God

I wanted to write this earlier, after Dan commented in an earlier post about Richard Dawkins' disparagment of God. I don't think too much about it, but there's something to God, whatever that may mean.

I was raised Catholic, and recently learned that my grandfather was Jewish (later converted), so I'm of the tribe, as it were. (That adds a layer of interesting-ness to my flirtation with Judaism mid-HS, but nothing substantive enough to draw any conclusions from). Despite this, I stopped caring about God/religion a few years back.

But man, this song really has an effect on me. I'm not unself-conscious enough to be able to say straight-faced that it's profound or thereabouts, but there's something there to it, that really affects me. Just this sense of connection to something broader and less trivial, maybe.

This is one of the most attractive components of spirituality to me, and it's something that I saw in animism or other indigenous spirituality, which in turn opened me back up to God, again, whatever that means.

It's something hard for me to talk about since it all sounds so corny, but the idea of the well really makes sense for me. It's palpable the feeling I experience sometimes, when some feeling rises up from my core to my throat, and I just want to stay there in the moment. Man, I feel like a trashy novel writer, but it's legit, whatever it is I experience.

I don't know if we're supposed to stay there forever, as maybe some advocates of enlightenment suggest, but I think we could use a lot more of that. Likewise, there's probably room for life outside of language, and we can all use so much more of that from where we are now, trapped in linguistic jungles that are, to paraphrase Edward Abbey, symtomatic of an indoor philosophy. But there's still probably a place for spoken language, and there's probably a place for the mundanity of un-profound existence. We just have no balance now.