Sharpening Your Spiritual Senses

Photo by Anders Jildén on Unsplash

Happy Sunday, Soothers. I’m going to be totally honest, my pop culture/music/cultural radar is so decayed in the last decade and a half or so that if you had asked me who Rick Rubin was a few weeks ago, I would have known he somehow had something to do with… uh, music? But that would have been it. Then my boyfriend picked up Rubin’s book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, and I’ve been reading snippets here and there and really resonating with it. I don’t think I’ve heard my own beliefs about creativity, and its link to spirituality and a sense of wonder, articulated so clearly and so in line with how I think creativity works, too. (Short version being that I find creativity one of the most spiritual acts you can engage in.)

There was one passage in particular I wanted to cite from Rubin on this line of thinking:

Art is our portal to the unseen world.

Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage. The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science. The world of reason can be narrow and filled with dead ends, while a spiritual viewpoint is limitless and invites fantastic possibilities. The unseen world is boundless.

The word spirituality may not speak to those who dwell chiefly in the intellect or those who equate the word with organized religion. If you prefer to think of spirituality as simply believing in connection, that’s fine. If you choose to think of it as believing in magic, that’s fine too. The things we believe carry a charge regardless of whether they can be proven or not.

The practice of spirituality is a way of looking at a world where you’re not alone. There are deeper meanings behind the surface. The energy around you can be harnessed to elevate your work. You are part of something much larger than can be explained — a world of immense possibilities.

…Pay particular attention to the moments that take your breath away — a beautiful sunset, an unusual eye color, a moving piece of music, the elegant design of a complex machine.

If a piece of work, a fragment of consciousness, or an element of nature is somehow allowing us to access something bigger, that is its spiritual component made manifest. It…