Losing my Religion

Creative drought and the holidays

I’ve completely lost my creative spark for the moment.  Maybe I’ve poured it into the holiday preparations and loving the people around me as I am back in Canada for the holidays for the first time in a very long time.  Maybe it’s just gone for that deep winter rest.

But I can’t call it to me right now, where lately I have been running to keep up.  It feels a little like magic when it’s running on full.  Scenes and names and conversations just coming at me from the ether.  So many lessons about the expectation of productivity and “always on” in this for me.  I wonder what our deep ancestors knew about calling things in.  Surely they must have been abandoned by the mysteries at points too?  Moments when answers and inspiration were not to be had and they like us were left alone and vulnerable with their humanity and limited decision making skills!

I think part of it was the Christmas season from a religious perspective.  This manufacturing of a birth date for Jesus that subsumes the rituals of Solstice.  Surely there was room for both?  Same with Easter.  I can’t help but think of the leaders of the church at some point sat in a room like Greeting Card executives planning their high holidays on top of those that were already a part of the people.  They were so smart and committed and so awful. They made decisions whose success set a great swathe of humanity on a trajectory away from a cooperative relationship with and as nature ourselves.  And that pisses me off.

I think I was hitting this block before the holidays anyway honestly.  Because what has become obvious is that I must figure out how to write about a religion I left behind in my teens.  I have to mine it for what it was to Erna centuries ago.  Before all the big conclaves set policy on top of belief.  Erna was in the landscape.  The companions of Columba spent months alone in the wilderness regularly.  They reached for their connection with god there.

I bet they ate well!  They stayed alive didn’t they?  The short fasting and dreaming connections with gods was available to everyone!  And that has been erased and distanced too. What the narrative of things like 40 days and 40 nights without food do is keep people from experiencing their gods themselves.   That’s impossible so why would you try it?  Better to use the powerful man intermediary to talk to experience a connection with god for me (they still let you talk to them at least).

So I’m here untangling all these thoughts so I can understand more of what Erna and the others were actually teaching.  And it’s hard.  Yet even writing this has wedged open a door into being able to do it.

Thank you for being here with me.  If you haven’t considered subscribing yet, please do.  It’s a radical act to invest in the making of our individual art.  I appreciate how every drop further cushions me from existing in a world where that doesn’t happen.

Sit for a few moments outside today if you can.

Susie