365 Photo Project - Day 152

Taken: June 1, 2010, 6:30 p.m.
Location: Healdsburg, Ca

I've been thinking a lot about faith lately. I recently watched an interview that Charlie Rose did with Neil Young in which young talks about spirituality in a way that made perfect sense for me. He basically said that he has respect for every kind of faith there is but that he personally prefers not to follow any one specifically. He talked about nature as being his religion and I'm sure creativity plays a role in that too. I often think about my writing as a certain kind of channeling of forces beyond my control.

I realize that I might sound crazy to some people and full of shit to others, but believe me when you're neck-deep in filling up pages with your own words and it's going gangbusters, you might believe in things like higher powers and magic. Especially the next day when you stare at a blank page like you've never seen one before.

People tend to wait for the big happening to declare their solidarity with faith, as if only a miracle can confirm its existence. Me, I tend to think of it in smaller, every day terms. It's all around us -- we just have to look with the right eyes and, I think, we have to be open to it.

This part of my whole theory about living life as the journey as opposed to keeping score on the outcomes. How if we pay too much attention to how we want/think/hope things will turn out for us, we miss the whole trip to get there -- which taken together adds up to a lot more than all those losses and wins we're so obsessed with tallying.

I'd like to think faith is personal to everyone, which is why I get so uncomfortable when it's sold to me as The Only Way. I know belief is hard and I know once you're feeling it, there's temptation to spread the word but to me it's everything that's wrong with the world. There's just too much pressure to prove one God's way is better than another. The problem isn't necessarily the belief itself. It's that singing the praises of one religion automatically disrespects another.

I've always thought religion should be like sex. Do it anyway you like with anyone you want (within reason) but keep it to yourself and spare me the details.

If you think about it, keeping it personal makes the world a smaller place because no one way of thinking gets precedence over another. We'll never be defined by one system of belief but by all systems of belief, even no belief at all.  Which is another way of saying that we're all believers in something which means we'll never be alone.