweaty.
It should have dirt under its nails.
Heathenry, animism, dirt-and-tree worship — this should definitely not be a reified thing. It must be meaty and sweaty and real. It must be in-person. We must join hands and pass cups.
I remember that crochet is impossible to replicate by machine, and that makes it special.
I have been sewing my clothes, making my jewelry. I look more and more like a piece of my own art.
I want to stitch all these ideas together. Some kind of coherent artist’s statement. But coherency still eludes me.
That’s all right. I don’t have to be an essayist today. Tonight, by the new moon, maybe I can tend the flame as a poet.
Ducks of the World Tree 
I was ruined for spirituality/religion by being raised a Southern Baptist, the human slavery loving bunch- it’s in the Bible- in the 50s and 60s in South Alabama. It was so boring sitting in those hard pews listening to a hypocrite in an ugly suit with a bad haircut droning on about sky God. Baptists like ugly churches and say you don’t even need a church, just read your King James Bible. So I did. And what a vicious, jealous, violent old man he was, telling his cultists to smite them all then take their women, lands and cattle and leave not a man alive. Exactly like modern Israel.
So I’m agnostic toward any god but especially to sky god, who hates women and hates thought more. Here’s all you need to live your life according to primitive tribespeople from the unHoly Land 2k years ago. The writings were all plagiarized from earlier human sacrifice cults- see Abraham and Issac- then rewritten over the centuries to maintain the hegemony of men and the ruling priest class.
So to me organized religion is the enemy, a tool for maintaining the autocratic authoritarian power structure of today- see the overwhelming Christian murderous, traitorous Trumpite cult regime.
It seems to me that sex and touch and love and art should be practiced. Not imaginary sky gods who hate all that in favor of maintaining the repressive power of the religious cultic power structure.
I’ve seen the hand of God nowhere in my long life: no miracles, no angels, no heavenly hosts singing hosannas toward God in their sniveling, begging, sycophantic fashion. Yet people I believe and trust have, so a higher power cannot be ruled out.
While not a scientist, I still need proof or at least evidence to believe a thing and the absence of evidence for sky God is telling. Yet He could exist, it’s a big universe.
I lean towards the older, wiser, kinder animist idea that every particle in existence participates in consciousness and life: supernovas, suns and planets, feldspars and granites, viruses and neutrinos, all move in sympathy and have their yearnings and drives.
The closest crippled me can come to spirituality is playing primitive 12‐bar, I‐IV-V blues on my sublime Warwick bass guitar. My old age musical ‘art’ is my only relationship with the divine.
Why music is so compelling to human animals and the other animals and to me is a mystery. But I’ve gots to have it every day. That I came t to find the miracle of musical art at age 67 is the closest I’ve come to evidence of God. Maybe it’s enough.
Thanks for liking and subscribing to my wildly unpopular blog. Good luck with yours, you have obvious writing talent.
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There are a few people who wind up accidentally touching the sublime via the organized, state religions of the bible. But that is genuinely rare. Most only become more fearful and hateful that reality will never conform to the narrowness of their expectations. But my antipathy is formed also by Southern Baptists. Something violent in the water down here.
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