SPIRITUAL GLUE
A different perspective on spirituality, and its role in creativity.
Seeking and becoming. Life and work. Authenticity and connection. Art and craft. Leadership and evolution.
All are themes and words that I keep returning to time and again, inspecting from every angle, examining their shape and texture, searching for commonalities and patterns, looking for truth and insight, seeing how they fit together into our human experience.
What I’m sensing is that they might not be as separate as they can seem.
I’m sensing that they’re connected, in a deeper, more intangible way.
A spiritual way.
Spirituality as connection, not belief
My favorite perspective on spirituality is simple, and yet different than conventional ones.
Spirituality, to me, is connection.
With this perspective, a spiritual act is anything that connects us more deeply - to ourselves, others, or the world around us.
Spirituality is a deepening of experience.
In a sense, this means that spirituality is a relationship with the world around us. It’s bidirectional and reciprocal. It means that we’re active, not passive, participants in our lives and the lives of others.
To me, there’s a sense of power in this interconnected existence - while still demanding humility.
Dynamic interconnectedness puts us on the field, not as a puppet to be controlled, but as a teammate, collaborating in and contributing to the infinite game - the big dance of life. Just as we’re not powerless, we’re also not all-powerful - our lives, while helping to shape the whole of the world we live in, are just one small part of it all.
It’s gray, not black-and-white.
I like the paradigm of spirituality as connection because it most closely matches my personal experience, as well as untangles spirituality from any particular religious belief. It opens the aperture to include both secular and non-secular worlds, and roots to its core the transcendental human experience of relating to something bigger and more important than us.
Spirituality, to me, is not belief.
Spirituality, to me, is connection.
Spiritual arts and crafts
So, what does this have to do with The Artist’s Way and Mastery?
For as long as I can remember in my adult life, just about the entirety of my reading has been non-fiction, and more specifically, on the topics of business and personal development. This has been my way of attempting to quench my eternal thirst for more and better - I just can’t get enough information about it.
As I wrote about last time, as I’ve walked further into my current chapter of life, dedicated to exploration over exploitation, I’ve tired of this familiar operating system that values living better over living more deeply.
Now, let me say here that I haven’t written it off. This orientation is still a part of me, and I’m not sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing. It simply is still within me. I still dream of who I want to become, and what I want to do. I still read for more knowledge and strategy in hopes of moving me closer to my dream.
But at the same time, I’m striving to do so with more awareness of why I’m doing so. As I closed with last week:
I’ll continue to seek to understand the specific pieces of the puzzle - the components of life - I’ll just seek to do it with more of an eye to the completed picture they reveal.
In addition, I’m also exploring further afield, seeking out other, broader perspectives and insight. Beyond information and knowledge, I’m exploring more embodied and intuitive, and less overtly logical ways.
In this pursuit, it’s been explorations of art, creativity, and their roots in authenticity over logic, rationality, and their roots in performance that have pinged that intuitive sense of curiosity and excitement in me.
In a sense, this combination of The Artist’s Way and Mastery is a beautiful representation of these two sides of me, and how they’re coming together.
Mastery explores excellence.
The Artist’s Way explores creativity.
Both explore a way of living.
Both explore the internal pursuit of self-knowledge - of connection with intuition and curiosity. Both explore the process of creating an authentic life - of living and practicing a craft that’s in alignment with our true nature. Both explore creativity and expression. Both explore meaning, calling, and service.
They talk about what I believe in - the process of seeking and becoming.
And, interestingly, both Cameron and Greene refer to this process as a spiritual one. It’s even in the subtitle of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Both refer to this process of our lives as connected to something larger than us. As not selfish or indulgent, but in fact as generous - as our gift to furthering the world’s diversity and richness.
As Greene says:
To the degree you cultivate and express it [your Life’s Task] you are fulfilling a vital role.
Your vocation is more than the work you do. It is intimately connected to the deepest part of your being and is a manifestation of the intense diversity in nature and within human culture. In this sense, you must see your vocation [your craft, your Life’s Task, your calling] as eminently poetic and inspiring.
Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, “Become who you are by learning who you are.” What he meant is the following: You are born with a particular makeup and tendencies that mark you as a piece of fate. It is who you are to the core. Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature. If you allow yourself to learn who you really are by paying attention to that voice and force within you, then you can become what you were fated to become - an individual, a Master.
And as Cameron says:
The act of making art exposes a society to itself. Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, “See?”
Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.
Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.
We find we are able to tell more of our truth, hear more of other people’s truth, and encompass a far more kindly attitude towards both. We are becoming less judgmental of ourselves and others….We acquire a sense of movement, a current of change in our lives. This current, or river, is a flow of grace moving us to our right livelihood, companions, destiny.
I’m fascinated by how these two converge.
In reading both, I have that intuitive feeling of excitement where my pulse picks up and I filter my world through a new lens, seeing new connections all around.
This feeling is like a whisper, saying, “Keep going with this - there’s some truth in here. Something about what they’re saying has to do with you.”
This, right here, is me keeping going.
“Creativity is harnessing universality and making it flow through your eyes.”
From pathfinding to path-forging
With Cameron and Greene as teachers, my pursuit, and that of The Comma Project - seeking and becoming - feels a bit more rounded out and more rooted.
By adding a new, spiritual perspective on the inherent craft and creativity of the journey of our lives, it all feels a bit more, well, connected.
Perhaps the parts of life (and myself) that I assumed were disparate for so long were actually just a side effect of lacking the right perspective.
I’ve said for a while that I wanted work and non-work not to be so separate. I was exasperated by the sacrifices in my non-work life that I felt I had to make to succeed in my work life. I was confused, and in fact depressed, that I couldn’t see any path available to me to get to an integrated, richer life of more freedom.
What I see now is that I was on to something, even back in the early years after college. What I wanted was more connection, authenticity, and harmony between the parts of me and my life. It’s in fact what I still want.
I see that I was searching the world around me for the path perfectly authentic and fulfilling for me, expecting to find one clearly constructed and clearly labeled, with the only thing for me to do being to simply choose it. As time continued to pass with no such discovery, expecting turned to hoping. Then, hoping turned to fearing that it didn’t exist, and never would.
All along the way, the exasperation and depression continued to build - and I continued to look for my perfect path by moving from one to the next of the pre-existing paths visible and available to me. I moved from one role to the next, trying on new and different ways of being in both work and non-work parts of my life, until I broke, and finally confronted the realization that this approach wasn’t working.
I finally got frustrated enough with the way things were that I made a change. Putting aside the idea that I could find a path somewhere out there that perfectly matched, I began the work of creating my own in earnest.
As The Artist’s Way and Mastery both offer, it starts with a journey inward.
After all, the opportunity is to build a life that’s an expression of who we truly are. Forging our own path demands a better understanding of ourselves.
Spiritual spring cleaning
The inherent nature of ourselves and the world in this version of spirituality is connection.
Just look around - we don’t need a psychedelic trip to observe the interconnectedness at play. The friendly barista brightens our mood as we stop for an afternoon coffee, just as the bee brings life by pollinating a field of flowers in its search for food, just as a dying corpse fertilizes the earth for the next growth.
I believe, and continue to experience in my own life, that what we hurt from and struggle with blocks us from this natural state connection.
To the extent I’ve removed layers of artificiality and inauthenticity, peace and grounding seem to take their place.
So, I believe part of our work is to unlock what blocks us.
And in my experience, what gives rise to these blocks has often been the stuff that sucks to look at, reinhabit, and untangle - pain, suffering, and struggle that we want to be able to leave behind and move on from.
And yet, a knot remains tangled unless we turn attention and energy towards it, working to pull it apart.
This dynamic is what can keep us stuck. It’s a cruel joke of the universe that to get where we want to go - deeper connection, more peace, and freedom - we must first turn into the pain, taking on the most challenging part upfront.
But this, I think, is how insight and wisdom are gained.
What Cameron and Greene invite us to do is to take a creative and expressive approach to forging the path of our life.
A spiritual approach.
I’m gonna give it a try.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Until next time,
Devin