I had an orange cat when I was little. His name was Tuba.
Tuba ran away one time, we left the sliding door open and he bolted for the forest behind the house. My brother and I went out with cat food, calling and whistling for him through the trees, hoping to hear his meow and lure him back.
No such luck, but he came back anyways the next day. He stood at the door, shaking with agoraphobic nerves, pawing at the glass.
I think about that sometimes. The cats. How they sense, they know they belong out there, roaming endless tree-lined space, hunting small things and resting in the branches. They feel it in their bones, the rightness of what’s out there past the treeline.
But when they live inside too long, it all gets tangled up. They run for the trees, for where they know they belong — and then they come back, scared, shaking, hungry. They don’t know how to survive where they belong.
They don’t know how to survive where they belong.
Every art is a way to live closer to Reality.
A lot of artists use the word for their craft in ways civilians don’t. For an artist, art doesn’t just mean the painting you put on the wall, or the sculpture you commission for a courtyard. Art isn’t an output. It’s the generative current of the Life beneath life. Those outputs — the paintings, the sculptures, the photographs — they naturally emerge from the process of encountering Reality and guiding its currents while they guide you back.
Music can be the same. A couple weeks ago, I was struggling to understand a conversation until I remembered the guy I was talking to was a musician. When he talked about music, he wasn’t just talking about a set of pleasant sound recordings, or a technical skill. Inside his head, the word music was at the center of a web of ideas around beauty, truth, the ineffable creative rhythms that underpin Life and erupt through a well-tuned soul — becoming, along the way, a technical skill, a recording, a concert.
Poetry is similar too. Individual poems themselves are just the byproduct of Poetry. When you drop into the space where language and Reality meet — where world and archetype lose themselves in each other — there’s an intoxication there, a satori that leaves its trail in line breaks and a jarring turn of phrase.
For me, I mean something like this when I say myth or story. I’m not talking about a series of events and characters commited to film or paper — I mean the underlying current, the primordial current beneath the surface flow of events. Myth-making is a way of dropping into that current, instead of only ever looking at it from above the surface.
It’s a skill of perception, as much as translation. You put yourself into the open sensitivity where you can see, sense, taste the subtle ineffable flow beneath Life — and when you return, some fragments of what you found there are stuck to your skin. You take those pieces, arrange them, and send them out into the world. That’s art.
The arrangement is where technical skill comes in. You have to learn to arrange the fragments in a way that can somehow, impossibly, evoke the invisible whole. And then, somehow miraculously on top of that — exercising this skill can deepen your encounter with Reality even further.
There’s not a chronological order to this, it’s three inseparable parts braiding together.
Encounter the primordial,
Arrange its residue,
Send it out into the world.
They may happen out of order, or simultaneously. Each one deepens the others somehow.
Art is empty when it’s pure arrangement, no residue, primordially substanceless. All the skill in the world rings hollow when a piece was not birthed by encounter.
It’s increasingly clear to me that people don’t know how to survive where they belong.
Like Tuba staring out at the treeline, you look out at a deeper Life, a world where you can be wild and open and exert yourself upon Reality — you long for it. You press yourself against the window, staring at the edge of the forest. If you get the opportunity, you may even make a run for it. But as often as not, once you get there, it’s scary and unfamiliar and feels nothing like the wordless fantasy you had. You could die out there. You could get lost, lose track of the comforting home you left, and lose even the option of returning to its safety, quivering and caked with dirt.
But something in you knows it belongs out there. Even if you’ve lost the ability to survive there, in the Life Primordial, something in you knows that’s where you need to be.
Art helps us survive where we belong.
Not necessarily the paintings in museums, or the poems on your bookshelf; not your dad’s record collection or your flute lessons. The other art. The primordial encounter and how you arrange what it leaves with you. The navigation of what ineffably roils beneath the surface tension of this ego, this day, this lower-case life.
Encountering the primordial and reckoning with it through the detritus we bring back with us — it opens something. It strengthens some capacity that step by step lets us encounter Life and survive.
We can make the encounter through meditation, journeying, jamming on the guitar; or we can find it in travel, in love, in watching the same small town in its quiet transformations year after year, a whole life long.
We can reckon with it through writing, painting, or conversation; through running, stacking bricks, or raising a child; we can skillfully arrange it by gardening or making music or giving long winding sermons to the birds.
But one way or another, we have to encounter and reckon with it.
Because maybe a human doesn’t know how to survive primordial life.
But for certain, Humanity can’t survive anywhere else.
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This is full of life. love it