Survival, Art, Magic,
Isolation, and Community

These Aren’t Luxuries:
Art, Beauty, Spirituality, Ritual, and Wholeness

During the worst times, I find art, beauty, spirituality, and rituals more important than ever. They strengthen the spirit, help us connect with each other, help us embody alternatives to oppressive culture, and far more. This essay explores the inextricable and fundamental weaving of survival, isolation, community, art, beauty, and Faerie Shamanism’s magic and spirituality.

Art, Beauty, Spirituality, and Ritual
Help Me Survive Crisis

Some people believe we need only necessities like food and shelter to survive. I need more. I need art, beauty, spirituality, and magic. They are among life’s basic requirements.

When someone lacks food or other essentials, oppressors often wax eloquent about things that are supposedly nobler than having enough to eat and a roof over your head. They do this to shame a person for caring about the necessities they need for survival. That’s not where I’m coming from.

Some artists are born into groups that suffer from systemic oppression and lack food and other necessities. Yet they continue to make art. So the idea that art can be essential to life is not inherently insensitive or elitist.

I’ve overcome death several times. Art gave me the strength to do that.

I might’ve died if a guitar hadn’t, by sheer chance, come to me when I was 14.

Making music didn’t make me happy, not yet. But it boosted me enough that I was able to get out of the neighborhood I was raised in and explore a better life. I stopped feeling so lonely and isolated because I found people like myself who were also breaking free from childhood bonds.

Later, there was a period when I was so sick that I had trouble even speaking. I composed poetry in my head since I was physically unable to write anything down. I’d lie in bed, silently reciting my compositions to myself, over and over. The words wrapped around me like a blanket wraps the ill. It was comfort and medicine.

The recitation often caused me to memorize the poem.

If so, when a friend showed up at my place, I’d recite the poem to them if I had the strength, and they’d write it down.

But it was fine if we didn’t get to dictation. Composing and silently reciting the poem helped heal my body and spirit.

More about Art and Survival

When creating art or enjoying someone else’s, I might center into traits that help me survive: hope, clarity of purpose, spiritual vigor, and insights on how to solve even major problems. These characteristics are survival basics.

Here’s another reason art helps me survive:

Art Is Magic

Art makes life magical. Enjoying someone’s art or creating mine brings me into the otherworld where I walk with Gods. Their companionship is bliss that heals me physically and spiritually. As we visit, I also receive Their blessings, power, and guidance. They give me serenity with which to face problems and practical ideas for overcoming even the worst crises.

When I am between the worlds, I find my God-self; I have the huge proportions of an archetype with all powers and wisdom.

This is not to say that everything goes my way, or that I am all-powerful and all-wise. But I am a million times better off than I would be without magic. Anyone with so-called practicality who looked at my background would insist that I should’ve been dead by now or, at best, miserable. Instead, I have a good life.

Punished and Rejected for Making Art

I said art helped me survive as a child. I paid the price for survival: Exile.

My lust for art and beauty has cost me the respect of others throughout my life. As a child, I was mocked and otherwise punished. I was told I was ridiculous for seeking a better existence. The neighborhood culture in which I grew up drummed into me, time and again, when I turned to my art for survival, that I was pie in the sky and too fancy. The neighborhood, including most of my family, would’ve had me dead.

Almost everyone tried to convince me, “Just focus on surviving. Keep your head down and survive. Keep your head down and focus on what needs to be done in your daily life. Focus on necessities. Just keep your head down.”

It’s good to focus solely on survival if that is all one can manage. But to insist that someone do that can also be a way to stop their strivings and suppress their vitality. The modern world does this over and over. “Just keep your head down.”

Further on, this essay addresses managing self-care during crisis.

Society invalidates and ridicules art lovers of any age, causing alienation that stalks art lovers like Peter Pan’s shadow mocking him.

Spiritual Wholeness Helps Me Survive

Death of the spirit can lead to death of the body. For example, when one’s spirit is crushed, one might allow oneself to be burdened to a lethal degree. Or otherwise abused.

Or one might not take the simple measures needed to live long.

It can go further. Destruction of the spirit can corrode the body.

I can’t be spiritually hale and whole unless I am part of the greater whole. Connectivity is not a luxury. Art and beauty connect me to community and cosmos.

Punished for Believing in Magic

When I believe in magic, oppressors feel threatened. Why? Because magic helps a person find wholeness. Then they are less likely to be a docile follower and more likely to stand up for their rights.

I have been mocked, rejected, and otherwise punished since childhood for my belief in an enchanted reality. But I cling to my trust.

Using magic, for whatever purpose, is self-care because performing magic aligns a person internally and with the cosmos. That alignment in self and with cosmos makes me whole.

We are born magical. It is part of our makeup as humans. So we need to do magic. Often I do rituals just for the pleasure of them.

Exiled for Pursuing Wholeness

Exile from a community can be a death sentence.

I survived exile. I found a new community. I am not bragging. I am saying it is possible to survive banishment from a prejudiced group and then find a new, supportive tribe.

Finding Community after Exile

My tribe consists of people who strive to keep their spirit intact and happy, or who want to learn to do so. These people also strive to serve others. My tribe is all over the world. I haven’t even heard of all its members. But these strangers are kin, and their efforts sustain mine.

How did I find my tribe? I kept being of service and doing what I needed to survive and be happy, including enjoying myself. Community grew up around me during all these activities.

Find Ways to Strengthen
your Spirit and Wild Pagan Heart

Everyone needs their own ways to keep their spirit whole. For example, someone’s might include making art, viewing art, walking in the woods, performing ritual, listening to music, or hanging out with grandchildren.

Don’t keep yourself from spiritual care because some fool said your ways of doing it are lame.

Whatever your ways, do whatever it takes to foster spiritual wholeness. … You’ll also hold the sky up.

Some of my methods: I paint, sit on my lawn eating dandelion blossoms, dance in the woods, counsel my clients, hold my cat, channel Shamanic curriculums, sing, laugh at my friends’ jokes, and wear jewelry. When dandelion flowers turn into balls of white fluff, I blow on them to make wishes.

Being of service keeps me whole. So does brainstorming and praying about how to best serve. When brainstorms and prayers occupy my thoughts, worry cannot enter my brain and fill it to exclude everything else.

You Are the Whole Universe,
and the Universe Is Magic

No one method could nurture my spirit and wild Pagan heart. I need a multitude of activities. Why? I’m made up of all the threads in the fabric of the universe. All the filaments of existence are part of me. I try to draw on the power of as many threads as I can, both their lengths outside me and the lengths that run through me. The more I draw on the strands in the weave of life, the more they weave healthily together in me, making me a whole and hale weave.

The Weave of Life and Art

The weave of life and art often surprises me.

I don’t think I always know the use of my art until I pursue it. But when I create art, I see its relevance.

For example, I used to feel torn between creating art and being a Shamanic guide. I kept pursuing both. That helped me realize that, for me, my work as a Shamanic teacher and healer is an art. It is my main art form. I also saw how my other arts—e.g., painting and music—support my primary art. After these realizations, I could weave my arts together more than ever, which improved my classes and healings.

More weaves of art and life:

Being a Shamanic guide, even more than all my other forms of self-expression, helps me survive. Blessings flow into me when I use Shamanism to serve others.

When I am acting as a Shamanic guide, my life is joyful and worth living.

I paint enchanted borders for Book of Shadows pages that are class handouts. I also paint decorative elements for my blogs and online announcements of my Shamanic events. I love that an artist might find how their art can inform and integrate with their life.

Don’t Worry about Creating Perfect Art.
Just Make Art

If I’ve learned anything about the creative process, it is that you have to be willing to fail a lot of times and keep on going afterwards. Do that. You’re enormously creative whether you know it or not. Don’t let failures make you think otherwise. Just keep creating.

If you get stuck on one project, don’t give up. Move on to another project. Don’t throw the original project out. Leaving it for a while might give you what you need to finish it, whether what you need is inspiration, energy, time, research, relevant life lessons, whatever.

For example, I wrote a lot of this essay around 2020. Probably did most of the art for this post back then, too. Occasionally, I would add to the essay but never had a chance to finish it until recently.

For one thing, it’s long. When I write a long essay, wrapping my mind around the whole of it to revise a portion is mentally challenging. It’s a lot to sustain or even start. I couldn’t manage it often because that type of mental gymnastics was needed for other projects that were time-sensitive. Every time I finished one of those projects, the wherewithal for the same type of editing agility wasn’t there.

The right times came in snippets. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t still hard work.

Often, I could only do a little work and then “failed” because I couldn’t go further. I didn’t have it in me.

Toward the end, finishing the piece was going to require a lot of time within a short period so that I didn’t lose the piece’s threads. Finally, I made the time to finish the essay, mostly by working on my days off.

(Usually, it is unhealthy for me to work on my days off. But sometimes, it is necessary. More about unhealthy behavior being necessary sometimes is below.)

Back when I started the essay, I’d been painting and writing like crazy for a few months. Wasn’t sure what I was going to do with half of all this new art and writing. But creating it helped keep me sane and in touch with my wisdom and strength during challenges.

As often happens, all the parts of my life wove together in ways that surprised me. Students had asked to see more of my art. I realized a lot of the painting and writing would make perfect handouts for a class I was developing.

Perfectionism and striving toward a high ideal are not the same. Perfectionism can keep you from doing good work.

And I’m not suggesting that you put something in the world that is so flawed that it could seriously harm someone. For example, I will polish a magic course curriculum until its magic is safe. But I can’t keep polishing unless I accept my failed attempts to polish and keep going so I can rectify them.

Accept “failure,” keep creating, realize creating art helps you even if you don’t see how yet, and don’t worry if you see no use for your art. If you keep creating, you might be surprised at your art’s many uses.

Taking Care of Yourself
Can Feel Impossible During a Crisis

I used to think there wasn’t time to take care of myself during crises. I changed my mind. I stopped being in constant crisis. Every bit of self-care saves me time because I become calmer and have greater emotional and mental clarity. So I am more effective and faster when facing dilemmas. I weather them better and am more likely to overcome them.

Some crises are so big that there is no chance to make art, perform ritual, or do any other activity that keeps us whole. Heck, it might be hard to find time to eat.

However, once things let up, the feeling of no time might remain.

Or, if a wee bit of time clears itself, it’s easy to think there’s no point in doing the little you can in the limited window. But the smallest act can give you the energy and spiritual boost to do a bit more later. And so on until the bits add up to make a big difference.

If you don’t have enough energy to walk in the woods, get up from your chair and walk around the room for 60 seconds. If you can’t get up, sit and make the affirmation My spirit is getting stronger whether I feel it yet or not. If you can’t cook nourishing foods, grab an apple and organic almonds. Do what you can. My talk is not cheap. I’ve had to start with the smallest acts many times. It worked every time, even in life-threatening situations. Do the tiny thing you can do.

During Crisis, It Can Be Hard if Not Impossible
to Make Art

So here are suggestions:

Keep art simple and let it be brief.

Try not to chastise yourself if your mind wanders from it.

Try not to worry about whether you’ll ever be able to do more than a little bit of art. That little bit is likely to turn into more if you don’t pressure yourself with worry about whether you’ll do more or shame about doing only a little.

A Personal Story about Art as Self-Care in a Crisis

Years ago, I was so sick that I couldn’t sit up for a year and a half. A cruel family member wanted me dead so she tried to traumatize me into even worse illness. She would phone, saying terrible things.

I was too injured to sit up. It was painful to try. But I pumped up adrenaline until I could sit up and make art. At the time, I didn’t realize how often those painful deleterious art sessions happened right after a phone call from the terrible relative.

She had started subtly gaslighting me when I was a child. Most of the rest of the family gaslighted me, too. I grew up used to gaslighting, so I didn’t recognize it. It took a long time to see the brutality. And even longer to recognize every incident. Sometimes, I didn’t even know why I was upset after her phone calls.

In the early years of this illness that kept me from sitting up, I did not understand why I would make art when it caused me physical pain and exhaustion. It made my condition worse. Then one day I realized that, as I was creating art, I was subconsciously chanting, “I will not live in your ugly world.” I was chanting it to that terrible relative.

It took more years to realize that, were I not making that art, I would lie in bed, plagued by the nightmare of her demonism, without even being able to name the nightmare as her. Then I would become even sicker and more exhausted, drained by my subconscious preoccupation with her.

In those early years of sickness, I came to fully see her abuse. Every phone call was marked with sly malice, disguised by her ever-present pleasant veneer.

When I was a child, she would scold me for making art. She said that I needed to stop my art, dancing, and writing, and instead think about God and helping other people.

Art is a way I connect with God and help other people.

Once conscious of why I pushed myself so hard for art whenever she contacted me, I took necessary measures, bit by bit over the years. Examples: I banished her from my life. I used Shamanic tools to further heal from lifelong gaslighting, so that I was no longer as easily triggered by her.

Bit by bit, I learned how to deal with her. Now, when someone as cruel and demonic as she attacks, I am not as susceptible. Therefore, I am not as driven to extraordinary measures like pushing so hard to make art. When I do still push myself, it is usually not anywhere near as much.

Recently, she sent a digital greeting card. It was a happy cartoon. In context, it was emotional violence. She added a note that was “happy,” cute, and cruel as possible.

I took the necessary measures. Including art. Sometimes, making art is the only way I can exorcise the horror of this person’s cruelty.

That day, I was so tired that sitting up was hard. A nap would revive me. But I knew I’d have no peace and she would haunt me, draining me as I tried to rest. So I pumped up adrenaline to stay awake and upright, and start painting. Not ideal, but survival can demand extraordinary measures.

Sometimes we do things that hurt us but that help us even more. I will not live in her ugly world. I choose beauty.

Sweet Gods, if I am ready, show me a way to fend off cruelty without internalizing it by pushing myself so hard for art that I hurt myself.

Here is the piece I made to exorcise her after she sent the digital card. I painted on cloth, then added beads.

Then I sewed the painting along the neckline of a T-shirt.

Disclaimer: It is a gorgeous piece but I am not a photographer. For example, I could not capture the paint’s shimmers and the color variances they caused in each paint. Plus, reducing the photos so that this page wouldn’t take forever for you to load blurred them. Finally, I need to wash the shirt. Then the paint will relax and look better, and the shirt will not be wrinkled. And, back to the point I want to make:

I made art from pain.

Then I went to the app that this relative uses to send me greeting cards and blocked her there.

Art is extraordinary.

(Later: I think I found a healthy substitute for pushing myself too hard to make art. The old Gods answer prayers.)

Internalized Oppression
about Art, Beauty, Magic, Crisis, and Survival

Lack of time and energy is not the only block keeping someone from taking care of themselves. Society gives us negative messages about self-care. Once we internalize those messages, we tell them to ourselves. Like the message from my childhood, “Just keep your head down.”

We can do something about internalized oppression. Here are two things:

Method 1) A Ritual to Heal Internalized Oppression

Are there messages still in your cells that make you forget self-care or invalidate your need for it?

Try to find one of those messages. It doesn’t have to be the one that hurts you the most. You can find more messages later. Find one for now.

Once you recognize it, do the following to help heal yourself. If you don’t find any negative messages in you, you can use this ritual to heal from them anyway:

Step 1) Put your arms out in front of you, palms up, to symbolize offering your internalized oppression to the Fey Gods.

Step 2) Drop your arms.

Step 3) Say silently or aloud,
“I am worthy of all good things.
My Gods adore me.
They fill me with Their power to create a good life now. So be it!”

You might feel a change right away or experience improvement within weeks if not minutes.

Method 2) Shamanic Counseling

Book a Shamanic counseling session with me. This can be in addition to, or instead of, Method 1. For example, Shamanic counseling can help you uncover more internal messages that keep you from taking care of yourself, and more tools to free yourself from them.

Types of internalized oppression and how to overcome them are beyond the scope of this essay. It’s beyond the scope of any essay. And different people need different help. During Shamanic counseling, I can address your needs and channel tools suited to you.

Click here for more information.

The Weave of Survival with
Art, Beauty, Spirituality, and Ritual Is Fundamental

This essay has discussed fundamental ways that art, beauty, spirituality, ritual, and survival weave together. There are more ways than I can describe here. But I must add more.

Throughout my long life, an oppressive culture has drummed into me that my sole value is my care of other people. So it is easy to forget that I am worth self-care. During a ritual, I know my inner beauty, which reflects that I am worthy of all good things.

Fighting for survival can be disheartening, making me forget I have power. But then a ritual affirms my valuable, spiritual and worldly strengths.

Rituals connect me to life’s beauty. It uplifts my spirit so that I keep going, keep believing there’s a reason to fight through danger to get to the other side.

Rituals connect me to my community, helping us unite in our efforts for tribe survival.

Rituals with my students and other community members nourish us all spiritually.

Ritual Is Part of Life

Sometimes, when performing a ritual to send a spiritual transmissions, I might engage in another activity at the same time. The activity could be anything from painting art to washing the dishes to going for a walk. I might cook dinner, grieve the loss of a deceased loved one, or move through rage over a political situation. Just as ritual is part of life, life is part of ritual. Life is ritual. Ritual is life.

It might seem that participating in another activity during a ritual would distract me from the ritual. The exact opposite is true. Weaving a transmission ceremony into my other activities makes it more powerful. Ritual and the rest of life go together.

Painting, as an example, helps me center into and focus on the transmission. It might not even matter whether I see the painting as relevant to the transmission.

Mind you, I am careful when combining magical and physical activities. For one thing, I have to remain grounded so that I don’t have a physical accident because I’m sweeping the floor and not paying attention to the physical realm. There are a lot of other cautions I take to keep everything effective and safe both physically and magically. I went through a lot of lessons to learn those cautions and to train how to maintain them during rituals.

If the additional activity does distract me from the ritual, I notice quickly and put the activity aside to focus on magic.

A Sunlit Moment in a Ceremony

Recently, I was sending a direct spiritual transmission while I was also making art. The art piece was a magical beaded necklace.

Weaving an amulet necklace and sending a transmission at the same time made both more powerful.

So I’m working away, and, suddenly, light flooded in the window, pouring over my jewelry work tray and saturating the ritual.

The snapshot below does not do the moment justice. You see more of the shadows that were cast than the light that came in the window.

But the photo hints at the Old Gods blessing the Shamanic journey that I was on with the individuals for whom I was doing the transmissions.

The photo hints at the transmission’s recipients as my fellow seekers, whose spirits weave with mine in a web of love.

There are hints of a global tribe of seekers whom I’ve never met or even heard of—another weave sustaining me.

There are hints of the weaving of art, beauty, magic, and life allowing all blessings.

And in the photo’s shadows are gold. Shadows of Gods.

So mote it be!

Keep painting, singing, or doing whatever else keeps your spirit whole. … You’ll also hold the sky up.

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