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…